“Let’s get my judgment of Thomas Sowell’s new book out of the way first. There is not a single interesting idea in its more than three-hundred pages.” So wrote Alan Wolfe in his recent New Republic review of Sowell’s latest book, Intellectuals and Society. Yet Wolfe did not mention, let alone discuss, any of the ideas presented in the book (interesting or otherwise), and so I could not tell from his review whether the intellectual staleness is Sowell’s or Wolfe’s.

I picked up the book myself and found that, in fact, it is chock full of interesting ideas — like much of Sowell’s work. Of course, interesting ideas can be wrong or unimportant or both. But the book contains many interesting ideas that are correct and important, as we shall see. My bottom line is that Intellectuals and Society has large strengths — and some large weaknesses.

Intellectuals One large weakness, both in the title and throughout the book, is that it is not really about intellectuals, per se, but about a subset of intellectuals. Sowell uses the terms “intellectuals” and “intelligentsia” (in his view, intellectuals are part of the intelligentsia) inconsistently. He characterizes intellectuals as people who work in the world of ideas, but who are not accountable for the effects when their ideas are followed.

He admits that this definition would apply to two intellectuals that he and I both admire and have learned from: Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Yet, in assessing the influence of the intelligentsia (which he does not define), he claims that its influence has been reduced as more and more attention has been given to people like Friedman and to conservative and neoconservative intellectuals. Isn’t this a reduction in influence of some members of the intelligentsia due to other members of the intelligentsia? If so, it does not qualify as a reduction of influence per se.

One senses that Sowell wants to criticize a number of people whom he often refuses to name, and so he lumps them into the “intellectuals” category. The problem is that his generalization does not hold. I think of myself as an intellectual; many of you readers are intellectuals; and don’t look now, but Thomas Sowell is an intellectual. In short, his whole argument about intellectuals as a class becomes incoherent.

A related problem is that Sowell is careless at times. He too often refers to various people’s thinking without actually naming the people to whom he attributes the thoughts. How can one evaluate his accuracy in characterizing a group of people when he will not tell us who is in the group?

Fixing Fumbled Facts But when he does name names, Sowell makes important criticisms.

Take his discussion of MIT economist Lester Thurow’s much-celebrated 1980 book, The Zero-Sum Society. Thurow wrote that, on unemployment, the United States is “the industrial economy with the worst record.” What is remarkable about that statement, notes Sowell, is that Thurow made his case by referring only to the unemployment record in the United States and saying nothing about that of other countries. Sowell points out the obvious, but as my marked-up version of Thurow’s book shows, it is not so obvious that I had caught the problem — namely, that you cannot compare without doing a comparison. Sowell also points out that Thurow was wrong even about the United States. Thurow wrote:

Lack of jobs has been endemic in peacetime during the past fifty years of American history. Review the evidence: a depression from 1929 to 1940, a war from 1941 to 1945….

Huh? Sowell points out that unemployment during the war was extremely low.

Or take Sowell’s numerate pick-apart of the 1996 “arson of black churches.” The Chicago Tribune, he notes, referred to “an epidemic of criminal and cowardly arson.” (By the way, isn’t “criminal” redundant in that sentence? Is there any arson that is not criminal?) Columnist Barbara Reynolds of USA Today claimed that the fires were “an attempt to murder the spirit of black America.” President Clinton added to the plot, claiming that the church fires reminded him of similar burnings of black churches in Arkansas when he was young.

The problem with those statements? Let Sowell tell it:

This story began to unravel when factual research showed that (1) no black churches were burned in Arkansas while Bill Clinton was growing up, (2) there had been no increase in fires at black churches, but an actual decrease over the previous 15 years, (3) the incidence of fires at white churches was similar to the incidence of fires at black churches, and (4) where there was arson, one-third of the suspects were black.

In his chapter “Intellectuals and the Law,” Sowell humorously analyzes quotes by columnist Michael Kinsley, reporter Linda Greenhouse, and law professor (and now White House official) Cass Sunstein. All three criticized federal court decisions, not by reference to the Constitution, but by reference to majority rule.

Sowell quotes Kinsley’s criticism that then-Court of Appeals Judge Antonin Scalia overturned “a major piece of legislation passed by large majorities in both houses of Congress and signed with a flourish by a popular president.” Writes Sowell: “as if these were things that make a law Constitutional.” Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times, complained that the Supreme Court “invalidated a law that two houses of Congress and the President of the United States approved.” Sowell points out that other laws overruled by the Supreme Court were duly passed. And Sunstein accused the Supreme Court of forbidding “Congress from legislating on the basis of its own views.” Well yes, says Sowell — whenever the Supreme Court overrules a federal law, that is what it does.

Information and Incentives One of Sowell’s strengths is that he has laid out, better than Hayek, why central planning of an economy cannot work. Sowell’s 1980 book, Knowledge and Decisions, exposits and applies Hayek’s insight beautifully. Those not familiar with this earlier book will find his thoughts on central planning in his latest book valuable. While Hayek focused solely on the information problem — central planners do not have access to the circumstances of time and place that individuals have — Sowell goes beyond that, integrating that insight with the incentive problem. Sowell writes:

Why the transfer of decisions from those with personal experience and a stake in the outcome to those with neither can be expected to lead to better decisions is a question seldom asked, much less answered. Given the greater cost of correcting surrogate decisions, compared to correcting individual decisions, and the greater cost of persisting in mistaken decisions by those making decisions for themselves, compared to the lower costs of those making mistaken decisions for others, the economic success of market economies is hardly surprising and neither are the counterproductive and often disastrous results of various forms of social engineering.

Although that quote could have used some editing, it is still a nice statement of the information and incentive problems with central planning. While I agree with Sowell that the dominant mindset among many intellectuals is that a central government can do it better, his argument would have been stronger had he identified four or five, rather than zero, prominent intellectuals who hold this view. Since he did not do this, I will: Into that category I would put lawyer Robert Reich and, increasingly, economists Paul Krugman (on health care), Joseph Stiglitz (on financial markets), and Jeffrey Sachs (on foreign aid.)

Selective History The biggest weakness in Intellectuals and Society is Sowell’s discussion, in two chapters, of war and the intellectuals. It is not all weak. He does an effective job of skewering intellectuals’ wishful thinking about the threat posed by Hitler. For instance, I had not known before reading this book just how strong France’s military was before World War II and how well positioned it was to stop Hitler’s drive to his west. France, says Sowell, because of its understandable distaste for war, lacked the will to fight Hitler early, when he could have been defeated.

So why do I find this section of the book weak? Because Sowell is quite selective in his recounting of history. Consider his discussion of Vietnam. He leads off with this long sentence:

Whatever the merits and demerits of the decision of the United States to become a major participant in the war to prevent South Vietnam from being conquered by North Vietnam’s Communist government, the stark fact is that more than 50,000 Americans died winning military victories in Vietnam that ended in political defeat because the climate of opinion created by the intelligentsia in the United States made it politically impossible not only to continue the involvement in the fighting there, but impossible even to continue to supply the resources necessary to defend itself after American troops were withdrawn.

After that, Sowell goes on to lay out the specifics of how the antiwar movement in the United States helped pave the way for defeat in Vietnam. I am not enough of an expert on Vietnam to know whether Sowell is oversimplifying, but I know enough about rhetoric to know that with his first five words in the above quote, Sowell avoids the major issue: did it make sense for the United States government to intervene in Vietnam? What if the demerits exceeded the merits, as many Americans, including me, came to believe? Should the intelligentsia have remained silent? How did defense of America imply that the U.S. government should get involved in an Asian civil war thousands of miles away? Does it matter to Sowell — or does he even know — that an American president, Dwight Eisenhower, intervened in 1954 to help set up a government in South Vietnam in violation of the Geneva Accords, under which there was to be a 1956 vote on whether to unify the two parts of Vietnam? Although the term was not used then, this was an early version of U.S. “nation building,” in which the ersatz nation was South Vietnam. This was, in short, central planning of a country, something Sowell criticizes when a government centrally plans an economy. But Sowell sidesteps all those questions with his casual, “Whatever the merits and demerits….”