THOMAS SOWELL
Economist and author Thomas Sowell, whose column frequently appears in HUMAN EVENTS, likes to consider more profound questions when discussing the superficial issues of our day. Conflicts between right and left reflect differing "underlying assumptions about human beings," he said in a recent interview, not just disputes over funding levels or the constitutionality of abortion restrictions.
Like many prominent conservatives today, Sowell is a former leftist. "I was a Marxist," he said. "A lot of conservatives are ex-leftists. They see that what the left wants doesn't accomplish their goals."
What does the left want? Sowell divides leftists into two camps. "There is the infantile or na??¯ve left who just want people who are disadvantaged somewhere to have a better life," he said. "They are always worrying about injustices somewhere." Many of these people are part of the "transient left," he said. "They move away when they see it is not working."
Then there is the other kind of leftist. "They have a vision, and facts that get in the way of that vision, it's just too bad," said Sowell. "Gun control is a good example. It's completely discredited-it doesn't work-but they won't abandon it. . . . I think a great deal of it is about their image of themselves. That explains the bitterness of their attacks. They believe that those who disagree with them must be awful people. . . . The leftist most likely to cease to be a leftist is the one who's in it for other people. I don't think the leaders of the environmental movement care if the globe is warming, cooling, or staying the same."
Asked to define the final, liberated end state of society that leftists are pushing us toward, the one in which leftists would finally stop complaining, Sowell replied that he didn't think there was one. "There must be a never-ending set of grievances," he said. "The notion that you can buy off these people piecemeal is false."
Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow in Public Policy at the Hoover Institution. Says his official biography: "He writes on economics, history, social policy, ethnicity, and the history of ideas. . . . On social policy he has written Knowledge and Decisions (1980), Preferential Policies (1989), Inside American Education (1993) and The Vision of the Anointed (1995)." Years before the 1964 civil rights act, Sowell, a black American, received his bachelor's degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958 and his master's degree in economics from Columbia University in 1959. In 1968 he received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
Sowell ascribes none of the success of his family and himself to the contemporary civil rights movement. "There was nothing that I have done that wasn't done by other blacks before me," he said. "All this stuff was done long before these saviors appeared on the scene."
Sowell is soon to publish a book on affirmative action policies around the world, which-separate from the issue of their racism-do not accomplish their goals, he said. For example, here in the United States, "the poverty rate for blacks was cut in half before affirmative action came in, and it's barely changed since," he said. "Affirmative action is great if you're a minority millionaire."
He said that his examination of the minimum wage, which hurts poor job-seekers, first caused him to question leftism. "At the University of Chicago, we were taught that if there are two different theories, at some point there will be an empirical difference that can distinguish between the two theories," he said. He found that the data disproved the benefits of the minimum wage-and that his fellow academics didn't care, he said.
Sowell's personal website features some of his favorite quotes. Paul Johnson: "The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." Edmund Burke: "There is no safety for honest men but by believing all possible evil of evil men."
Sowell said that conservative politicians who compromise with or cozy up to leftists never have anything to show for it. "If you're looking at professional politicians, especially Republicans, they don't have a clue," he said. "Some are now meeting with Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, or both."
Corporate businessmen, too, are clueless. Sowell said that their alliance with environmentalists requires an updating of a Leninist maxim. "The new modern capitalist will donate the rope free of charge," he said.
Dr. Sowell receives mail at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif. 94305-6010.
