I've read some of Sowell's other books and in some he does a good job of putting across libertarian and old style liberal ideas. The objective here is the same but it is far more outlandishly partisan than other work I've read. The descriptions (take the health chapter for example) are so one-sided they are laughable.

Sadly this undermines his argument significantly and it makes for agonizing reading. This is not a useful contribution to the debate.

Lastly, the title makes this sounds like a textbook: it really isn't...

Meh. It’s like a parade through topics for applied econ, but it’s an economist’s parade (which is the worst kind and consists only of sweater-vested old men walking around and grumbling at things). In all seriousness, I was quite disappointed. I’ve read a lot of Sowell’s papers and expected much better work here. Specifically, he used a lot of anecdotes rather than data to prove his points, and I felt like his definition of “applied economics” was “apply economics retroactively to my personal views to rant about why I’m always right.” Don’t bother.

Conquests and Cultures made a baby with Basic Economics. Those books cover the same concepts in a more thorough and satisfying way.

Reinforces the idea that working hard in America leads to success. Like it or not, those who are poor or fail almost certainly made a series of wrong choices throughout their lives. There is simply too much opportunity in our country. Incentives are everything.

Memorable quotes:

"Even the top FIVE percent of households by income had more heads of household who worked full-time for 50 or more weeks a year than did the bottom 20 percent. In absolute numbers, there were 3.9 million heads of household working full-time and year-round in the top 5 percent of households and only 3.3 million working full-time and year-around in the bottom 20 percent. There was a time when it was meaningful to speak of 'the idle rich' and the 'toiling poor' but that time has long past. Most households in the bottom 20 percent by income do not have ANY full-time, year-round worker and 56 percent of these households do not have anyone working even part-time." - Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies, pg. 127

Pro

This is Thomas Sowell so you know what to expect. High quality writing, deep intellectual thinking, rational look at everything, calculated and meticulous arguments. And first and foremost you can expect one of the greatest economics philosophers of our time. Thomas Sowell is equal rationality in the 20th and 21st century.

It's the typical Sowell stuff with needed critical arguments pro liberty and anti top-down management that often is too expensive and constricts the freedom to express yourself. Basically, freedom makes us all rich. Brutal leadership makes us all poor.

The race chapter is a great one and feels new and fresh compared to his former books. In that he argues for the state being responsible for creating racist systems as if you just let the market decide most often people would be too profit focused to let some weird emotion rule them all together as one. If one single IT company starts hiring East Asians while all other companies are racist and don't then you end up with one company dominating the IT market with cheaper and better workers. Basically, unless all move as one any one company can just break the bad system and get rich. But the state can create a system where no one can hire those workers so the companies just compete in an unfair market - equally. Systemic racism can therefore not easily sustain itself in a free market.

This book is basically about "stage one" economics meaning planned economy and top-down and short term view on things by the government. So the government will raise taxes and control the market to gain profits now. While in reality they are destroying the market. The current leaders are just not focused on something they can't measure right now or gain something from right now. They will try to abuse the system if they can.

Con

Now, let's get into the bad parts. Firstly the audiobook I had had a narrator I didn't like. He was shouting everything with a monotone voice. I just couldn't concentrate for over 5 minutes listening to these arguments.

Secondly, Sowell makes some libertarian fallacies. Universal healthcare is just explained away as bad with anecdotes. So we read that Canadian citizens travel to USA to use their healthcare system while it doesn't happen the other way around. But wouldn't rich people better afford to travel? Isn't Canada's system better for poorer people? Meaning rich Canadians travel to USA for expensive quality healthcare but poor Americans can't afford to travel to Canada even if their system may be cheaper - or not. I'm not sure. I'm not saying the American system is bad, but Sowell's short arguments are just not convincing. And it's the same in all his books. He just does not seem to explain the healthcare system from a libertarian point of view in a way that can make me agree with him as I don't get enough info here. Just small examples mean nothing to me here because they are not a fair dollar to dollar comparisons. I need many, many more numbers and then counter-examples too. Not just anecdotes pro his points. I do think USA's healthcare system is very impressive in some parts but I'm not sure the Western European system is as bad as he makes it out to be. It does actually work well in many countries. And the potential bankruptcies are at least not here yet. So maybe Sowell is just plain and simply wrong on this. It's hard to say how much a free healthcare system helps vs. how much it is abused counter the private system.

Then later Sowell is explaining away Africa's low SES without going into IQ. This made it a chapter I just ignored. I really don't care what people say about black people or Africa unless they start their argument with the heritability of IQ. Anything about water canals and animals or whatever is just small things that may have changed the evolutionary trajectory of races but you can't really use it to explain all of Africa today. That's just silly.

But overall I just found myself zoning out one too many times. Both because of the bad narrator/sound quality and just his repetitive arguments. All his books feel similar. It's always the same ideas, the same topics, and the same arguments. I had to keep reading for a long time to get to something new here and at that point I was often too tired to fully enjoy the clever argument. Sowell unfortunately wrote a lot of books that feel too similar to each other. I think this is my third one of his but I have also listened to a ton of his interviews on YouTube. I want more facts per argument. Instead he has some great facts surrounded by many pages of argument. Not really a proper mix if you want to fully convince me. Before Stefan Molyneux went batshit crazy and was banned from YouTube his interviews and libertarian videos were actually better structured than many of Sowell's arguments. Unfortunately the way Sowell remains unbanned is to make overarching vague arguments and seldom go into details like Molyneux did. Anyone can be safe that way. And it often feels like Sowell is trying to say something but then doesn't quite say it. When he talks about the fair number differences between blacks and whites in NBA he doesn't explain athletic genes. Again, safe side. When he talks about gender wage differences he ought to go into evolutionary psychology but yet doesn't. Safe side. It's all morally good arguments but then where is the proof itself? Sowell feels like he can convince all readers with simple number facts and deep moral arguments. But he is missing the scientific psychology argument. That's a strong argument too as it proves that the differences are fair and not caused by any top-down force as long as we are talking about most free markets. If he dared he could go an extra step. Into the things he is hinting at.

Conclusion

Yet another Sowell book. At this point I expect new arguments but it's largely more of the same libertarian macroeconomy ideas I've read about before. And what I haven't read about already I just could as easily logically conclude myself. So for me all his books feel too similar which does make me feel like this book is not giving me enough new info. Maybe I'm just much better at structuring all these arguments in my head today. 10 years ago this book would probably have blown my mind as these moral arguments are not easily found in mass media or on social media.

I don't think it's his best book. And I think many rationalists will feel like it's a bit too simple and too loose argument focused to be great. On the other hand if you are new to the thinking community this may be a huge information boost for you. It just tells me that I'm getting old and grumpy and that I need to interact with more young people because I'm kinda feeling like I've learned most of the basics in philosophy and am seeking more concrete evidence and fewer loose arguments. I don't need to be sold on the freedom argument anymore. And if Sowell or anyone else wants to sell me on the libertarian argument they need to have much more data.

If you have a hard time understanding basic freedom and instead support a big state in any way you need to read this book. If you are not in the center politically grab this book and read it. You won't regret it.

Thomas Sowell has a number of good books and this is one of them. I would probably rate it about a 4.5. This is a natural follow up to his book Basic Economics. His observations about thinking beyond the immediate effects of an action or policy is essential and something everyone should do. However, it is something that few people do, which is why this book is needed.

One of the obvious implications is in how government programs work. While some may have a noble goal that is immediately obvious, the full impact of some policies or programs is not felt for years or even decades. Even worse, people often are unable to trace the results back to their underlying cause. As a result, the attempted treatment will simply create additional unintended (or in some cases intended) consequences which will require additional action. These new actions can produce another set of consequences, and the cycle can continue on well after the initial issue is no longer relevant.

The same is true of visible negative consequences, where many of the future benefits can be very positive, but some cannot see past the first set of smaller negative consequences. An example of this (and I hope I am not crossing books here as I was reading several at the same time) is vaccines. While they can have a negative side effect that could be lethal to .01% of the population that would be obvious and immediate. However, they could keep 10% of the population from contracting a serious disease which results in millions of lives saved. While that is of little consolation to whom the doses were lethal, the overall good towards society should be obvious when one considers how diseases like smallpox have been wiped out.

Overall a very good read. It would be worthwhile to read the precursor, Basic Economics, but it is not required to understand this book.

I didnt like that much this book. I doesnt have a good structure to follow ideas, and there are too many examples to explain the same concept.

Its more like the history of recent economics.

I thought Economic was about financial politics. I'd call this book just with the subtitle "Thinking Beyond Stage One" :) And it really gives a great overview how all things are interconnected and one should always ask 3-4-5 times after big decisions "but what happens then... and then". Because just thinking "stage one" solutions means quite always creating more problems than it solves.

Thomas Sowell has done it again with this follow-up to his ground breaking Basic Economics.

He shows clear examples of why most governmental involvement always has negative effects after there short term fixes or as Thomas Sowell describes it as 'Level 1' thinking.

Rent Caps usually lead to a shortage of supply and also higher rents is just one of the examples he clearly shows.

The author gives good incentive to understand the effects of political decisions from the standpoint of economics; namely how being short-sighted leads to unexpected consequences often prohibitively far into the future to retroactively distinguish. This leads to a misunderstanding and diagnosis of their root cause, continuing a misguided chain of cause and effect for the sake of aid.

That was the useful part of this book.

The useless parts consisted of the author's highly polarizing political opinions rationalized by theoretical economic theory. Instead of giving alternative viewpoints to multiple perspectives or motivations, he is very heavy-handed in advocating right-wing thought patterns. A more thoughtful analysis of alternate decisions or opportunities would have been more useful for the sake of critical thought and creative conceptualization of economic theory. Also he uses statistics often to bolster claims that I perceived more as hog wash than factual evidence despite the author's intent.

Thomas Sowell's "Applied Economics" ought to be required reading in every high school and college economics, politics, and English courses. While Mr. Sowell is Ph.D economist and fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, his ideas are useful even to the non-economist. As a society, we tend to be taken in too easily by people who make irrational arguments that sound good at first glance but produce miserable results since no one thought about the next step. Often times, too many words are politically popular but are actually quite harmful. Such words include: "living wage," "consumer protection," "rent control," etcetera. When these ideas are actually applied in practice, the results rarely meet the rhetoric over the long-run. Politicians only tend to care about what will get them re-elected, and as a result, few of them have an incentive to think about what will happen 10 years from now. As a result, many often escape the blame since the poor results will be far removed from their disasterous policies. This, of course, could easily be construed as a problem with democracy, but instead, my feeling is that it is a problem with our educational system. If our educational system actually educated citizens to think deeply about what would be the consequences of certain policies, perhaps the heated irrational logic emanating from certain politicians would cease. Perhaps such rhetoric would continue to work in irrational hotspots such as Berkeley, but rare for it to work elsewhere. One could only hope. This book is a must read for everyone -- regardless of who you are.

The central idea of Applied Economics is that political decisions are made at Stage 1. Good decisions are mostly made in stage 2 or beyond. This is because politicians get credit for caring about something rather than effectively doing anything about it. Building a bridge is good politics. There are signing ceremonies and breaking ground ceremonies and ribbon cuttings. Building bridges is face time with the constituents and pictures on the front page. Repairing a bridge is only good governance.

And politicians like all people are more likely to make poor economic decisions when they won't be the ones paying the costs of the decisions. In the case of building restrictions, current homeowners will see their home values rise as restrictions increase, this is at the expensive of newer people moving to an area. Sowell tells us that most housing costs and shortages come from the kind of political decisions that limit land use. The material and labor to build homes doesn't cost much more in one part of the country as in another. The limits of how many houses per acre of land or how many stories per building has a real cost to buyer and renter. Because those costs will not be blamed on a particular politician, the same people that cause the problems can get credit for trying to build low cost housing.

What I appreciate most about Thomas Sowell is that his counter-intuitive arguments are often the best response to a lazy the conventional wisdom seen everywhere in public life. If this were ancient Greece, the rulers would be offering up the Hemlock.