Thomas Sowell: Facts Against Rhetoric, Capitalism, Culture and Yes, the Tariffs (Transcript)

Why did you go to the trouble of pulling these materials together? Wouldn’t students come across this material in ordinary college courses, in any event?

THOMAS SOWELL: No. I thought of it as enabling students to get an education despite being in college.

What Sounds Good vs. What Works

PETER ROBINSON: All right, questions. All my questions today are drawn from the website or use the website as a point of departure. Economic issues. Under the heading on the website of economic Issues, you provide a link to your classic work, Basic Economics. A brief passage from that book I’m quoting. Basic Economics. “Empirical questions are questions that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well being of others. Perhaps the most important distinction is between what sounds good and what works.” On the one hand, what sounds good. On the other, what works. Why is that distinction so important?

THOMAS SOWELL: I guess it was because rhetoric and visions play such a large part in higher education that the question of whether some vision is correct, what they believe is correct. I saw just recently a replay of something by AOC, the congresswoman from New York. And as I listened to her, I just was amazed that there seemed to be no factual issue. As far as she’s concerned, she just pronounces things to be so, and that’s the end of it.

And unfortunately, I think many, too many, certainly college students and students in high school for that matter, are introduced to a certain vision of the world where, for example, the capitalists are exploiting the workers and so on, and they just memorize that, and they talk about it as if it’s a known fact. And there’s no developing in those students the ability to look at two different views and try to figure out which of them is correct.

To me, back when I was teaching, if I taught a course that had a lot of controversial stuff in it, I would spend a great deal of time putting together a reading list where I would find the strongest argument on one side of a particular argument and then the opposing view, the best example I could find of that. And I would then present that to the students. And when I tested them, I didn’t test them on which side you believed. I tested them on whether they understood the arguments on both sides. I suspect from what I see and hear that that is something that’s rarely done today in education at the college or high school level.

PETER ROBINSON: I see. So the old fashioned principle of teaching, which is that before you make up your mind where you stand, you make sure you understand where the other person stands first. Yes. All right, Tom, again, on your website, factsagainstrhetoric.org you provide a reading list, but you also provide links to a number of videos and podcasts. Here’s one. This is a link to your old professor at the University of Chicago and then for many years, your colleague here at the Hoover Institution, Milton Friedman. In this video to which you link on your website, Milton is addressing the question, is capitalism humane? Take a look at this, if you would, with me, Tom.

“It’s true that if you had a concentrated power in the hands of an angel, he might be able to do a lot of good as he viewed it. For one man’s good is another man’s bad. And the great virtue of a market capitalist society is that by preventing a concentration of power, it prevents people from doing the kind of harm which really concentrated power can do. So that I conclude that capitalism per se is not humane or inhumane. Socialism per se is not humane or anything. But capitalism tends to give free reign, much freer reign, to the more humane values of human beings. It tends to develop a climate which is more favorable to the development, on the one hand, of a higher moral atmosphere of responsibility and on the other, to greater achievements in every realm of human understanding.”

Capitalism and Morality

PETER ROBINSON: Thank you. All right, That’s Milton. Now, it’s one matter to argue that capitalism represents the least bad system, but it’s another to argue, as Milton did just then, that capitalism produces, quote, “a higher moral atmosphere,” close quote and again quote “greater achievements in every realm,” close quote. Tom, wasn’t your old professor and your Hoover colleague Milton Friedman getting a little carried away there?

THOMAS SOWELL: I don’t think so, but if he was, it was the way to… The way to answer would be to put forth opposite evidence to what he’s saying. And that’s what doesn’t happen. That is a lot of what is called education is really indoctrination. And so it’s not a question of whether I happen to agree with Milton Friedman or anyone else who’s watching. It’s a question of do the people who would disagree with him have any facts or any reasoning, any logic that would be relevant to what he’s saying? Too often it’s not true. They don’t.

PETER ROBINSON: Could I ask you, there’s a… The website again is factsagainstrhetoric.org and you’ve already told us that the reason you pulled that together was to produce evidence, to be empirical, to teach students to be empirical, to look at the facts. On the other hand, from this passage I just quoted from Basic Economics, your book, “Empirical questions are questions that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well being of others.” And then Milton just said in that clip that capitalism produces a higher moral atmosphere. I just want to tease this out that as best I can tell you, your insistence on empiricism, on looking at the facts is because you have a sort of moral groundwork on which you insist there’s a pre-existing sense of morality, of right and wrong and of our duties to each other. Is that correct?

The Moral Foundation of Civilization

THOMAS SOWELL: Absolutely. Without that, civilization would just not be possible. I mean, every one of us is vulnerable to all sorts of things. If we couldn’t rely on someone, well, take it from birth. I mean we come into the world knowing nothing. We don’t even know that we need food, much less how to get any. And so you must have a structure out there.

It’s also true that even as we move toward adulthood and into adulthood and old age, there are times when other people, lots of them, are essential to our own well being. I think of all this talk about equality. In a sense equality is enormously important and in another sense it’s enormously irrelevant. It’s important that we have equality before the law. It’s important that we regard each other with a certain kind of equality. But to talk in terms of equality of capabilities is madness.

I mean, if you’re the world’s leading authority on some particular subject, that doesn’t mean that you have even minimal competence in a hundred other things. And it’s one of the most dangerous things in the academic world and among intellectuals in general, is they often seem to assume that they know better than other people about all sorts of things, including things that these other people know from their own personal experience. And that’s what makes intellectuals so dangerous.

Civil Rights and Cultural Change

PETER ROBINSON: All right, back to your website, Tom. Under the heading biographies, you provide a link to a personal odyssey, which is your own autobiography or memoir. Here you are in a personal odyssey, describing your response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. I’m quoting you. “The idea seemed to be that white people’s sins were all that stood between us and economic and social parity through American society. The enormous amount of internal change needed within the black community, in education, skills and attitudes, seemed wholly unnoticed. Civil rights were important in and of themselves as a matter of justice. But to expect civil rights to solve our economic and social problems was barking up the wrong tree.” Close quote. Tom. This notion that civil rights, as important as they are in and of themselves, is a matter of justice, but that the black community needed, and I’m quoting you again, “internal change.” Could you explain that?

THOMAS SOWELL: Well, in one sense, that’s… Well, first of all, I would repeat that all groups have their own cultures. And in many groups, including blacks, there are internal differences in cultures within the same race or ethnicity. And so one of the great handicaps historically that the black community has had is that during the era of slavery, blacks were concentrated 90% or more in the South. And the south, in turn, had its own culture, which was different from people who came from other parts of Britain.

I’ve gone into this at length in a book called “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.” And the people who came from the south, they had this culture when they were back in Britain, where they were called crackers and rednecks and things like that. And it’s easy to understand if you understand the history of their life in Britain, but once they transferred to the United States, that same culture was a huge handicap. And that’s the culture that blacks grew up in.

And so, again, with blacks, as with the whites, more and more generations of blacks began to put aside that culture to operate in ways that would be more productive for them in the new society. And now this counterproductive culture persists in many low income ghettos. And unfortunately there are intellectuals and others who celebrate this culture and try to keep it going when in fact it’s a great handicap.

The Lost Century of Black Achievement

PETER ROBINSON: So, Tom, one of the themes that runs throughout your work and again it pops up again and again on your website is this what you refer to as this lost century of black achievement. From the end of the Civil War to the enactment of the Great Society programs a century later, black Americans made remarkable progress. I’m going to quote now from Discrimination and Disparities, one of your books to which you link on your website, quote, “the plain fact is that the black poverty rate declined from 87% in 1940 to 47% 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, 2/3 of all black children were living with both parents.” Close quote.

So this African Americans come out of slavery with no education, no what the economists call human capital. I’m putting this out to make sure that… I’m putting this out to you to make sure I understand it correctly. Furthermore, they’re handicapped by the ambience, culture, white culture of the south, which places relative to culture in the north, particularly say New England, it places little emphasis on education, for example. And by 1940, blacks had not only begun to better themselves economically, they’d begun to achieve education, they had begun to move into certain trades. You remark elsewhere that African Americans are making progress in particular in construction, for example. They have by and large intact families. And all of this century of progress, which predates the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, almost receives almost no notice in the academic literature. It’s as if you take a century of astonishing, really quite moving a whole people making progress and push it down the memory hole. Is that correct?

The Impact of Statistical Analysis on Policy Evaluation

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes. And this is part of a larger pattern in looking at statistics over time. It applies, for example, many people credit Ralph Nader with having made the country and the government conscious of various dangers so that they can have laws and agencies to control those dangers. And they’ll point out that Ralph Nader’s book Unsafe at Any Speed put him on the map when he argued that American cars were being made without regard to safety and that the corporations put more emphasis on styling and that was costing people’s lives and so on. And then after that, these government agencies came in and then as you follow the data, the death rate in automobiles went down. And many people think that’s a convincing argument.

But if you’re looking at statistics over time, everything depends upon the date that you arbitrarily choose as the beginning. And so if you were to go back 30 years before Ralph Nader, you would find that automobile fatality rates were going down and were going down at a far higher rate than it did after Ralph Nader. But it’s only when you understand the importance of picking the right dates.

In the case of blacks, I would pick the period from, say, 1940 to 1960. In 1940, 82% of black children were raised with two parents. After the 60s, and all the social things that happened, that fell to 17%. And so you destroyed one of the key institutions of any society, the family and its influence, and that’s the consequence.

Similarly, with things like violence, the homicide rate among black males fell during the 1940s by 18%. It fell again by 22% between 40 and 50. Now, in the 1960s, which is when all progress is assumed to have begun, the Supreme Court began creating new constitutional rights for prisoners and criminals. And almost immediately beginning in the 1960s, the homicide rate doubled and it doubled after three consecutive decades of falling homicide rates for the whole country. Now, you know, some things can be coincidences, but I don’t think that qualifies as a coincidence. But so much of what is said, you can go through things about the women’s rise and so forth, where you find the very same pattern.

PETER ROBINSON: So, Tom, again, let me quote, if I may, from Discrimination and Disparities. This is you writing in that book: “There was a far more modest decline in the poverty rate among blacks after the Johnson administration’s massive war on poverty programs began. And by 1995, only a third of black children were living with both parents. Among black families in poverty, 85% of the children had no father present.” Close quote.

All right, this brings us to a very important question, which is, did the Great Society, did these government programs, civil rights—we have—you’ve already said those were essential, simply as a matter of justice. At roughly the same time, we get welfare programs, a massive increase in government spending, the so-called war on poverty. And we also get cultural upheaval, shifting or erosion of certain cultural norms. And your argument is civil rights is the civil rights legislation. Equality before the law was just and necessary and overdue. We’re happy that that happened. It needed to happen. But your argument is also that federal money, that the rise of the welfare state and the erosion of cultural norms took progress among black Americans, stopped it and reversed it. In other words, that they actually did harm or that they were merely irrelevant.

The Harmful Effects of Government Intervention

THOMAS SOWELL: They did harm. They did harm. Across society, not just among racial minorities. You have people who’ve had meaning taken out of their lives. People, for example, I see in California, especially people who have young people with cars will go into some street area and then do all kinds of crazy driving with a car in order to attract the crowd. And that’s what they get.

But people who have meaning in their lives from what they’re doing, if you have a family to support, having a child to raise, things like that, that puts meaning in their lives. But when all of that is taken out of their lives by the government, and especially when the government is paying people when they have no husband present, and not paying if there is a husband present, you’re subsidizing a social change that is doing far more harm than whatever incidental good you’re doing just by handing out some money.

Charter Schools and Education Reform

PETER ROBINSON: All right, Tom, education. We spoke a moment ago about the internal change that was needed in the black community. One of the central elements in that argument is education. And your website, again, factsagainstrhetoric.org. Your website links to your 2020 book, this just amazes me, which you published on your 90th birthday. You know, one of these days you really ought to pull yourself together and accomplish something, Tom. This is your 2020 book published on your 90th birthday, Charter Schools and Their Enemies.

I’m quoting: “New York City has a substantial sample ethnically and socioeconomically comparable students whose educational outcomes can be compared.” Close quote. You identified five different charter school systems, each of which taught portions of its classes in ordinary public schools. In other words, the charter school—it was a wonderful social test, so to speak, or experiment, because they drew from the same socio-economic group and indeed conducted their instruction in the same buildings with public school students. And you produce two main findings in your book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies.

Here’s the first. You found that charter school students, especially black and Hispanic students, outperformed the public school students. And the second measure—

THOMAS SOWELL: In the same building.

PETER ROBINSON: In the same building. In the same building. You’ve got in one example, only 7% of the kids in one public school passed a math proficiency exam. Among the charter school kids on the other side of the wall being taught in the same building, the figure was 100%. So let’s pause with that finding. How can that be?

THOMAS SOWELL: Well, it certainly suggests that we ought to spend a lot more time comparing these cases where the students are in comparable places. In other words, they’re not only in the same building, they’re serving the same neighborhood and all. And most of them in both cases have low income from low-income families. And they didn’t put the smarter kids in one system. The charter schools admit deliberately by lottery. So there’s no question that they’re picking the smartest kids to start with. They’re taking whoever wins the lottery.

And in this case, the school you mentioned, by the way, is a school that I went to when I was a teenager in junior high school in Manhattan, 129th street and Amsterdam Avenue. And someone ought to be—one of my great frustrations is that despite whatever praise the book got, it really changed nothing.

And I think it should be a high priority in letting low income, black, Hispanic and other families know what difference the charter schools can make. Not all of them are good, but ironically, even the disappointing charter schools almost invariably still do better than the traditional public school housed in the same building with it.

PETER ROBINSON: So this brings us to your second major finding in that book, Tom. The teachers unions opposed the charter schools. So you go through the history of this battle in New York. I’m quoting you again: “In New York City,” this is as of 2020, “In New York City, there are more than 50,000 children on waiting lists to get into charter schools. Yet New York has ended the expansion of charter schools and threatened restrictions on those already functioning. And even national black organizations opposed charter schools. In 2016, the NAACP called for a moratorium on new charter schools.” What is going on there?

THOMAS SOWELL: What is going on is that the charter school collect billions of dollars in union dues and they spend millions of dollars financing campaigns of politicians who will do whatever the charter schools want.

PETER ROBINSON: Whatever the unions want.

THOMAS SOWELL: I’m sorry, yes, yes, whatever the unions want. It’s painful that even people who started out wanting to give parents the choice of where to go to school when they learn about the political realities, they realize they’re not going to get the teachers unions money if they don’t try to stop the charter schools and the kinds of things that are done to stop them.

For example, in various cities around the country where there’s been population loss over the years, there are plenty of vacant schoolhouses because they’re not needed in those places. Not only the whole educational establishment does everything they can to prevent those vacant buildings being used by charter schools. Because New York is not the only one that has large numbers of students waiting on waiting lists to get into charter schools.

In some places they have absolutely—they have simply demolished these schools that have been vacant for years to make sure that the charter schools can’t use them. And that’s happened in Chicago, in various cities across the country. Again, if there was some way of letting the people in these low income neighborhoods understand that this is what’s going on, I think we would have a very—we’d have a chance of giving a lot of kids a better education.

Recent Progress in School Choice

PETER ROBINSON: Tom, since you published Charter Schools and Their Enemies in 2020, a few developments. I’d like to believe that at least some of this is a result of that book. Charter school enrollment nationwide has expanded up from 12%, or almost 400,000 students since 2020, since the year before you published your book. Now, 400,000 students in charter schools is a relatively small number by comparison with the number of students across the country, but it’s up 12%.

Many of the biggest gains have come in the most rapidly growing states over the last five years, up 26% in Texas, 21% in Florida. Even in New York, even in your old home state, charter school enrollment is up 15%. And school choice legislation has spread across the country. It’s state by state. In the last three years, the number of states with universal school choice legislation has risen from zero to a dozen. That’s since you wrote your book. In 2023 alone, 20 states expanded their school choice programs. And this very year, Texas is preparing to enact dramatic school choice reforms. Tom, have I encouraged you?

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes, but there’s another side as well. The teachers unions are well aware of all this, and they have put in all kinds of roadblocks to make it more difficult for kids to be sent to charter schools. For example, in California, the California law has said that charter schools are not allowed to expel students who disrupt the schools. Now, can you imagine any educational benefit that anyone could imagine will come from that?

What is happening is one of the reasons that charter schools are good is they insist on maintaining law and order in the schools. And so when you do all kinds of things, including beating up teachers, the kid doesn’t get expelled. The charter schools were put in there as an experiment so that as they had more freedom to choose what to do. And if some of those things worked out, then presumably some of those practices could be transferred to the traditional public school.

What is actually happening is that when there’s this gap between the two kinds of schools, you have laws and restrictions where you transfer the things that are failing in the public schools and force them on the charter schools. So instead of bringing the traditional schools up to the charter schools levels, politicians are bringing the charter schools down to the levels of the traditional schools.

Affirmative Action’s Personal Impact

PETER ROBINSON: All right, I tried to encourage you. I tried. Tom. Affirmative action. This is another of the headings in the website. Again, it’s factsagainstrhetoric.org from your memoir, A Personal Odyssey. I’m quoting you: “One of the ironies that I experienced in my own career was that I received more automatic respect when I first began teaching in 1962 as an inexperienced young man with no PhD and few publications than I did later in the 1970s after accumulating a more substantial record. What happened in between was affirmative action, hiring of minority faculty.” Close quote. Explain that affirmative action impinged on your own life, your own reputation.

Race and Perception in Different Contexts

THOMAS SOWELL: Well, you know, I could give an example of something that puzzled me for a long time. When I was in the Marine Corps, I was trained as a photographer, and I worked in a photo lab. In barracks, there are a whole bunch of photographers. I was the only black photographer. And this is down in the south in the 1950s. And I noticed that when some of the other Marines in the barracks, the white Marines from the south, when they took a picture that went wrong and so forth, they’d come over there and they would come to me rather than to the white photographers. And that baffled me completely for about 20 years.

And what happened at UCLA when I was teaching. I was teaching a course, and students said that they liked the course and all. One young man came to me one day with a textbook, and there was a passage in it which he couldn’t understand. And he asked me to explain it to him, and I explained it to him. And he said to me, “Are you sure?” And I said, “Yes, I’m sure. I wrote the textbook.”

But you see, people use race as a way of getting at other things. These white Marines in that barracks down south in the 50s had no way of knowing who knew more about photography and whatnot. But they knew that if the Marine Corps had trained some black man to be a photographer, he was probably… he knew his stuff. And conversely, after affirmative action, you see, now, when I have far more experience and so forth, the students are questioning whether I know what I’m doing.

PETER ROBINSON: Got it. I see. One of the articles. Back to the website. One of the articles to which you provide a link on the website is your 2012 review of a book called “Mismatch.” And the argument in that view is that affirmative action often places minority students in schools in which they would have trouble keeping up, even though they could have done well in other schools. I’m going to quote to you from your review of that 2012 book: “The authors of Mismatch have performed a major service for those of us, for those who think that black students on campus should be there to advance their own education and lives, not to serve in a role much like that of movie extras whose presence enhances the scene for others.” So affirmative action, you suggest in that review, is less to help black students, other minority students. It’s less to help minority students make progress than to permit white liberals to feel good about themselves. Fair, yes.

The Real Cost of Affirmative Action

THOMAS SOWELL: And not incidentally, ensure they can continue to get hundreds of millions of dollars each at universities like Columbia, which they couldn’t get if they didn’t have a certain percentage of minority students among their classes. And here again, there’s an irony that these are places which have pushed affirmative action. And now they realize that if they don’t have minority representation similar to that in the population, they can be accused of discrimination, and that can cost them money. And so these black students who are put in institutions where they’re likely to fail, even though there are hundreds of other institutions where they would have succeeded, they’re there more or less as human shields.

PETER ROBINSON: Tom, tell that story. You mention it again in your book “Personal Odyssey.” But when you were at Cornell and you discovered that there were some black students at Cornell who struck you as extremely intelligent and capable, but they were struggling all the same. They were unhappy and even angry all the same. And you investigated, do you remember that?

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes. After Cornell suddenly started admitting black students with qualifications not as high as the students already there, I discovered that half the black students were on academic probation. And so I went over to the administration buildings and looked up the test scores. Now, at that time, the average black student at Cornell scored at the 75th percentile on the SAT score, meaning that…

PETER ROBINSON: They were really smart kids.

THOMAS SOWELL: They did better than three quarters of the other students who took that test. But at Cornell Liberal Arts College, which is where I taught, the average student there was at the 99th percentile. And so the professors teach to the kinds of students they have, and therefore, they’ll proceed at a faster pace. They’ll proceed with fewer explanations, because the students already know so much themselves. And so someone who is perfectly capable of handling the work if it’s taught in a way that’s geared to students at the 75th percentile, cannot keep up.

It was even more extreme at MIT. The average black student in one of the studies done some time back at MIT was at the 90th percentile in mathematics, which meant, you know, they scored higher than 90% of students who took the test. But they were… So that made them in the top 10%. But at MIT they were in the bottom 10%. Because at MIT there’s no question that the vast majority of students are in the 1%. So it’s a question only of where you are in the top 1%. Of course, virtually everybody else is. And so they proceed, obviously at a pace and a complexity with those kinds of students which most American students, black or white, wouldn’t be able to keep up with.

Justice Scalia’s Critique of Affirmative Action

PETER ROBINSON: Tom, here’s another item to which you link on your website. This is a critique of affirmative action by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. It’s a longish quotation, but it’s on your website and I’d like to read it to you. Quote, this is the late Justice Scalia: “I am entirely in favor of according the poor inner city child who happens to be black advantages and preferences not given to my own children because my children don’t need them. But I am not willing to prefer that the son of a prosperous and well educated black doctor or lawyer solely because of his race should be given preferences over the son of a manual laborer. The affirmative action system now in place will produce the latter result because it is based on concepts of racial indebtedness rather than individual worth and need. That is to say, because it is racist.” Close quote. Now, it is one matter to say that affirmative action does a lot of harm, and you’ve just described instances in which it has done harm, taking very talented black kids and placing them in a situation in which they’re going to feel inadequate for four years when they could have felt at the top of the charts in other institutions. But it’s another matter to say that affirmative action as we’ve experienced it across this 25 years or so, is racist. Are you willing to go that far?

THOMAS SOWELL: Oh, adjectives are not always the main thing. I’m ready to deal with the factual evidence that minority students do better when they are put in institutions where the other students have qualifications similar to theirs.

And the University of California system is a classic example. Towards the end of the 20th century, great numbers of black and Hispanic students were being brought into the system. And many of them were being sent to Berkeley or UCLA, the two top campuses in that large system, and they were doing very badly. And as they admitted more and more black students, the number who were graduating declined. Absolutely. And so that was clearly not working.

The voters voted to end affirmative action admissions. It was predicted that there would be no more black students. It turns out that over the next few years there were a thousand more black students who graduated from that system. Now that they were not being sent to UCLA and Berkeley, but to the other campuses where the other students had qualifications very similar to their own.

Not only that, black students who are put into these places where they simply can’t… it’s a struggle just to keep from being flunked out. They switched from difficult subjects to tough subjects like… From difficult subjects like math, science, engineering into things like sociology, education and so on. So what happened is that you had virtually no change in the total number of black students in the UC system after affirmative action admissions were outlawed. But you had a great increase in the number of black students who graduated. And really the point of going to college is not to be on campus, but to graduate so you can go out into the world and do something.

Recent Supreme Court Decisions on Affirmative Action

PETER ROBINSON: Tom, I’m going to try to encourage you again. In the 2023 case of Students for Fair Admissions versus the President and Fellows of Harvard College, your old alma mater. I know you get all misty eyed when I mention Harvard. The 2023 case of Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. The Supreme Court found that Harvard had discriminated against Asian students in admissions. That’s the fact set. And the court ruled that universities could no longer consider race in their admissions policies. Looked at one way, looked at, strictly speaking, that’s the end of race based, strictly race based affirmative action. Exactly the kind of affirmative action that Antonin Scalia found offensive. Have I encouraged you?

THOMAS SOWELL: Unfortunately, that decision included something in there by the Chief Justice about how you could somehow read stuff that told you what the student’s race was and consider that. I don’t know whether this, how this decision that they made is going to work out in practice. I see the same game was played with the Bakke decision years ago. And what it amounted to in that case was that you can’t have racial quotas if you call them quotas, but you can have them if you call them something else. Now, I don’t know whether this latest caveat, how that’s going to work out in practice, but I found it very painful that a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would suggest some way in which you can evade the decision that’s being made, because that’s the way I read it.

Trump’s Tariffs and Economic History

PETER ROBINSON: All right, Tom, a few last questions. We’ve been talking about your website factsagainstrhetoric.org. I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about contemporary events. Let’s start with Donald Trump and tariffs. Let me begin by quoting again from your book “Basic Economics.” Quote: “The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, the highest tariffs in well over a century, were designed to reduce imports so that more American made products would be sold, thereby providing more employment for American workers. It was a plausible belief as so many things done by politicians seem plausible. But within five months the unemployment rate rose to double digits and it never fell below that level for any month during the entire remainder of that decade, the decade of the 1930s.” That’s Tom Sowell in “Basic Economics.”

Today, President Trump has imposed a number of new tariffs, including an average of 39% on goods from China, 25% on goods from Canada and 25% on goods from Mexico. And the President has announced a further 25% tariff on all imported cars and car parts, effective April 3rd. As we record this, that April 3rd new tariff, 25% tariffs on cars, will kick in the day after tomorrow. What do you make of the present President of the United States and his tariffs?

THOMAS SOWELL: It’s painful to see what a ruinous decision from back in the 1920s being repeated now insofar as he’s using these tariffs to get very strategic things settled and that he is satisfied with that. But if you set off a worldwide trade war that has a devastating history, everybody loses because everybody follows suit. And all that happens is that you get a great reduction in international trade.

It’s disturbing in another sense. Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president in the 1930s, said that you have to try things and if they don’t work, then you admit it, you abandon that, you go on to something else and you try that until you come across something that does work. Now that’s not a bad approach if you are operating within a known system of rules. But if you are the one who’s making the rules, then all the other people have no idea who what you’re going to do next. And that is a formula for having people hang on to their money until they figure out what you’re going to do. And when a lot of people hang on to their money, you can get results such as you got during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

So if this is just a set of short run ploys for various limited objectives, limited in time, fine, maybe. But if this is going to be the policy for four long years, that you’re going to try this, you’re going to try that, you’re going to try something else. A lot of people are going to wait, I think what happened in the stock market recently when things came down substantially for quite a while and I note that various people are holding on to their money before they do anything because they don’t know where this is going to lead.

Race and Politics in America

PETER ROBINSON: Right back to a question of race. Our friend Jason Riley published a column in the Wall Street Journal headlined, “Trump might have won the first post-racial election,” and I’m quoting Jason Riley: “According to NBC News, since 2012, there has been a 15-point shift toward Republicans among Black voters, a 32-point shift among Asians and a 38-point shift among Latinos.” Once again, I’m going to make an effort to cheer you up, Tom.

So on my reading, one of the central questions, maybe the central question of American politics for the last 30 or even 40 years has been whether identity politics would become the dominant mode of all of our politics and people would vote according to their race. And to use George Will’s phrase, we would not be conducting elections. Elections would simply represent censuses. All the white people vote one way, all the Black people vote another way, and so forth.

And Donald Trump, if I may say so, Donald Trump, of all people, is the one who has demonstrated that we can move beyond identity politics, that African American males move toward the Republican side. Now, you can like the Republicans or you can dislike the Republicans, but the argument would be people are making up their minds for themselves as individuals, not simply voting on the basis of their race, likewise Hispanics, likewise, and so forth. Does that make sense to you?

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes, and it’s one of the most encouraging developments and one I was surprised to see come finally. One of the reasons, for example, why it’s so hard to get a decent education for Black kids, low-income Black kids, is that the Black vote goes automatically, has gone automatically to the Democrats by a huge, huge margin for a very long time. And it’s the Democrats who get the money from the teachers unions for which they will then allow the teachers union to do what they want, regardless of whether that is bad news for the Black kids who can’t get a decent education. So I think to that extent it is encouraging.

However, Jason Riley writes for the Wall Street Journal, which is an excellent publication, but unfortunately, low-income people are not likely to be reading the Wall Street Journal. And I don’t know if there are enough people within the Black community leaders who have sufficient interest in making clear what these alternative educational things are like.

I mean, you mentioned earlier, I believe that the civil rights organizations have lined up with the teachers union. And I think, quite frankly, they’re doing it for the same reason that the politicians do it. They get money from them. I can remember decades ago, a Black Democrat that I knew said, “You know, the NAACP has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the labor unions.” He didn’t say that publicly, but he said to me privately.

Something else that needs a lot more attention. Years ago, I did a book called “Affirmative Action around the World,” in which I looked at countries in various parts of the world. Malaysia, Israel, England, wherever. And again and again, I see the same pattern of behavior, wonderful beliefs, and an utter failure to look empirically at what happens when you put the programs into action.

I mentioned the thing about allowing some consideration of race. This whole thing was enacted in other countries years ago in India when the court started saying, no, we can’t really have this kind of blatant favoritism and so forth, but you can take certain things into consideration. Immediately, people began giving interviews on subjective. It would be subjectively evaluated. And of course, for the kids who are scoring low, they give them high ratings on these things that are subjectively evaluated. And the ones who are high, they give them low ratings. And so they’re back to affirmative action in the bad sense. Despite what’s being said, Tom.

America’s Progress and Challenges

PETER ROBINSON: The United States of America. Your life has now spanned more than one third of the entire existence of this country. Now, the country remains far from perfect. On the other hand, you were born into the Jim Crow South. There you are. I know this from reading your book, “A Personal Odyssey.” There you are as a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and then you later returned to Washington as a civil servant. And there were drinking fountains you couldn’t use, and there were restaurants and cafes in Washington where only the whites were permitted to sit down and Black people had to stand at the counter.

That’s gone. You’ve led a remarkable life yourself, in which in all kinds of ways, the central theme of your work has been this country. What’s wrong with the country? The competing visions, the vision of the anointed, the way the intellectuals misbehave, the way we need to understand race and ethnicity in this country in the larger context of race and ethnicity around the world.

So you’re not just a remarkable figure. You’re a distinctly American figure, in my view. And students today are taught in all kinds of ways, and sometimes explicitly, that the United States is permanently flawed. They’re taught to look down on the country. Ta-Nehisi Coates—here’s a quotation: “The American dream cannot exist without racial injustice.” What should students understand about the United States?

THOMAS SOWELL: First of all, they should understand something about the actual history of the United States instead of the propaganda. That’s not likely to happen. This is a problem that extends beyond Blacks and other low-income minorities. This longer than year-long curse of anti-Semitism all over the country, and not just anti-Semitism in words, but actually forcing violence and so forth. And that is something that’s going to be very tough to get rid of. But I think it can be gotten rid of.

And I think this taking away the money from Columbia is a perfect first step. And Columbia is not the only one that’s like this. They’re the ones who got caught red-handed. And I think that we need to stop thinking about these institutions as places that are so wonderful and have great people. Right now the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is expressing outrage that the government dares to expect people at these institutions to live up to the laws. I think it is long overdue for them to live up to the laws.

PETER ROBINSON: Thank you, Tom. Would you close our conversation today? I’d like to—not only do I admire your reading, but I love your voice. And if this academic stuff ever blows over, you’ve got a great future in podcasting. But would you read for us what I take as almost the most important passage in all of “Basic Economics”?

The Importance of Empirical Questions

THOMAS SOWELL: Yes, and it’s the last paragraph in the book:

“However useful economics may be for understanding many issues, it is not as emotionally satisfying as more personal and melodramatic depictions of these issues often found in the media and in politics. Dry empirical questions are seldom as exciting as political causes or ringing moral pronouncements. But the empirical questions are questions about what that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well-being of others rather than in excitement or a sense of moral superiority for ourselves. Perhaps the most important distinction is between what sounds good and what works.“

PETER ROBINSON: Thomas Sowell, author of thousands of newspaper columns and magazine columns, author of dozens of books, and now the author of a website, Facts Against Rhetoric. Factsagainstrhetoric.org. Tom, thank you.

THOMAS SOWELL: Thank you.

PETER ROBINSON: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I’m Peter Robinson.

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