I have never regretted reading a book by the economist Thomas Sowell, a longtime fellow at the Hoover Institution and a syndicated columnist. He is one of the best writers and most incisive thinkers alive today: he has an admirable ability to weigh claims against evidence, and he is unafraid to question the accepted stories when they are inconsistent with the evidence. He can also turn a phrase and combine clarity and profundity like no one else. He is a joy to read, and one of the great communicators of our time. An opportunity to read Sowell is an opportunity to think hard about complicated and sometimes uncomfortable issues.

In his latest book, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Sowell summarizes theory and evidence on the geographic, cultural, and political factors that explain differences between the well-being of groups of people. It would, he argues, be quite a coincidence if spectacularly diverse geography, cultures, social conditions, and political institutions produced the same outcomes for everyone.

As in his earlier work, Sowell questions the popular but wrong assumption that differences between groups and individuals are prima facie evidence of malfeasance past or present. Just because this group or that represents x percent of the overall population but y percent of some subpopulation of interest does not mean something sinister is going on. Again, as Sowell notes, it would be surprising if long histories of varied experience across time and space produced such a pattern.

Much of what he brings to bear on the issue will be familiar to those who are already acquainted with his work. I found a lot of similarities between this book and his 2013 Intellectuals and Race, which I recently re-read in light of the unrest and activism at the University of Missouri, Yale University, Claremont-McKenna College, and other institutions. Sowell’s latest book reads like he took some of his greatest hits and remixed them for a new project. It is, if nothing else, comfort food for those of us who have read and learned from his earlier work and a revelation for those who have not—particularly those who adhere to the vision he has criticized so eloquently and thoroughly in his other work. (See his 2007 A Conflict of Visions for the clearest example.)

One of his strengths is that he tests domestic hypotheses against international evidence, as he did in his 2004 book Affirmative Action around the World. He shows that group differences in the United States are not so readily explained by uniquely American factors: differences between American blacks and American whites track closely with differences between urban American whites and Appalachian American whites and differences between upper- and lower-class whites in England. All around, he questions the “legacy of slavery” argument for things like labor force participation and the disintegration of the black family by pointing out that black families were stronger in the early 20th century even in the face of far more insidious and overt discrimination and oppression. Furthermore, black labor force participation was higher than white labor force participation within a short time after Emancipation. As he points out, if many of the pathologies we associate with black poverty (like broken families) are the “legacy of slavery,” then that legacy appears to have skipped a few generations.

Geography and resources / Sowell discusses the importance of geography in the determination of historical patterns, and in the process makes an important point about local knowledge. Data on “navigable waterways,” for example, can be misleading if they are measuring (say) miles of river rather than continuous miles of deep river. A river with a lot of shallow spots is not nearly as useful for trade and transportation as a river that is consistently deep: a river with an average depth of 16 feet is less useful if it is only 2 feet deep at its shallowest point, as compared to a river that is 12 feet deep consistently.

This is not geographic determinism. Rather, it is the sensible point that the patterns we observe are influenced by access to trade, fertile soil, and so on. At the same time, he points out that “resources” are context-dependent. Gold, petroleum, aluminum, and other things only become resources when we determine how to use them to solve problems. Petroleum in the Middle East, coal in England and the United States, and vast deposits of iron, copper, and other minerals were not resources to those who didn’t find ways to use them. He notes, for example, that the former Soviet Union provides perhaps the definitive refutation of the idea that natural resources automatically lead to wealth, pointing out that perhaps nowhere else on earth was so blessed with minerals, petroleum, and fertile farmland—all of which were largely wasted.

Blocking movement / Sowell’s discussion of geography is interesting on many levels. It explains why some civilizations developed the way they did, but it doesn’t explain why we have persistent poverty around the world given the low cost of moving people around. As William Easterly and other economists have argued, by treating a country or tribe as the unit of analysis, we ignore the fact that one of the simplest ways people can make themselves richer is by moving. Enduring patterns of poverty, therefore, are in part the result of immigration policy that locks so many poor people out of wealthy countries with market-friendly institutions.

The reader is treated to a wide-ranging discussion of the histories of different ethnic groups in the United States and beyond. Sowell describes the experiences of Jews in the early 20th century garment industry, Cuban immigrants who arrived here with nothing, and Fujianese Chinese who worked long hours washing dishes, clearing tables, and cleaning hotel rooms. Those people nonetheless succeeded in spite of formidable obstacles. Indeed, this success is the story of immigrant Chinese virtually everywhere: they arrive, they are oppressed, and yet they thrive. This is particularly interesting given that China went from being a global economic leader to being a global laggard by cutting itself off from the rest of the world a few centuries ago.

Again, there is much in this part of the book that longtime readers of Sowell will find very familiar. He marshals evidence on African-American achievement—such as historic enrollment at New York’s Stuyvesant High School or the success of the District of Columbia’s Dunbar High School, along with data on marriage rates, single parenthood, crime, and so on—to show that many of the problems we see among African-Americans today are reversals of historical trends. Black quality of life was improving until the United States expanded the welfare state and replaced racial oppression with racial preferences. Then advancement started to slow and in some cases regressed. He argues that even the reductions in poverty since the rise of the Great Society programs of the 1960s are really just a slowing of an earlier, more vigorous trend.

There is one explanatory variable that, I think, is missing from Sowell’s analysis: the “war on drugs.” It began in earnest in the early 1970s and it has had a disproportionate effect on black communities. He is correct to point out that minimum wages reduced employment among African-American youths, and welfare programs with very high marginal tax rates discouraged work. But when these policies (and the accompanying sense of hopelessness they inevitably produce) are combined with ever more potent drugs and the profitability of crime as an unintended consequence of current drug policies, the result is a perfect recipe for the disintegration of the black community. Future work on these issues will, I hope, explore the role of the drug war in explaining the patterns Sowell identifies on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the “coming apart” of white America described by Charles Murray.

Sowell is at his best when he reminds us of what we’re really seeking to explain. As he writes: “Poverty occurs automatically. It is wealth that must be produced, and must be explained.” We ask why some people are poor and some nations fail; the more important question is why some people become rich. As he argues here and throughout his work, it isn’t because of plunder, but because of a combination of cultural and political institutions that encourage production rather than predation.