Social Justice Fallacies’s five chapters present a lot of material that Sowell fans and scholars will find familiar. For instance, a chapter on “‘Equal Chances’ Fallacies” takes on the standard lament that little differentiates people who ultimately find economic success from those who don’t. Supposedly, most people have roughly the same innate potential, holding everything else constant. But Sowell points out, little has been held constant across the ages, so people differ substantially in their developed capabilities—and in their prospects for developing economically valued capabilities.
Proportional representation? / It is remarkable, Sowell thinks, that proportional representation by race, ethnicity, gender, and so on is used as a benchmark for social justice. Such equality characterizes hardly any society that has ever existed. We see disproportionate representation in many endeavors. Germans are “over-represented” in brewing beer, Scots in distilling whisky, and the French in winemaking. Sowell points out that players in the National Hockey League are disproportionately Canadian despite the United States’ much larger population.
Sowell argues that we don’t need invidious discrimination to explain disproportionate representation that accidents of geography, history, culture, and biology can readily explain. As he puts it concerning gender differences across space and time:
Human double standards of sexual behavior for women and men have been a pale reflection of nature’s more fundamental double standards. No matter how reckless, selfish, stupid or irresponsible a man may be, he will never become pregnant. The plain and simple fact that women have babies has meant that they may not have equal chances in many other aspects of life, even when some human societies offer equal opportunity for people with the same developed capabilities.
Or consider birth order of siblings, which matters a lot. Since first-borns start life with their parents’ undivided attention while their siblings do not, firstborns as a group go on to greater academic and commercial success. If we cannot expect equal outcomes among people born and raised in the same household, Sowell asks, on what grounds do we expect equal outcomes among people born and raised in widely differing circumstances?
Sowell explains that innate potential only translates readily into developed capabilities with important co-requisites. The poverty rate among Black households headed by two married parents is usually about 10 percent. Children of parents with professional degrees and professional occupations have an advantage insofar as they
hear more than three times as many words per hour as children raised in families on welfare. Moreover, these are far more often positive and encouraging words when the parents are professionals, and more often negative and discouraging words when the family is on welfare.
In his chapter “Racial Fallacies,” Sowell repeats claims and evidence that readers of his other work will find familiar. Despite the well-known emphasis on the Black–White income gap, he notes that the Asian–Mexican gap is even larger, and the Asian–White gap is considerable. Why, he wonders, do people point to “systemic racism” to explain the first gap but neither of the latter? Racism exists and racism is blameworthy, but Sowell does not believe it has as much explanatory power as other factors. He writes of Appalachian Whites: “People in low-income American hillbilly counties already face zero racism, because these people are virtually all white. Yet they have lower incomes than blacks.”
Compelling equality / In the next chapter, he discusses “Chess Pieces Fallacies,” referring to some social planners’ assumption that they can manipulate human beings as easily as game pieces on a chess board. He used this idea to great effect in his 2008 book Economic Facts and Fallacies. The prose is vintage Sowell, as he writes of discussions about how “we” should “arrange” society to achieve this or that beautiful goal: “Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel.” Compel they do, but frequently compulsion has the opposite of its intended effects. Higher tax rates do not necessarily translate into higher tax revenue, and “tax cuts for the rich” do not necessarily translate into lower tax revenue. Price ceilings create shortages and price floors create surpluses. He argues that Black teenagers’ poor job prospects are in no small part due to rules making it illegal for them to take jobs with wages and benefits that third-party observers do not like.
Knowledge problem / If these policies are pathological, why do they persist? And why don’t politicians learn that their standard interventionist toolkit has little salutary effect? My students ask these questions regularly. On the latter, Sowell writes: “Politicians do learn. They learn what is politically effective, and what they do is not a mistake politically, despite how disastrous such policies may turn out to be for the country.” Shortly before this passage, he quotes Richard Nixon responding to Milton Friedman’s criticisms of wage and price controls: “I don’t give a good goddamn what Milton Friedman says. He’s not running for re-election.”
Sowell’s penultimate chapter explains “Knowledge Fallacies.” Much of it will be familiar to those who have read his books Knowledge and Decisions (1980) and A Conflict of Visions (1987). It will—or should be—revelatory to people who are not. As he does in his earlier work, Sowell builds on Friedrich Hayek’s insights to distinguish the kinds of knowledge intellectuals have from the consequential local knowledge dispersed throughout society. One can know much about navigation and how to operate oceangoing vessels, but on one fateful night in 1912 the consequential knowledge most relevant to passengers on the Titanic was of where the icebergs were.
People unacquainted with Sowell might be surprised to learn that he has little use for intellectuals’ and experts’ pronouncements, plans, and visions. After all, he is an intellectual and an expert himself. However, he does not think himself fit to serve as a surrogate decision maker for others who do not know as much as he does about economics and intellectual history but might have more consequential local knowledge about what Hayek called “the particular circumstances of time and place.”
This tension came into high relief during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and we will be discovering unintended consequences of expert contempt for consequential local knowledge for years to come. Mask mandates, for example, substitute experts’ knowledge about transmission probabilities for speech therapists’ consequential local knowledge about the importance of seeing people’s faces and, importantly, how particular conditions vary from patient to patient.
For politicians, this all boils down to what President George H.W. Bush called “the vision thing.” But these visions are not just visions; politicians try to turn them into reality, often with poor results. Sowell describes the consequences memorably:
Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. They have already done that enough times–and in enough different ways—for us to reconsider, before joining their latest stampedes, led by self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence.
He elaborates on this in his final chapter, “Words, Deeds, and Dangers.” Many things done in the name of social justice visions decades ago have created problems that social justice warriors feel called upon to “solve” today.
One will search the book in vain for mention of present-day “woke” leaders of the social justice movement. Their omission is both a weakness and a strength of the book. It is a weakness in that the world would benefit from direct, line-by-line refutations of these warriors’ claims by a scholar of Sowell’s distinction and stature. It is a strength, however, in that Sowell explains how the social justice vision is not some new thing, but has been around for a long time.
If this turns out to be Sowell’s final book, it is a fitting summary and statement concluding a long, distinguished career of following the facts and logic wherever they may lead. It does not contain much that will be new to people already well-marinated in his other work. It will be, however, a revelation to the fair-minded observer wondering whether today’s crusades for social justice are as new—or as likely to be effective—as the crusaders claim.
