8/17/24 - reposting this today, as I just read a review of a book by one of my “friends” that almost made my head explode. I try to make Goodreads my refuge from politics, but as this election looms nearer I’m afraid it’s going to be harder and harder. I so admire people who are able to state their opinions intelligently and without denigrating and name-calling those who have a different viewpoint. I hope at least some of us, on either side of the political divide, will think twice before posting. If you want to fight and insult other people, we have Twitter for that.
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I often run across quotes by Thomas Sowell that resonate with me. "An influential African American economist who is known for his controversial views on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, Thomas Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina in 1930."

Despite being written almost 30 years ago, The Vision of the Anointed could have written yesterday. Consider this:

The focus here will be on... the vision prevailing among the intellectual and political elite of our time...which means that its assumptions are so much taken for granted by so many people, including the so called "thinking people," that neither those assumptions nor their corollaries are generally confronted with demands for empirical evidence. Indeed, empirical evidence itself may be viewed as suspect...

...what the prevailing vision of our time emphatically does offer, is a special state of grace for those who believe in it. Those who accept this vision are deemed to be not merely factually correct but morally on a higher plane. For those who have this vision of the world, the anointed and the benighted do not argue on the same moral plane or play by the same cold rules of logic and evidence.

Sowell promises in the book to offer "an empirical comparison between the promised benefits of policies based on that vision, and the grim and often bitter consequences of those political and judicial decisions. In short, the purpose is not simply to see what kind of world exists inside the minds of a self-anointed elite, but to see how that world effects the world of reality in terms as concrete as crime, family disintegration, and other crucial social phenomena of our times."

Sowell then describes a series of policies that have followed the "Pattern of Failure." He notes:

The great ideological crusades of the twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the most disparate fields...What all these have in common is their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government...several key elements have been common to most of them:

1. Assertion of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.
2. An urgent need for government action to avert impending catastrophe.
3. A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.
4. A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.

Remember, the above was written in 1995, and he describes policy failures from the previous 30 years. As far as I got in the book, it ironically makes me feel a bit better about the world - this has been going on for my entire lifetime, but I was never much interested in politics so I was just oblivious to it.

So now when I look around me, trying to understand why people can't have a rational discussion on important but controversial topics - e.g., gender issues, abortion, immigration, crime, climate change - I have to remember that this is not new. Instead of listening to and considering the opinion - or even evidence - of anyone with an opposing viewpoint, the default is just to assume that other person is evil, to insult and try to shut them down.

Although Sowell places the blame for this mostly on liberals as the "anointed," it absolutely goes both ways, and social media has made this problem much, MUCH worse than it was 30 years ago. It's a shame, and hard to see a way out.

I love people who think in straight lines.

Sowell at his prescient and ascerbic finest. He fires a volley of logic and research across the bow of the ship of self-righteous elitism in effort to warn them of the approaching icebergs. He synthesizes and builds on some of the ideas developed in his other works (notably A Conflict of Visions), and the result is an elegant and digestible summary of Sowell's thought.

He picks apart the insulated, echo-chamber ideas of the social/political elites--the anointed (since they have named themselves the de facto saviors of the world)--and argues for the historic, "tragic" vision of a world in which personal responsibility matters, human nature is not perfect, and there are no "solutions" to the world's problems, only trade-offs between equally good or equally bad options.

In essence, this is a book about how man is not and cannot be sovereign over the world, despite his fervent efforts to the contrary.

The implications of Sowell's reasoning are clear at a political and economic level, but there is a clear warning for personal and spiritual issues as well. The tendency to believe that we can "change the world" and bring about "social justice" is just as pervasive in the Church as it is in the world. We have to work within the responsibilities and possibilites given to us and guard against the temptation to usurp God's place as the only righteous judge.

Bad sources and unvoiced assumptions make this ideological dogma in the guise of an adult non-fiction book.

The thesis is that "they" are concerned about non-issues, create policies that cause more problems, and ignore any feedback because of ideological blindness. His examples include seat belts, sex ed, and the Miranda rights.

This could work if he went a more Public Choice route and talked about how well-intentioned policies get chewed up by the political process. He could talk about some plausible examples of counter-productive legislation. These would talk about actual issues with nuance, but Sowell is only interested in selling dogma to the converted.

I'm not joking about those examples. He says that informing detained persons of their legal rights "provide greater means of escaping punishment for crimes committed by criminals who fall below the state of the art in criminal evasions of the law". Before this he talks about the morality of shooting mad dogs, and saying that capital punishment is the only humane option. Apparently Sowell's idea of the legal system comes from Dirty Harry movies.

He also uses highly questionable sources for contradicting statistics. A good examples involves sex education in the 60's. His line is that teenage births were declining until it was taught in school, and afterwords it skyrocketed. This confused me, since there's decades of well-established data showing a negative correlation between the two. The National Center for Health Statistics shows exactly the opposite that Sowell claims. His source? "The War Against Population" by Jacqueline Kasun, and who knows where she got her figures from. While his book is dotted with footnotes, most turn out to be garbage like this.

While Sowell complains that "THEY" ignore reality in place of ideology, this book is a tedious exercise in self-projection.

It’s hard to believe that this book was written nearly 30 years ago. Its critique of the prevailing ideological elite describes with incredible accuracy the current social and political environment and the consequences of progressive ideology.

Thomas Sowell is quickly becoming my conservative intellectual father-figure. In this outstanding book, he exposes liberals for what they believe themselves to be - "the annointed". A very intellectual book - not casual reading, but worth the time to read carefully.

I’m not sure how this ended up on my TBR, but it was surprisingly good. Dr. Sowell took a somewhat dry subject and made it interesting. I ended up highlighting tons of stuff despite trying not to.

In this book, “the Anointed” are the self-proclaimed experts and elites who believe they are smarter and wiser and kinder than everyone else (“the benighted masses”). They get in power and infringe on basic rights and liberties as they attempt to reshape society according to their vision—because they couldn’t ever be wrong.

The anointed don’t see people as individuals or as people, really, but a single mass to be shaped according to their whims. They name something a crisis, whether or not it really is (crime, racism, overpopulation), blame it on “society” and implement their own “solutions.” They assume they have the omniscience to fix society and therefore refuse to notice unintended consequences. They refuse to accept evidence that shows their solutions are doing more harm than good. They are oblivious to the realities of the world because they have created their own reality in an academic setting.

It kept reminding me of this scripture: “O that cunning plan of the evil one! O the vainness, and the frailties, and the foolishness of men! When they are learned they think they are wise, and they hearken not unto the counsel of God, for they set it aside, supposing they know of themselves, wherefore, their wisdom is foolishness and it profiteth them not. And they shall perish. But to be learned is good if they hearken unto the counsels of God.”

They tend to be socialists and progressives, believing they can create utopia if only they were in charge, no matter how many people communism kills. The book examines how they work, how they think, and gives tons and tons of examples and data. Very insightful. Even though this was published in the 90s, it is still relevant today.

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HIGHLIGHTS (continued in comments)

1. Flattering Unction

What is intellectually interesting about visions are their assumptions and their reasoning, but what is socially crucial is the extent to which they are resistant to evidence. All social theories being imperfect, the harm done by their imperfections depends not only on how far they differ from reality, but also on how readily they adjust to evidence, to come back into line with the facts. One theory may be more plausible, or even more sound, than another, but if it is also more dogmatic, then that can make it far more dangerous than a theory that is not initially as close to the truth but which is more capable of adjusting to feedback from the real world. The prevailing vision of our time—the vision of the anointed—has shown an extraordinary ability to defy evidence.

2. By the Numbers

The fact that crime and poverty are correlated is automatically taken to mean that poverty causes crime, not that similar attitudes or behavior patterns may contribute to both poverty and crime. … The correlation between bad housing and high crime rates was taken to mean that the former caused the latter—not that both reflected similar attitudes and behavior patterns. But the vision of the anointed has survived even after massive programs of government-provided housing have led to these brand-new housing projects quickly degenerating into new slums and becoming centers of escalating crime.

Different racial and ethnic groups not only vary in which proportions fall into which age brackets but vary as well in which proportions fall into various marital and other social conditions—and these in turn likewise have profound effects on everything from income to infant mortality to political opinions.

3. The Irrelevance of Evidence

Automobile company representatives who pointed out that the industry cannot produce features that the consumers do not want, or are unwilling to pay for, were scorned by [Ralph] Nader for treating the issue as “wholly one of personal consumer taste instead of objective scientific study.” Like so many who invoke the name and the mystique of science to override other people’s choices, Nader offered remarkably little hard data to back up his claims, whether on the overall safety of the automobile over time, or of American automobiles versus from other countries (including socialist countries where “corporate greed” was presumably not a problem).

One of the problems faced by “consumer advocates” in general is how to make the consumers’ own preferences disappear from the argument, since consumer sovereignty conflicts with moral surrogacy by the anointed.

The confidence of the anointed in their own articulated “reason” has as its counterpoint their complete distrust in systemic racial processes, operating without their guidance and intervention. Thus the operation of a free market is suspect in their eyes, no matter how often it works, and government control of economic activity appears rational, no matter how many times it fails. … As bitterly resented as the gasoline lines of the 1970s were under government price controls, there were widespread predictions of skyrocketing gasoline prices if these controls were abolished. … President Carter blamed the benighted masses for not facing up to the situation as seen by the anointed. … Ronald Reagan issued an Executive Order during the first month of his administration, ending oil price controls. Within four months, the average price of a gallon of unleaded gasoline fell from $1.41 to 86 cents.

In academic circles, the equally vast generality is “diversity,” which often stands for a quite narrow social agenda, as if those who reiterate the word “diversity” endlessly had no idea that diversity is itself diverse and has many dimensions besides the one with which they are preoccupied. Advocates of diversity in a race or gender sense are quite often hostile to ideological diversity, when it includes traditional or “conservative” values and beliefs.

The cold fact is that the truth cannot become private property without losing its whole meaning. Truth is honored precisely for its value in interpersonal communication. If we each have our own private truths, then we would be better off (as well as more honest) to stop using the word or the concept and recognize that nobody’s words could be relied upon anymore. The more subtle insinuation is that we should become more “sensitive” to some particular group’s “truth”—that is, that we should arbitrarily single out some group for different standards, according to the fashions of the times or the vision of the anointed.

However modest a goal, “decent” housing does not produce itself, any more than palatial housing does. Be it ever so humble, someone has to build a home, which requires work, skills, material resources, and financial risks for those whose investments underwrite the operation. To say that someone has a “right” to any kind of housing is to say that others have an obligation to expend all these efforts on his behalf, without his being reciprocally obligated to compensate them for it. Rights from government interference—“Congress shall make no law,” as the Constitution says regarding religion, free speech, etc.—may be free, but rights to anything mean that someone else has been yoked to your service involuntarily, with no corresponding responsibility on your part to provide for yourself, to compensate others, or even to behave decently or responsibly. Here the language of equal rights is conscripted for service in defense of differential privileges.

5. The Anointed Vs. The Benighted

The refrain of the anointed is we already know the answers, there’s no need for more studies, and the kinds of questions raised by those with other views are just stalling and obstructing progress. “Solutions” are out there waiting to be found, like eggs at an Easter egg hunt. Intractable problems with painful trade-offs are simply not part of the vision of the anointed. … Far more important than particular reckless policies, even those with such deadly consequences as weakening the criminal law, is a whole mind-set in which omnicompetence is implicitly assumed and unhappy social phenomena are presumed to be unjustified morally and remediable intellectually and politically. Inherent constraints of circumstances or people are to be brushed aside, as are alternative policy approaches which offer no special role for the anointed. The burden of proof is not put on their vision, but on existing institutions.

The hallmark of the vision of the anointed is that what the anointed consider lacking for the kind of social progress they envision is will and power, not knowledge. But to those with the tragic vision, what is dangerous are will and power without knowledge—and for many expansive purposes, knowledge is inherently insufficient.

Although followers of this tradition [anointed] often advocate more egalitarian economic and social results, they necessarily seek to achieve these results through highly unequal influence and power, and—especially in the twentieth century—through an increased concentration of power in the central government, which is thereby enabled to redistribute economic resources more equally. While those with the vision of the anointed emphasize the knowledge and resources available to promote the various policy programs they favor, those with the tragic vision of the human condition emphasize that these resources are taken from other uses (“there is no free lunch”) and that the knowledge and wisdom required to run ambitions social programs far exceed what any human being has ever possessed, as the unintended negative consequences of such programs repeatedly demonstrate.

What is seldom part of the vision of the anointed is a concept of ordinary people as autonomous decision makers free to reject any vision and to seek their own well-being through whatever social processes they choose. Thus, when those with the prevailing vision speak of the family—if only to defuse their adversaries’ emphasis on family values—they tend to conceive of the family as a recipient institution for government largess or guidances, rather than as a decision-making institution determining for itself how children shall be raised and with what values.

In their zeal for particular kinds of decisions to be made, those with the process by which decisions are made. Often what they propose amounts to third-party decision making by people who pay no cost for being wrong—surely one of the least promising ways of reaching decisions satisfactory to those who must live with the consequences. It is not that the anointed advocate such processes, as such, but that their preoccupation with goals often neglects the whole question of process characteristics. The very standards by which social “problems” are defined tend likewise to be third-party standards. Thus “waste,” “quality,” and “real needs” are terms blithely thrown around, as if some third party can define them for other people. Government actions in the form of bureaucracies to replace the systemic process of the marketplace.

To say that pesticides, nuclear power, medicines, automobiles, or other things must be “safe”—either absolutely (which is impossible) or within some specified level of risk—is to say that only one set of probabilities will be weighed. Put differently, to minimize the overall dangers to human life and health is to accept specific, preventable dangers rather than follow policies which would create worse preventable dangers. The issue thus is not whether nuclear power is “safe” but whether its dangers are greater or less than the dangers of supplying the same power from coal, oil, hydroelectric dams, or other ways of generating electricity, or the dangers in reducing the availability of electricity. Fewer or dimmer lights are almost certain to increase both accidents and crime, for example, and brownouts and blackouts create other dangers when people get trapped in elevators or fire alarm systems no longer function.

The language of politics, and especially of ideological politics, is often categorical language about “rights,” about eliminating certain evils, guaranteeing certain benefits, or protecting certain habitats and species. In short, it is the language of solutions and of the unconstrained vision behind solutions, the vision of the anointed. Indirectly but inexorably, this language says that the preferences of the anointed are to supersede the preferences of everyone else—that the particular dangers they fear are to be avoided at all costs and the particular benefits they seek are to be obtained at all costs. Their attempts to remove these decisions from both the democratic process and the market process, and to vest them in obscure commissions, unelected judges, and insulated bureaucracies, are in keeping with the logic of what they are attempting. They are not seeking trade-offs based on the varying preferences of millions of other people, but solutions based on their own presumably superior knowledge and virtue.

6. Crusades of the Anointed

Clearly, with no safety requirements at all, needless deaths from untested drugs would be numerous and unconscionable. But, beyond some point, the residual increment of safety from more years of testing declines to the point where it is outweighed by the lives that continue to be lost through delay. Safety can be fatal.

Here, as elsewhere, the anointed show what Jean-Francois Revel has called “a pitiless ferocity toward some” and “a boundless indulgence toward others.” Both the particular mascots chosen [criminals] and the particular targets chosen [general public] serve the same purpose—to demonstrate the superiority of the anointed over the benighted. To put themselves solidly on the side of the supposed underdogs, the anointed often place permanent labels on people, on the basis of transient circumstances.

Many have claimed that the “insanity” defense is not a serious problem because it is used in only a fraction of criminal cases, and used successfully in a smaller fraction. This understates tits full impact as another factor delaying trials and providing grounds for appeals after conviction in an already overburdened court system. Moreover, the demoralization of the public, as it sees horrible crimes go unpunished and violent criminals turned loose again in their midst because of psychiatrists’ speculation, is not a smaller consideration.

Criminals are the most obvious, and most resented, of those for whose benefit judges have stretched the law, in an attempt to achieve the cosmic justice of compensating for preexisting disadvantages. … That most people born in poverty did not become criminals, and that people born in more fortunate circumstances sometimes did, was acknowledged by Judge Bazelon, but this acknowledgment made no real difference in his conclusions or his judicial decisions. Correlation was causation.

Mistaken beliefs about the safety of untested blood did not originate with the public but with the anointed elites. This was only one of the many ways in which these elites pooh-poohed the dangers from AIDS. San Francisco nurses who used masks and gloves while handling AIDS patients were punished by hospital authorities for doing so in 1985, though such precautions later became accepted and then officially recommended in federal guidelines.

The very existence of families and the viability of marriage are both grossly understated through misused statistics … Similarly, the incidence of various problems in families is overstated by artful definitions and half-truths. For example, alarmist stories in the media about domestic violence often lump together husbands and boyfriends as “partners” who batter women, when in fact a woman who heads her own household is nearly three times as likely to be beaten as a wife is. Separated, divorced, and never-married women are all more likely to be beaten than a wife is. In other words, the traditional family is the safest setting for a women—though that is, of course, not the message which the anointed seek to convey.

The pervasive preferences of the anointed for collective and third-party decision making (“solutions” by “society”) takes the form of promotion of “day care” for children. Enabling families to take care of their own children at home by allowing the income tax exemption to keep pace with inflation and the real cost of raising children has no such support among the anointed. Indeed, this is an idea often pushed—in vain—by conservatives. While the anointed are often ready to spend vast amounts of government money on families, especially in ways which allow outsiders to intrude into family decisions, they are by no means equally willing to let families keep money that they have earned and make their own independent decisions. In family matters, as in other matters, power and preemption are the touchstones of the vision of the anointed, however much that vision is described in terms of the beneficent goals it is seeking.

7. The Vocabulary of the Anointed

When people choose their occupations according to what the public wants and is willing to pay for, that is “greed,” but when the public is forced to pay for what the anointed want done, that is “public service.”

Families who wish to be independent financially and to make their own decisions about their lives are of little interest or use to those who are seeking to impose their superior wisdom and virtue on other people. Earning their own money makes these families unlikely candidates for third-party direction and wishing to retain what they have earned threatens to deprive the anointed of the money needed to distribute as largess to others who would thus become subject to their direction. In these circumstances, it is understandable why the desire to increase and retain one’s own earnings should be characterized as “greed,” while wishing to live at the expense of others is not.

Since the bottom line of the prevailing vision is that the anointed are moral surrogates to make decisions for other people, those other people must be seen as incapable of making the right decisions for themselves. The concept of personal responsibility is thus anathema to this vision and the vocabulary of the anointed reflects this.

Anyone can be in favor of “social justice” without further ado. In short, the ideas of so-called “thinking people” often require much less thinking. Indeed, the less thinking there is about definitions, means, and consequences, the more attractive “social justice” seems.

A truly devastating critique of the liberal mindset.

Quotes:

In reality, the entire population of the world today could be housed in the state of Texas, in single-story, single-family houses - four people to a house - and with a typical yard around each home.

Everyone is a “progressive” by his own lights. That the anointed believe that this label differentiates themselves from other people is one of a number of symptoms of their naive narcissism.

Rights from government interference - “Congress shall make no law,” as the Constitution says regarding religion, free speech, etc. - may be free, but rights to anything mean that someone else has been yoked to your service involuntarily, with no corresponding responsibility on your part to provide for yourself, to compensate others, or even to behave decently or responsibly.

For society as a whole, nothing is a right - not even bare subsistence, which has to be produced by human toil. Particular segments of society can of course be insulated from the necessities impinging on society as a whole, by having someone else carry their share of work, either temporarily or permanently. But, however much those others recede into the background in the verbal picture painted by words like “rights,” the whole process is one of differential privilege.

Among the many other questions raised by the nebulous concept of “greed” is why it is a term applied almost exclusively to those who want to earn more money or to keep what they have already earned - never to those wanting to take other people’s money in taxes or to those wishing to live on the largesse dispensed from such taxation.

To say that a shoe shine boy earns “too little” or a surgeon “too much” is to say that third parties should have the right to preempt the decisions of those who elected to spend their money on shoe shines or surgery.

...both poverty and dependency were declining for years prior to the Johnson administration’s “war on poverty.” Black income was rising, not only absolutely but relative to rising white income.

Those who wrote the American constitution were of course familiar with such terms as “due process,” “freedom of speech,” etc., from English common law and indicated no intention of giving them different meanings from what those terms already had.

[According to the anointed]: Opposition to the vision of the anointed is due not to a different reading of complex and inconclusive evidence, but exists because opponents are lacking, either intellectually or morally, or both.

The perennial desire to make particular things “affordable” through public policy or to have government provide an ever-expanding list of “basic needs” suggests that the economic realities conveyed by prices are seen as mere arbitrary social conventions, rather than expressions of inherent constraints and inescapable costs.

This was somehow both interesting and a slog to get through. Sowell is definitely on to something - except for the dated examples it could have been written yesterday. AmblesideOnline schedules this in the high school years, but I haven’t been assigning it to all my kids. I think it could be helpful in wading through all the bad ideas out there, but it could possibly reinforce cynicism in those with that tendency. ;) The last (scathing) chapter is possibly the best:

“Desperate evasions of discordant evidence, and the denigration and even demonizing of those presenting such evidence, are indicative of the high stakes in contemporary culture wars, which are not about alternative policies but alternative worlds and of alternative roles of the anointed in those worlds. Because differential rectitude is pivotal to the vision of the anointed, opponents must be shown to be not merely mistaken but morally lacking.”

So very true; enumerates so many of the distractions I have run up against talking with liberals. They close their eyes to reality and logic and argue with blind emotion, trying to frame rational people as unfeeling even as they rob them to fund their wasteful and destructive programs.

"The perennial desire to make particular things 'affordable' through public policy or to have government provide an ever-expanding list of 'basic needs' suggests that the economic realities conveyed by prices are seen as mere arbitrary social conventions, rather than expressions of inherent constraints and inescapable costs. Similarly, the desire to spare people 'stigmas' for their behavior treats such stigmas as representing mere arbitrary narrowness by others, rather than social retaliation for very real costs created by those who are being stigmatized and deterrence to others who might create more such costs in the absence of stigmas."

Simply a must read and would be great for a late high school student.

"The views of political commentators or writers on social issues often range across a wide spectrum, but their positions on these issues are seldom random. If they are liberal, conservative, or radical on foreign policy, they are likely to be the same on crime, abortion, or education. There is usually a coherence to their beliefs, based on a particular set of underlying assumptions about the world—a certain vision of reality."

The Vision of the Anointed was another great book from Thomas Sowell. He drops the above quote in the book's intro, setting the pace for the writing to follow.

Author Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Sowell has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell University and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked at think tanks such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he served as the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy. Sowell writes from a libertarian–conservative perspective. Sowell has written more than thirty books, and his work has been widely anthologized. He is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics and political science.

n  Thomas Sowell:n
n  n


The Vision of the Anointed is my 6th book from Sowell. Sowell's writing here was exceptional, as usual. His analysis is super-nuanced and insightful, in line with other titles of his that I've read.

n  "The Vision of the Anointed"n The title could be somewhat ambiguous... What does it mean?? Well, expanding on his quote above; people are born into a society and culture where often one dominant set of axiomatic assumptions about the way the world operates are bestowed upon them. Rarely are these fundamental tenets examined closely using empirical evidence. Rather they are assumed to be true by means of social proof.

Sowell takes a shot at the current ideological orthodoxy and the people who propagate these ideas. He calls these the "visions of the anointed." The French have a term for these people - "bien pensants". These are people who largely see the world as they'd like it to be, and not how it is. As the term implies, there is also a strong religious element to this line of thinking. There is original sin, heretics, protected groups, mascots, and protected symbols.
This viewpoint is contrasted with those who hold the "tragic vision" of reality; which is to accept the flawed nature of man, and find realistic solutions to social policy based on data, empiricism, and taking human nature into account.

He launches an opening salvo with this quote:

n  "The prevailing vision of our era is long overdue for a critical reexamination—or, for many, a first examination. This vision so permeates the media and academia, and has made such major inroads into the religious community, that many grow to adulthood unaware that there is any other way of looking at things, or that evidence might be relevant to checking out the sweeping assumptions of so-called “thinking people.” Many of these “thinking people” could more accurately be characterized as articulate people, as people whose verbal nimbleness can elude both evidence and logic. This can be a fatal talent, when it supplies the crucial insulation from reality behind many historic catastrophes..."n

The scope of the book is broad in nature; Sowell covers much of the modern thought orthodoxy here. In this quote, he speaks to the failure of the welfare program to lift people out of poverty:

n  "Despite initial claims that various government services would lead to reduced federal outlays on welfare programs as more people became self sufficient, the very opposite happened. The number of people receiving public assistance more than doubled from 1960 to 1977.23 The dollar value of public housing rose nearly five-fold in a decade and the amount spent on food stamps rose more than ten-fold. All government-provided in-kind benefits increased about eight-fold from 1965 to 1969 and more than twenty-fold by 1974.24 Federal spending on such social welfare programs not only rose in dollar terms and in real terms, but also a percentage of the nation’s gross national product, going from 8 percent of GNP in 1960 to 16 percent by 1974.25"n

The writing here is very thoughtful and reasoned; typical of Sowell. He is a brilliant mind, for sure. Some more of what he covers here includes:
• The failures of sex education to lower STDS, teen pregnancies, as well as teen sex
• Criminal Justice
• The false assertion of mortgage "redlining"
• The long roots of this thinking; the French Revolution
• Trade-offs versus “Solutions”
• Crusades of the anointed
• The vocabulary of the anointed
• Personal Responsibility (REEEE)
• Judicial visions in court cases
• The world of the anointed

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I haven't read a book by Thomas Sowell I didn't like, and this one was no exception. However, I will note that I felt the last ~third of it; where he takes a deep dive into Supreme Court Justices - went on for longer than it was worth. A minor gripe; the book was still excellent.
4.5 stars