Ethnic America: A History / Markets and Minorities / Pink and Brown People, and Other Controversial Essays
Sowell, Thomas
B O O K R E V I E W S To anyone who has already studied Thomas Sowell's Rave and Economics (1975), these three books should need no further recommendation than that they are all the work of...
...Passion neither is nor ever will be any sort of scarce good...
...Race and Economics began with what has perhaps become again a necessary repudiation...
...For in each case they can be used to show that a consistently and authentically critical approach is an essential requirement of good faith...
...The reason for both these discrepancies is, of course, the same...
...an institution which put up a long record of black "firsts" before, during the 1950s and in the name of equality, integration, social justice, and educational progress, its high quality was--shall we say?--normalized...
...All this is true...
...There were, for instance, nearly half a million "free persons of color" compared with roughly five million black slaves at the start of the Civil War...
...GOD'S FIFTH COLUMN William Gerhardie, edited by Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky / Simon & Schuster/$15.95 Herb Greer T h i s book is one of those posthumous curiosities ~worked and reworked by the author and finally left unfinished...
...In part, certainly, the answer is that h e approaches every question as a thoroughly trained yet altogether unindoctrinated economist, wholly free from all the fashionable prejudices of the professional sociologist or the professional liberal...
...No wonder that their descendants continued to play a disproportionate part in Negro leadership in every sphere right into the present century...
...As published the book is a chaotic, cranky, and generally callow tract which stoops to caricature more often than it achieves portrayal, and gives the unmistakable impression that the author was trying something beyond his intellectual and narrative powers...
...Witness the fact that this "was the only country in which the slave population i'eproduced i t s e l f and grew by natural increase...
...A recent British government-sponsored report showed children from West Indian homes learning much less in school than their Asian contemporaries, notwithstanding that many of the Asian parents speak little or no English...
...From Sowell we learn that "slaves in the United States had a longer life expectancy than peasants in Ireland, ate better, and lived in cabins built of sturdier materials, with more space, ventilation, and privacy than the huts of contemporary Irish p e a s a n t s . " Slaves in the United States also appear to have been treated somewhat less atrociously than slaves in Latin America and the West Indies...
...Leading spokesmen for these and a variety of other points of view put forth their claims in discussing the full political, historical, economic, legal and philosophic complexity of the relationship between democratic government and a capitalist economic system...
...While native blacks had an unemployment rate above the national average, West Indian blacks had an unemployment rate below the national average...
...The third reason why Sowell is so exhilarating to read is, therefore, the luminous and constant sincerity of both his academic and political purpose...
...20036 m . Zip . . . . [ ] How Democratic Is the Constitution...
...As an economist he was quick both to notice certain patterns and changes in the incidence of racial discrimination, and to uncover the reasons for these patterns and these changes...
...Since to a white bigot any black is just a black, these differences in performance between ~ocially different black groups must raise questions about the importance of such bigotry as an explanatory factor...
...Certainly Sowell cites evidence that Southern slaveowners did, for this very good reason, p r e f e r to employ expendable free labor for any really dangerous jobs: " I f the Paddies get knocked overboard, or get t h e i r backs broke, nobody loses anything...
...population rated as Jews, 27 percent of all American Nobel Prizewinners had come from that group...
...Indeed, as Sowell remarks in one of his pieces for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, collected in the third book, not only academic criminology but also " t h e whole criminal justice area needs to be cleansed of the excuse-mongers, faddists, sentimentalists, and assorted zanies and hustlers who infest the system...
...What is it, then, which makes not only Ethnic America but also everything else Sowell writes so exhilarating to read...
...They came speaking every language and representing every nationality, race, and religion...
...These formidable hatchetpersons at once set about calculating when and where it becomes the course of economic rationality to pursue a career of crime...
...When at last the Good Brother loses patience and screams for an explanation, the answer rumbles softly through the synagogue:"You-u-u bug me...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 31 long ago, when unemployment rates were lower for black juveniles than for white...
...our public figureheads...
...This moral sheds a harsh, unpleasing light upon the author of that Hymn of Hate in the Washington Post...
...If, on the other hand, you insist on dismissing or ignoring all evidence that your cherished policy is not in fact delivering the goods" promised, then the inescapable, existential moral is that your actual commitment either never was, or has since ceased to be, to the production of these particular goods...
...Those who so freely and so furiously denounce Thomas Sowell for allegedly betraying blacks, by taking various "rightwing I' and "anti-people" positions, are themselves very long indeed on passion...
...Sowell proceeded to show that there is, and that they can...
...There was a time, and that not so How Capitalistic Is the Constitution...
...It should always have been obvious that such massive differences between the performances of different ethnic groups in America cannot be understood without reference to their different pre-immigration backgrounds...
...The real crux--and this point has the widest s i g n i f i c a n c e - - i s that everyone sincerely committed to any purposb is necessarily by that sincerity committed also to monitoring his success or failure in achieving that purpose...
...Over the years, a massive stream of humanity--45 million people-crossed every ocean and continent to reach the United States...
...Much the same applies in the latter case...
...copies ($14.25 cloth...
...Fatherless black families too there always have been...
...In the academic world itself it is, as Sowell insists, significant that the black breakthrough occurred first "in the money making part of the college--varsity athletics...
...It all began as black flight from the Irish...
...Taking the former first, how can we possibly credit anyone with sincerity of academic purpose except insofar as he is willing to submit his conj e c t u r e s to the most rigorous testing...
...Ethnic America is presented as "A History...
...But, whether or not that is the fact, it appears that the West Indian immigrants in England are doing significantly worse than the Asians...
...Government and other nonprofit organizations are free from, or at any rate freer from, market pressures_9 The costs, therefore, both of refusing to hire more productive and of insisting upon hiring less productive workers do not fall, or do not fall so heavily, upon those who make the hiring decisions...
...Payment must accompany all orders under $15...
...It would be 1900 before the literacy rate of the black population as a whole became as urbanized as the 'free persons of color' were in 1850...
...and hence, that.their different achievements and rates of achievement thereafter are not to be explained by reference solely to differences between the various material and human envi~ ronments in which they then found themselves...
...crime rates, an offender's chances of severe penalization have been correspondingly falling...
...So he feels no need to expiate felt guilt for being a misbegotten WASP, or even to compensate for marginality as t h e descendant of West Indians or "free persons of c o l o r . " As a !00-proof, all-American black he has no call to prove that, if not blacker, he is at least more pro-black than thou...
...If it i s i n d e e d true knowledge he is a f t e r , r a t h e r than congenial conviction, then he cannot but be anxious to detect any seductive subs t i t u t e insinuating h e r s e l f into his arms...
...Yet that did not, of course, stop the committee from putting poor West Indian performance down to stubbornly persistent racism among the almost all white teachers...
...No wonder, too,- that they and their descendants founded and ran the outstanding Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C...
...Thus, for instance, he noticed that "the government as an employer was far more discriminatory than private industry, until this became politically impossible, at which point it made extremely rapid increases in minority employment, leading eventually to a higher proportion of minority employment than in private industry...
...Sowell started in his authentically Herculean labor of cleansing this contemporary Augean Stables in Race andEconomics...
...But Sowell's kind of sincerity is not common, and it ought always to be in strong demand...
...And so on...
...In his foreword to Markets and Minorities, Milton Friedman speaks of Sowell's passion, adding that "the passion is disciplined by reason, by intellectual integrity, and by the careful and intelligent examination of a wide range of evidence...
...There is no racial economics in the sense of a different kind of analysis for black people than for white people, or for Jews and Gentiles, but there is an economics of race in the sense that the basic principles of economics can be applied to deepen our understandings of the social problems that revolve around race...
...demanding only that, regardless of consequences, all legislation should be both conventionally left-wing and intentionally anticapitalist...
...Not only the pace but also the preferred avenues of advancement were different: "Even though the Boston Irish had higher incomes than the Jews in that city in 1909, the Jews were nine times more heavily represented among b u s i n e s s m e n . . . " ; while by 1965, when only three percent of the U.S...
...Next, I suppose we have to mention that Sowell is a mainstream black, who worked himself up out of Harlem the hard way...
...But that was in a period before minimum wage laws, when n e i t h e r the s t a t e nor the uniQns were p r e v e n t i n g the unskilled but ambitious young from pricing themselves into poor jobs, and so acquiring the work experience to become fit for better...
...Thus, simply in passing, Sowell points out that the very different records of different ethnic groups succeeding one another in equally wretched material conditions are enough to discredit the dogma that such conditions straightforwardly produce either crime or continuing backwardness...
...The project was apparently planned as a quasi-Tolstoyan epic, a "biography of the age of 1890-1940," a vast mosaic of scenes from and essays on the worlds of politics, business, and the arts which was meant en toto as the embodiment of a Big Idea: that God is a malicious practical joker whose pranks no one escapes, from the anonymous "suffering unit" to the most exalted of Herb Greer is an American Writer and playwright living in Europe...
...ETHNIC AMERICA: A HISTORY Thomas Sowell / Basic Books / $16.9.5 MARKETS AND MINORITIES Thomas Sowel}/Basic Books / $13.50, $6...
...The Jews, for example, arrived in the United States with even less money than the Irish, initially earned less than their Irish contemporaries, but then overtook and outdistanced the Irish in income, occupation, and education...
...continues in the tradition of its predecessor (How Democratic Is the Constitution...
...Again, the first and most famous of all the black ghettoes was still predominantly white as late as 1910...
...And the whole book constitutes a sustained and overwhelming barrage against what, in another of the newspaper pieces _9 collected in Pink and Brown People, Sowell calls "the great mindless idea of our time . . . that all groups would be equally 'represented' everywhere if it were not for discrimination or other sins of 'society.' " 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982 Instead of these and other so wearily familiar false commonplaces, Sowell deploys case after case where differences in performance in America bear some manifest and intelligible relation to corresponding differences between the pasts of the groups in question, first before and later in America...
...In the following four parts, about Americans from Europe, from Asia, from Africa, and from Latin America, in separate chapters covering all the major groups to arrive largely or entirely since Independence, Sowell never forgets that the members of these various groups were at the moment of disembarkation very different indeed...
...For instance: By far the mos't lethal riot in U.S...
...He flaunts the modish p/'ewar view (still current in some circles) that we and 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1982...
...Jews had been peddlers and moneylenders o r ' t o put it more elegantly--merchants and bankers for centuries before any Jews landed in the Americas...
...But in those days no one saw need for any public response to this voluntary migration, whether by compulsory busing or in other ways: "The first blacks in Harlem were fleeing from the tough Irish neighborhoods in mid-Manhattan, and avoided going north of 145th St., for fear of encountering more Irish there...
...copies ($12.25 cloth) . . . . . . . copies ($5.25 paper) is enclosed...
...Between 1910 and 1930, for example, when Negroes were making at least some occupational advances in the private sector, the federal government was reducing the numbers of its Negro employees, especially at the rather higher levels: "Negro postmasters declined from 153 in 1910 to 78 in 1930...
...One thing which has remained the same is that some groups with a much lower legal status contrive to be materially b e t t e r off than many of their officially recognized superiors...
...T e second collection of essays in AEI's onstitutional series, How Capitalistic Is the Constitution...
...Again, in the worst year, the proportion of Irish would-be immigrants dying during the Atlantic crossing seems to have been over double the average in the slave ships...
...Please bill me...
...In 1865, when the Civil War was over, we read of black men tramping the roads of the Confederacy in search of their wives and children: "After several months, the mass migrations subsided, but the search for lost family members continuedthrough newspaper advertisements that filled the newly established black newspapers into the 1880's...
...In many ways this was a handicapped and--as the silly vogue word has it--underprivileged group...
...AEI American F.aat.rprise Institute 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W...
...B O O K R E V I E W S To anyone who has already studied Thomas Sowell's Rave and Economics (1975), these three books should need no further recommendation than that they are all the work of that same author...
...If you are in business to make a profit, then you will surely take care to keep accounts showing which parts of your operation are and which are not more than recovering their costs...
...There is, after all, no global or even local shortage of passibn...
...As I suggested at the s t a r t , Sowelt moves through the clapped-out plant of the race-relations industry with that same devastating and unblinkered freshness of mind which his fellow economists "brought into the disaster area of the contemporary American criminal justice system...
...If you truly want to vein a game of t e n n i s , then yo u must be concerned to have someone keeping the score...
...Contributors to the volume are: Walter Dean Burnham * Edward S. Greenberg _9 Robert Lekachman _9 Forrest Mcl)onald Stephen Miller _9 Marc F. Plattner Bernard H. Siegan AEI ORDER FORM Name Address . . . . . . City State_ _ Please send me: [ ] How Capitalistic Is the Constitution...
...More exciting perhaps than any comparisons between any of the ethnic groups originating in Europe, because more relevant to issues of present politics, are the corresponding comparisons between various subgroups among the blacks and the Asians...
...Chapter One, "The American Mosaic," opens thus: "The peopling of America is one of the great dramas in all of human history...
...pointing the moral that sensible penal policies have to be directed toward making this alternative relatively less, and others relatively more, attractive to the potential criminal_9 (In fact, through a period of rising U.S...
...Just one generation later those same schools "began hiring black faculty members en masse--and lectured private industry on the need to end discrimination...
...Sowell offers a wealth of often surprising illustration...
...while in the armed forces in the same period the story was even worse...
...Noting that Gerhardie was never satisfied with his text, the editors have cropped about a quarter of the original material, parts which seemed to them " l e s s ready than others...
...For it appears that he is just not interested in, for instance, the actual impact o f minimum-wage legislation upon the unskilled young in general and upon unskilled young blacks in particular...
...In Ethnic America, but not I think in earlier works, Sowell notices that "West Indian immigrants in England are not nearly as successful...
...O0 paper PINK AND BROWN PEOPLE, AND OTHER CONTROVERSIAL ESSAYS Thomas Sowell / Hoover Institution / $8.9~ paper Antony Flew - what dissidents in Britain dare to call the race-relations industry...
...copies ($6.25 paper) [ ] My check for $ (Make checks payable to AEI...
...The immediate relevance of these manifest, indeed tautological, truisms is in their perennially neglected application to both academic inquiry and the assessment of public policy...
...Of course Gerhardie is not joking, and his cast of characters is given little credit for being good...
...By contrast the Celtic Irish had no such traditions of town-living or of business enterprise: "The ancient Celtic culture was"--Sowell makes bold to s a y - " 'hostile to literacy,' and Ireland was the only major Western nation that did not build a single university during the Middle Ages...
...and this notwithstanding that there is some scarcely avoidable overlap, both with that earlier book and with one another...
...But their enormous multiplication in recent years seems to have been a byproduct of misdirected welfare programs: "More than four out of five Negro families in New York in 1905 were headed by the father...
...If you genuinely want to teach, rather than merely continue enjoying the pay and status of a teacher, then you will be bound to make .or to make use of some arrangements, and by p r e f e r e n c e some independently assessed arrangements, for discovering what, if anything, your pupils are in fact learning...
...The crudely common-sensical approach of these economists, assuming that criminals and potential criminals are human beings concerned like the rest 9f us to do the best they can for themselves and their families, is not one which would ever have occurred to the sociologically oversophisticated...
...and you will be ready to adjust your efforts and methods in response to this feedback...
...The consequent r e l i e f i s great, and general...
...Yet it fails to bring out that it is the very sincerity of the passion and of the commitment which demands such disciplines...
...The American Speatator in its November issue reprinted from the Washington Post one prize bout of such ritualistic liberal, journalistic apoplexy...
...In our day it is, or should be, well known that the average black in the money economy in South Africa is, apartheid notwithstanding, materially very much b e t t e r off than his opposite number in nearly if not quite all the black republics to the north...
...Again, at a time when there were only three Negro Ph.D.'s on the faculties of all the non-Negro colleges and universities combined, there were in chemistry alone over 300 employed in private industry...
...Presumably this was because the slavers had a strong interest in keeping their black cargo alive...
...So here we are not harassed by the false commonplaces of popular sociology...
...and for centuries too Jewish children had been raised to respect, even if they were not themselves to pursue, Rabbinical and other kinds of learning...
...Essays are presented by prominent economists, political scientists, aiad historians...
...history, claiming up to ten times as many victims as all the long hot summers of the 1960s put together, was the largely Irish, and murderously antiblack, New York draft riot of 1863...
...If your commitment to a particular policy really is a commitment to a policy for producing such and such particular results, then you are bound to want to know whether they are being secured without incurring unforeseen and unacceptable costs...
...X ~ , J f the present three'books, Ethnic America is by far the most substantiall Sowell is, as every American has every right to be, captivated by the splendid spectacle to be surveyed and described...
...His concept of God reads a little like that in the old Jewish joke about the Good Brother who is reduced to rags and misery while his villainous sibling prospers and grows fat...
...Washington, D.C...
...and suggests that this may be "because of the absence of a large non-West Indian black population to provide them with a constituency...
...As such it gives frequent salutary shocks to our temporal parochialism...
...by focusing on an issue that arose at the time o f the Founding and remains at the center of political controversy in America today...
...Certainly, insofar as members of these disproportionately successful subgroups are in fact employed by other blacks, the evidence of the disproportions cannot be used to Support doubts about the importance of bigotry...
...and hence no very compelling reason why anyone but a lover should commend anyone simply for being passionate...
...It is at present perhaps especially scarce in those areas of social science and social policy with which he himself has been--and remains--most concerned...
...Nevertheless they were years, even generations, ahead of the slaves in their acculturation to American society...
...By 1850 the majority of them could read and write, while all but one or two percent of the slaves were illiterate...
...Edited by Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra $14.25 (cloth) $6.25 (paper) Oloes contradiction exist between the deep a constitutional promise of democratic equality and the economic, social, and political inequalities generated by American capitalism...
...The same is equally or more true of Antony Flew is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading and author, most recently, of The Politics of Procrustes (Prometheus Books...
...More surprising perhaps is the similarly disproportionate part played by the one percent of all America's blacks who have come from the West Indies: By 1969, "while native blacks were substantially underrepresented in the professions, a slightly higher than average percentage of West Indians were professionals...
...Nor'have the now notorious group afflictions always been the same...
...Indeed the entire exercise proved as salutary and as illuminating as that in which the American Enterprise Institute unleashed into a conference of the established experts on crime a handful of well-trained economists...
...Or is capitalism compatible with - - and even essential for - - democracy...
Vol. 15 • May 1982 • No. 5
