Thomas Sowell on the Origins of Economic Disparities

[Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson Thomas soul has taught and studied economics intellectual history and social policy at institutions that include Cornell UCLA and Amherst now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution dr. Sol has published more than a dozen books including his most recent volume a revised and enlarged edition of discrimination and disparities Tom so welcome thank you let me quote discrimination and disparities this edition this new edition takes on the non sequitur underlying the prevailing social vision of our time namely that if individual economic benefits are not due solely to individual merit there is justification for having politicians redistribute those benefits close quote now Tom we want to be a country based on individual merit so if some people are rich through no merit of theirs and other people are poor through no fault of theirs isn't it clear that the government oughta play Robin Hood and take from the rich and give to the poor why is that a nice instead of an obvious good oh my gosh I don't know where to begin take your time I you can imagine now I'll take the extreme case where someone is literally no merit he know he knows he inherits some Empire I don't know big grocery stores or whatever he knows nothing about it cares nothing about it hasn't a clue how to run it and so on he said well clearly turn it over to the politicians well what's he gonna do with that Empire it will be worth far more to almost anybody else and it would be to him now when things have radically different values to different people well what usually happens in the marketplace is it transfers to somebody if it's worth two billion dollars to him somebody who knows what are you doing it may be worth five billion to him and he will pay the five billion to get it and he will run it better than a politician he's gonna run it all right see this is the trouble taping a shows with you you just talk sense and you talk it so concisely then we may as well go have lunch right now all right the argument the basic argument let's lay out the argument here in discrimination and disparities during the early 20th century the key factor behind socio-economic disparities as seen by leading progressive intellectuals of that era was genetics in other words some people got ahead and some people stayed behind for reasons of a race yes the racist argument by the late 20th century to continue the quotation discrimination insidious unfair discrimination had become the prevailing explanation all right so let's take each of those in turn the genetic or racist explanation you write that by the middle of the twentieth century even even a leading proponent of the influence of genetic factors such as the famous infamous I suppose too many people Arthur Jensen of the University of California Berkeley up the road here rejected the idea of an IQ ceiling for some groups would you explain what that means well Jensen said why are you surprised that there are black children with IQs of 115 and above that and in the earlier time in the early 20th century it was thought that there was a ceiling so low that you had to make sure that certain people simply did not reproduce that's the whole eugenics movement right which was very big and they were eugenics courses by the hundreds in colleges and universities across the country and so Jensen reject me rejects that kind of rendition of it well once you've rejected that really it the rest of it becomes a matter of much smaller consequence all right so the the racist argument is rejected on scientific grounds yes rather than by rhetoric all right all right so this brings us of course to the other explanation for disparate outcomes once again at the heart of the prevailing social vision of our times is the seemingly invincible fallacy that group outcomes and human endeavors would tend to be equal or at least comparable or random if there were no biased interventions and explained that for us well empirically is the easiest way to explain it almost nowhere anywhere in the world or in any period of history do you find any society and which groups that compete openly end up with the same results as on the genetic side by the way this is a study of families where someone one of the kids becomes a National Merit Merit Scholarship final finalist in five child families the firstborn becomes the finalist more times than the other four siblings combined now that's not genetic there are other their actual sin that discrimination it's just luck birth order the luck of the draw well but it was more than that it tells us something about the importance of parental attention in the development of a child and that's also reinforced by the fact the twins tend to average several points lower IQ and people born singly because obviously no neither twin ever gets the full attention of the parent of their parents and also backing that up is that where one of the twin is either stillborn or died shortly after birth the other twin the twin has a an average IQ much closer to the norm I see okay so this which the point here is we eliminate the argument from racism which leaves us with the argument from discrimination and what you're saying is no no no no look at example after example after example where we know in more or less controlled experiments families with five kids twins and so forth that there are factors that have nothing to do with justice or injustice but that are simply happens yes yes yes also it's true it's also true and for child families to reach out 300 mm Li's oh it is true in Britain in Norway in any other a number of other countries where they've been huge tests done alright so again I'm going to take discrimination to disparities to bring it to American society it might seem strange right that during the 19th century of mass immigration from Europe to the United States it was not uncommon to find Jewish and Italian neighborhoods in New York represented by Irish politicians a situation that did not change until well into the 20th century how could this have been because if you look at the history of the three groups is clear if the Irish had a lot more political experience in Europe before before any of them ever set foot on American soil I mean it's really an when you think of how many factors there are at work it's incredible to think that they're gonna work out the same for almost any group yeah defined it anyway the other thing it's so frustrating I can I can come up with umpteen different examples of this the disparities in various situations including situations where there's not possible for it to be either discrimination or or genetics people on the other side cannot give you one example you can read reams of paper by advocates of social justice and not find one example anywhere in the world there are people who have done International Studies broad day like woat you know the French his stories in no society has all poor all parts of the population had the same outcomes all right you note also by the way that even within this I've found striking even within socio-economic bands or strata that is people who or ethnic groups that are actually doing pretty well there are differences that can be striking and to quote you again Jews have been especially well represented in retailing finance and garment production but by no means equally well well represented in heavy industries such as the production of steel or automobiles yes and it has nothing to do not we're not talking about relative disadvantage here they rose to success in different fields yeah from I don't know Andrew Carnegie I guess as a Scot who's doing steel and Ford is if the Ford and the Dodge Brothers are what northern European stock automobiles and it just worked out that way yeah for no invidious reason yeah alright you see if you just say yes well of course if I if I just quote the book to you you're going to say yes which is what you should do all the time alright to continue here to lay out your argument again I'm going to quote you but I'm going to get more than a yes out of your time on this this one statistical under-representation or over a representation of various groups is not peculiar to the United States or to our times for centuries there have been countries where most members of various professions and most business owners in whole industries have been members of some subordinate minority all right you present a couple of examples let's take a couple of examples the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia oh yeah tell us about them oh my gosh the that some people call them the the Jews of Southeast Asia considering the numbers involved you might call the Jews the Chinese of Eastern Europe but there are there are country after country where over half of the retail outlets about by people who are Chinese I mean Malaysia Indonesia Thailand whatnot there are countries after countries where most of the billionaires are Chinese outside China outside China and this is one of the other things too is mister this ties in not to some extent with a genetic thing as of 1994 there were 57 million overseas Chinese and 1 billion people in China the over 57 million produces much wealth is the billion people in China all right Jews in Eastern Europe as another example yes AB ordinate group yes tell us about them it's very uncommon from retailing and many parts of Eastern Europe to be largely in the hands of Jews greatly over-represented and universities by the late 19th century 1/3 the people at the University of Vienna would use and they were usually a more successful students Indians in East Africa oh my gosh and you see something that ties in with a desire to confiscate the wealth of the wealthy they did that new ganda the people from India and Pakistan dominated a modern industry in that in that country eventually of course the politicians out decided the thing they should be expropriated they were expropriated they were sentence out not allowed to take any wealth with them but we need significance and all the stuff that was left there their businesses and so forth went went to the continent the Ugandan economy collapsed these people arrived destitute mostly in England and within a decade they were on their way to prosperity again the same thing with the Cubans here that went Castro took over Castro takes over 1959 a million Cubans leave with almost nothing yes and he left behind all the wealth they had in Cuba you fast forward a half a century and the Cuban American businesses in the United States had a revenue that was larger than the revenue of the entire nation of Cuba even though and and they weren't in the United States they weren't driving 1950s cars in the 21st century alright so the underlying assumption just to close up the argument here the underlying assumption of the social vision the vision of social justice that absent discrimination roughly equal outcomes will prevail is refuted by every page of recorded history yeah all right Jews in Eastern Europe overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia they rise in spite of discrimination yes all right ok and they rise better than the people who are discriminating against them all right we tend to think I believe of this new social vision social justice is something completely contemporary but you right has been prevalent for half a century you also argue not merely that it is mistaken but that it has done positive harm yes discrimination and disparities with the prevailing social vision came a more non-judgmental approach to behavior as well as multiculturalism a D emphasis on policing and punishments and an emphasis on demographically based fair shares for all so what you're talking about here is not explicitly governmental action or government programs but the way people begin thinking about society in the United States you continue murder rates rates of infection with venereal diseases and rates of teenage pregnancies were among the social pathologies who steep declines in the 1950s reverse and begin to get worse in the 1960s ok ideas alone it's what people that people carry in their heads but the idea is were carried out in policies in the classic place were in public housing projects people today think of a public housing projects is really just a bedlam and violence and so forth drug dens and Sophia I remember in the 1940s when one of our relatives was admitted to a public housing project in New York and we were so proud because back in those days you got admitted because even though you were just a working person you had a good record you got a steady job women with with with nut with fatherless children would not admit it and so on and so it was not just that the place was good it was that it was one honor that he'd passed these tests to get to get into these places you tell a tale of two blackouts that illustrate what's taking place here the first blackout takes place in November 1965 I can actually remember that we lived in upstate New York I lived in upstate New York and and there was a month that I can remember when we were having dinner and the lights in the house went dark mm-hmm and then came back up for a moment we all looked at each other and thought what was what what just happened well of course when you turn on the television we found out what happened huge power outage and New York City where his upstate the lights just went down and came back on in New York City the the city went black the whole night yeah and you write that that night the crime rate was lower yeah than usual 1965 second blackout very similar event takes place in July 1977 and you write again New York City was again dark throughout the night but now there was widespread looting and arson yes sixty-five people behaved themselves in New York City in the door yes and in seventy so what what happens in those 12 years this was this was one of the many things that turned a turn to the worst in the 1960s there's a whole slew of them Steven Pinker has a book about international murder rates and he said the general trend over the centuries is for the murder rate to go down and but in but in the 1960s the rate did a u-turn as he put it it way when it went right right up and this was common across Western societies and it is because of the same vision out there and the vision so I'm trying to I guess one thing I'm trying to get at here is the extent to which how does it work itself out are the cops because of this new social vision between 1965 people know that if they miss be if they try looting or arson the cops will come right at them no no no there's only so much the house can do the first line of defense is morality and the law as a statement of what the principles are you deal adju demise that and all you've got other police there aren't that many police that you know you could double the number of policemen and if you destroy it appear the put the morality you're not getting anywhere so in 1965 people who had grown up let's see 65 that's going to be dominated by people who'd been through the adults in 65 remember the depression yes they remember the Second World War yes they've had the experience of rebuilding the country in the 1950s and they take for granted what we would now term traditional moralities that right yes you just don't steal things yes you don't destroy property yeah so what another another example it was exchange buffet restaurant that I mentioned yes yes yes and I remember going to those very explain what's going to say you you go in and you pick up you go through the line and pick up your own food and then you break your bring your dishes a little bit there and then you come to the cashier and you tell the cashier how much you owe and they're at 70 some of the the 70 some of these restaurants there were a lot of them in New York dozens dozens all right all right and and and that they lasted for 78 years in the 1960s they collapsed because people no longer or honest all right in England it was even more dramatic because they really sort of set the standard for self-controlled societies and of course if you have a lot of self-control you don't need a lot of government control right but which you don't have it the government is not gonna you're not by itself and the government itself is often tainted as it were about by these same ideas that you example in London in 1954 there were a grand total of 12 armed robberies in the City of London that year at a time when anybody could buy a shotgun with no questions asked fast forward a couple of decades and there at 1400 armed robberies in London despite some of the most strict gun control laws in the world god I'm so I'm still struck what do we make about the speed with which society changes again you've got what I love about the to blackouts ours because they're two snaps there they're almost literally what do people get up to when they think nobody's looking yeah lights go out and it's just a dozen years between good behavior people helping each other out in this in this difficult and terrible behavior where their loot setting fire to property and how is it that ideas the wrong ideas can percolate through Siskin so change behavior in such a brief period of time well it it was going I mean it was these ideas weren't invented in the 1960s right but but but the number of people who progressively move towards those ideas greatly increased and the whole political and intellectual scene was very different all right you spend a good deal of time in discrimination and disparities on the african-american experience in this country mm-hmm and in particular you spend time presenting what might almost be termed a century of hidden history hidden outside but displayed in this book I'm going to quote you the plain fact is that the black poverty rate declined excuse me I should say the hidden century from the end of the Civil War to the enactment of the Great Society yes it's pretty much an even hundred years yes and on one measure after another you argue african-americans make progress yes their incomes rise educational attainment begins to take off family structure remains intact more intact by some measures than that of white Americans and now to quote you the plain fact is that the black poverty rate declined from 87 percent in 1942 47 percent in 1960 prior to the great expansion of the welfare state that began in the 1960s under the Johnson administration and as late as 1969 two-thirds of all black children were living with black parents and then we get the Great Society enacted again it quotes you there was a far more modest decline in poverty rate among blacks after the Johnson administration's massive war on poverty and by 1995 only one-third of black children were living with both parents and among black families in poverty 85 son of the children had no father president a century of intact african-american families and economic and educational progress and then it all goes begins to slide away things start to get worse what happened well the welfare state itself happened but more than that it's the welfare state vision their idea that the world owes you something takes all and it happens it happened in Britain where the underclass is white is amazing the detective depicted parallels and and similarly the the nation note with schools and in Britain kids and then in low-income neighborhoods who want to learn get beaten up by the by by that by that by their classmates because that's where you go out of this class treachery over there its class that's the big deal here it's race but the real net result is the same Tom you had to have been a good student when you were a little kid growing up in Harlem what what reaction do you remember anybody saying no no no don't don't don't be too don't be too don't be too good a student you'll make everybody else look bad in the family or what what was it like in your generation when people were beginning to discover that little Tommy Sol was a pretty smart kid well actually when I first got to Harlem I was not regarded as a pretty SWOT yeah because I come out of the south and back in those days the southern education was so inferior than all other education that you were behind when you all my gosh I was in North Carolina I was among the top students in the class and and my first year in New York I was trailing whoever was the second worst student in the class how old were you when you moved from North Carolina up to Harlem nine-nine okay so but somewhere in there you get a library card and you start reading and oh you become a good student and what is the reaction of your your family and your neighbors and so forth as you begin to become a good student well I neighborhoods didn't didn't really know that oh the family was there they were so pleased and I still remember what to do they may when I was promoted to the seventh grade I wondered why and someone said to me you've now gone further than any of us Wow Wow you've just explained we get a century of progress that a retrogression as you call us and then the economics that was not was not the reason I mean there's no question that blacks in the 1960s at a higher standard of living than blacks in 1940 right right right right right so what how why is it I have to say I have to I get to the passages about african-american progress that century of progress and I have to reread them because they run so counter to what I believe I understand which is that the legacy of slavery is so deeply impressed on African Americans and it's the Great Society that begins to make some progress how is it that a whole century of American history is simply gone it doesn't get talked about that's not the only thing I you know from one of the other chapters there people who talk look talk about the 1920s the history of the 1920s is taught including in a history book written by a Stanford professor it sells for a hundred and sixteen dollars that I bought recently you know he tell he tells you what happened what Andrew Mellon said and how this was tax cuts for the rich and all you have to do is pick up melons book and you'll find out what a dream L has said and all you have to do is going in and that and yet the IRS data tonight e twenties you find that it bears no resemblance to what is said in this history book because one hundred and sixty dollars so ideologies Trump's historical understand I mean I I have I have the IRS data for every year of the 1920s in my file and it's just farcical and these are not stupid people and I don't believe it all of them were lying I believe that they've they've heard what other people have said and they repeated it and they haven't bothered to check the facts back to the African American experience the biggest internal creation in American history takes place as african-americans move from the south up to northern cities and there are it's almost again a kind of two snapshots again I'm quoting discrimination and disparities as blacks in northern cities this is the first arrivals to northern cities become more acculturated to the norms of the larger society racial barriers begin to erode this is in the 19th century right in Illinois restrictions on access to public accommodations for blacks are removed in Detroit blacks had been denied the right to vote in 1850 but they were voting by the 1880s and then the 1890s blacks were being elected to state wide offices in Michigan the 1880 census showed that in Detroit it was not uncommon for blacks and whites to live next door to each other okay african-americans move north and all kinds of racial progress takes place but then and again I quote you however a major major retrogression set in later in northern cities with the arrival of large masses of black migrants from the south in the early 20th century so describe that retrogression what begins to go wrong well in Washington DC for example blacks had been able to go to restaurants theaters and so on prior to the mass migrations that began in the early 20th century when I first arrived in Washington blacks could not go to those things and then under 19 1950 so things had gotten worse oh yes yes I mean it's not so much the the movement of blacks to the north and then in the 19th centuries it was blacks away in the north which are very small populations and they're surrounded by a vastly larger white population and with other groups and similar situations you get you get a a culturation by the smaller group to the norms and a larger group over a period of time and so it wasn't a big big big migrations but the blacks for example at the end of the 19th century New York most blacks in New York had been born in New York by the at the end of the 1970s and so you had a very different population than you had when you have massive numbers of people all right you and you right neither the era of progress in race relations nor the era of retrogression were simply inexplicable mood swings among whites the behavior of blacks themselves had changed yeah explain that well the South is a different culture and then again to some extent it was an example of that that I did mine education was just not the same as the education of kids who've been in Harlem all along so it took me you know a year or two to catch up I see I see okay so all right I'm trying to think this through that if the I mean for example III and story that I've told so many times that the and that that my family found the kid a black kid in Harlem who was very well-educated and so forth and they made it a point that he should he should meet me and show me the rogues and he took me to a public library at the age of nine I had no idea what a public library was and it was only with great reluctance that was I persuaded to take out a library card and borrow a couple of books but of course that was a turning point social justice today so social justice the idea of correcting for unequal outcomes in particular redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor so you've already argued we've already discussed this that the very notion is a historical hmm and misguided but you argue something more there is a crucial question as to whether the redistribution of income of wealth can actually be done in any comprehensive and sustainable sense close quote what do you mean well I've used the example of world they say that we need to send a telegram to Alexandria okay is your Cortes zero I think it would be a vast waste of money but I've used the example so far of the of the Cubans you know right the East Asians but they're all over the places and then in the 15th century in the end of the 15th century Spain decided to expel all Jews and it often happens in each age they're not allowed to take any wealth with them and so they they go to various places including the Netherlands and in over time they again rise to prosperity in the Netherlands helping to increase the Netherlands economy the Huguenots in France were being persecuted they flee to England and Switzerland and they take their skills with him now prior to that time France was big there they were there was no watch industry in England prior to the arrival of Huguenots so now the British could buy their watches from London instead of from France and moreover the London watch makers could compete in the international market with the French watchmakers and in Switzerland this is what helped Switzerland to become and remain to this day with a dominant watch breaking country in the world and you you can't confiscate the source of the of their wealth you can converse safety and you and I did although I didn't go into it in this book this is true of people who wanted want to do this on a local community level I mean you know Detroit was once a prosperous place they followed policies they drove the prosperous people out and the price and then of course we had they had to leave all their businesses and so forth in Detroit that was there no use without the people who knew how to operate it those people I'm sure I've done much better Detroit has never fully recovered from that mm-hmm so the idea here is you can you can confiscate wealth it's already existing you can confidently wears out goods yes yes but what point is it all right so again I'm quoting going to quote the book once again physical wealth is a product of human capital the knowledge skills talents and other qualities that exist inside the heads of people where it cannot be confiscated in a closed quote so the central question you're getting me correct me if I get this wrong because I have a feeling you're going to slap me around what I'm about to say the central question not just of economic growth but of social justice is not the distribution of wealth it's access to human cat it's access to education is really what it comes down to you and goes yeah encompasses education becomes it's not but it's not limited to that so because it's also the store so so where you have where you have social pathologies if it's very hard I'm just making this up to see how you respond to it it's very hard for example figure that I quoted earlier where African American kids living in poverty 85% of them grow up with only one parent present that makes it harder for those no there's no two ways about to acquire human capital so so access to education I'm fumbling here access to education some how is it is it the role of government to foster certain kinds of social stability or social skills well you you you all you can do you can't give anybody an education you can offer them an education you can show them where the public library is that's right but that but that but that that's that's it okay all right and now something else so social justice is an actual impediment to acquiring human capital because if you're what it tells you is that the reason you have less is because people have malevolently kept you from from having the access to the tool to all the good things in life and that and if that's the case why in the world should you knock yourself out learn a whole new culture to develop wholes sets of skills and so forth sacrificed in the present for the future when it's gonna mean nothing one of two of the stories I've heard that it really pains me greatly a couple of young black guys is it two different guys in two different sets of stories express the desire to become a pilot and they say I thought about joining the Air Force but I realize that the white people are not gonna let me become a pilot and they're saying this after there was a whole squadron of black fighter pilots in world war ii and after they have been black generals in the Air Force but this vision that they're that they're that they're bombarded with tells them that that's not possible that something that's already happened is not possible so so so the social fit the notion that you've been wrong yes has the effect of of what of of encouraging encouraging passivity no resentment resentment yes but not but not but not the because social mobility is not some easy thing I don't know if you read the book about the hillbilly elegy oh yes yes always advanced yes that's right and he go well what a what a trauma it is for him to come out of his background and and achieve something in the world why in the world would you put yourself through that if you thought that at the end of it all they're gonna say no we're not gonna let you fly any of our planes damn it right right and also if so if you think you've been done if you think you've been wronged your recourse might also be more likely to politics to try to try to redirect this whole review attribution oh yeah rather than hit the books acquire the skills get the well and with the other thing to I one of them affected my favorite statistic in there is that being poverty rate among blacks as a whole was 22% mmm-hmm among whites as a whole is 11% and among black married couples is 7.5% so it's been an and black married couples have never had I'm a poverty rate as high as 10% in any year since 1994 all right so to the to the to the crime what is to be done tom so all answers it's been done get on education stay merit get married have kids after you get married that's that's sort of the answer right well yes and the things that worked for other people were 10 10 that worked pretty generally all right all right reparations oh I knew you'd like this one New York Times columnist David Brooks in a column last month and titled the case for reparations quote we are at a moment of make-or-break racial reckoning we're a nation coming apart at the seams a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative and the narratives are generally resentment narratives the need now is to consolidate all the different narratives and make them reconciliation and possibility narratives reparations are a drastic policy and hard to execute but the very act of talking about and designing them reparations policies heals a wound oh it's one of many reasons I don't read David Brooks heals the wound and and opens a new story close quote you can imagine somebody whose parents great-grandparents came here in the eighteen 1880s after the Civil War being asked to give reparations to people yeah yeah even in the even in the antebellum south most White's did not have slaves the cost of one male adult slave was more than the average white person earn all year so they weren't all living in terror with it were there plantations and all the rest of it it's insane the other thing I have a slight sidebar and they on the history of slavery mmm-hmm the history of slavery slavery existed all over the world for thousands of years among all sorts of people as far back as the history of the human species goes it's one of many evils that the left tries to localize when it when in fact it is it is a universal evil so it is this too stronger statement that it is what is distinctive about the United States is not that at countenanced slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries but that it has taken such efforts to overcome the legacy of slavery since no that's there that's part of it but more than that as much as slavery is repudiated around the world today prior to the 18th century I know of no serious effort to abolish the institution anywhere anywhere anywhere not in Africa not in no Arabia not in Africa in the 21st century hmm what Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that the only place in the world where slavery had been abolished completely was Western Europe and so this was as late as as late as the as late as the year this country was founded yes and so the idea that this is something that the United States had nobody else had or in all the other other countries that didn't have it's been estimated that there are more slaves in India than in the entire Western Hemisphere and that's quite and that's before and after Columbus got here right last questions Tom a statistic in 2015 this is most recent year I could find in 2015 black households at the 20th and 40th percentile of household income earned an average of 55 percent as much as white households at those same percentiles 20th and 40th and that figure from 19 a bigger part and that figure from 2015 is exactly the same as the figure in 1967 so you can imagine people of goodwill looking at that and saying only 55 percent as much as white households and it hasn't changed since 1967 dr. Sol I grant all of these arguments but even at that something must be done and Tom so all replies hell one way would be to get rid of the welfare state but also those kind of numbers of resolutely what they have in mind I don't think perhaps not one other problems are those kind of numbers which I going to in a different chapter on numbers is that household and family income statistics have a lot of problems with them and they don't they don't reflect for example in kind transfers right and and the in-kind transfer is not only up from government welfare payments yeah that sort of thing but more than that the in-kind transfers are among the reason that people don't have to earn more money right okay once again discrimination and disparities the most spectacularly successful political doctrine that the 20th century was Marxism yet if the wealth of rich capitalists came from the exploitation of poor workers then we might expect to find that where there are larger concentrations of rich capitalists we would find correspondingly larger concentrations of poverty the facts point in the opposite direction explain what you mean by this well the United States has five times as many billionaires as there are and all of the Middle East and Africa put together and so according to the logic of Marxism Americans should have a ordinary Americans should have a lower standard of living than the standard of living of people in the middle in the Middle East and Africa it is just that's the opposite I mean Americans on welfare have a higher standard of living than the average person in Africa in the Middle East so Marxism is simply wrong wrong demonstrable wrong yes obviously wrong well obvious to some people all right obvious to you now I Lord you into a trap a recent YouGov poll found that 19 percent of Millennials one in five young Americans holds a favorable view of communism now let me quote one of these young Millennials a new member of Congress alexandria okz of cortez who represents the bronx not all that far from where you grew up quote to me capitalism is irredeemable close quote tom soul replies - maybe they're in the movie but to the okay so let's Lilith set alexandria kzo cortez to one side - the one in five young Americans you it holds a favorable view of communism how can this be what's going on I think the education system has a lot to do with that back when I was quite young 20 years old I read a book called China shakes the world about how the Communists took over in China and the last chapter he tries to explain it and he says it's the education system had a lot to do with now at the time I struck me as a very hard explanation now that I've had a half a century or so in the American education system it doesn't strike me as odd at all all right Tom would you closed by reading a passage from your book from this new edition of discrimination and disparities the last Western nation to end slavery Brazil did so in 1888 and the first totalitarian dictatorship arose in Russia in 1917 there was barely a generation between the suppression of one form of monumentally brutal subjugation of human beings and the creation of another yet these dehumanizing dictatorships were often founded on stirring rhetoric and loft divisions that resonated with many leading intellectuals in countries around the world there could hardly be a clearer example of the need for the historic warning eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty Tom's sole author of this new edition of discrimination and disparities thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation I'm Peter Robinson [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

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Keywords: Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, Racism, African Americans, Welfare State, Poverty, Income Inequality, Reparations

Id: LdHEbOAQFmY

Length: 46min 32sec (2792 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Imahiker]

Sowell makes so much sense.