In the film, Larry Elder describes Sowell as the “greatest contemporary living philosopher and notes that he causes people to “rethink their assumptions.” Rethinking and questioning our assumptions has long been en vogue in the academy, and if you really listen to what he has to say, few scholars will make you rethink your assumptions like Sowell will. Knowledge and Decisions, for Sowell, was a book-length meditation on Friedrich Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” and throughout his work Sowell has worked to isolate and understand the institutions and social processes that make it possible for us to use others’ knowledge effectively.
Chesteron’s metaphor of the fence: if you come across a fence that doesn’t look like it’s serving any purpose, make every effort to find out what it is doing there and what problem it solves before tearing it down. Sowell opposes Affirmative Action programs because they are, as he argues, beset by “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”įourth, Riley points to Sowell’s respect for “social processes and existing institutions.” There is wisdom, Sowell argues, in tradition: for better or for worse, we have the institutions we have because, at some point in the past, they solved an important problem. Dunbar students outperformed their white counterparts even under official discrimination and in the face of far more overt racism than people encounter today. In a variety of places, he explains how all-black Dunbar High School in Washington, DC was a temple of intellectual excellence that produced a host of graduates who became the “first black person to” achieve this or that extraordinary thing. Third, Sowell emphasizes human capital and argues that it-not the kinds of things one might hope for after listening to John Lennon sing Imagine -is what explains success and failure in the world.
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