Is Reality Optional? Thomas Sowell’s Sharp Warning Against Wishful Thinking

My copy, purchased in 1994

When it comes to thinking clearly and speaking pointedly about contemporary issues, there are few better minds than that of Thomas Sowell, an American economist, social theorist, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's widely regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers of the past half-century for his clear-eyed, data-driven critiques of liberal social policies and his emphasis on empirical reality over ideological wishful thinking.

In 1993, Sowell published a short but powerful collection of essays titled Is Reality Optional? And Other Essays. Don’t let the title fool you — this isn’t some abstract philosophy book. It’s a no-nonsense straight-talking takedown of the idea that we can simply ignore reality when it doesn’t fit our favorite theories.

If you step off the roof of your house there will be consequences, whether you believe in the law of gravity or not. So, too, there are laws of economics, which we ignore to our own peril.

Sowell’s central argument is blunt: too many intellectuals, activists, and politicians treat reality as optional. They believe that with enough good intentions, clever policies, or bold social engineering, we can reshape human nature, fix complex problems, and create a better world — even if the evidence says otherwise.
He contrasts two very different ways of looking at the world. One vision (which he calls the “unconstrained” or visionary view) sees humans as highly malleable. If society has problems, it must be because of bad institutions or not enough compassion. The solution? Big government programs and new theories to remake everything.
The other view (the “constrained” or tragic vision) is more realistic. It says human nature has built-in limits — scarcity, self-interest, imperfect knowledge, and trade-offs. Good policy, Sowell argues, must work with these limits instead of pretending they don’t exist.
A quote on the back cover (of my copy) captures the problem perfectly:

““Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area—crime, education, housing, race relations—the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.” (EdNote: This was more than three decades ago, and the trend has continued unabated.) 

Sowell points to real-world examples in crime, education, welfare, housing, and race relations. Again and again, “bright new ideas” were tried, problems got worse, and yet the people pushing those ideas rarely faced any consequences. 
He repeatedly warns against what he calls “intellectual hubris” — the dangerous belief that experts know better than millions of ordinary people making decisions in their own lives. Sowell stresses the importance of empirical evidence and common sense (which, as they say, is as rare as the dodo). Start with observable facts and historical results, not beautiful-sounding theories.
At just 192 pages, Is Reality Optional? is short, readable, and often contrarian. Sowell writes like a man tired of watching the same mistakes get repeated while reality keeps sending the bill.
In a world full of grand ideological promises, Sowell reminds us of a simple truth: reality is not optional. You can ignore scarcity, incentives, trade-offs, and human nature for a while — but eventually, they push back.
Here are a few quotes that will give you the flavor of Sowell's ideas.

On Economics vs. Politics

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

On Faith Masquerading as Science

“Some things must be done on faith, but the most dangerous kind of faith is that which masquerades as ‘science.’”

On Forgiveness and Being Right

“People will forgive you for being wrong, but they will never forgive you for being right—especially if events prove you right while proving them wrong.”

A few more notable quotes from the book:

--“Ordinary people, lacking that gift [of ignoring reality], are forced to face reality.”

--“The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.”

--“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.”  

Recommended: Thomas Sowell, who was born in 1930, is still alive and kicking. YouTube has a treasure trove of videos that will give you an opportunity to engage directly with Sowell's ideas. His brain is stuffed with truckloads of facts from a lifetime of research, facts that often remain buried because they fail to fit the Progressive narrative.

What are the Pros and Cons of Today's Most Controversial Issues? Here's a Place to Start

Have you ever held a position on an issue and wondered why or how anyone could hold the contrary position? Or, have you ever held a position on an issue in which everyone seemed in opposition to your personal convictions?

Well, here's a great resource that might help you gain insights on how the other side thinks. Or, if seeking rhetorical firepower it could give you ammunition for what your gut has been telling you all along. (Read on.)

When not listening to audio books I occasionally would have National Public Radio (NPR) on during my lunch hour as I drove to and from wherever I was eating that day. For a period of time (and maybe still, I don't know) they would have a Friday debate on various issues with two people for and two people against a proposition on this or that contemporary issue. If I remember correctly, they would poll the audience before the debate and then again afterwards. The team that influenced the most audience members to the cross the divide would be declared winner.

What I liked about it was how it showed the listening audience that even the most controversial issues can have two sides. Whether capital punishment, concealed handguns, banning books or the relevance of the electoral college, all kinds of issues have smart people on opposite sides of the coin.

In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff note the polarization that has been occurring in our contemporary culture, and how unhealthy it is on several levels. On many college campuses it seems that kids want to only hear one point of view on things, concluding that any view beyond my own is illegitimate, nonconstructive, invalid, not worth consideration and harmful. 

This last point is a major point of the book. In our efforts to raise the current generation in a "safe" way we have made them so fragile that they may have a hard time when they get into the real world of hard knocks.

This singleminded group-think is not just college kids. It has become pervasive in all age groups and demographics. As I have noted elsewhere, citing Eric Hoffer and Orwell, it makes the masses easier to manipulate when they can be induced to clump together in fear in an Us vs. Them stance. 

What the writers of Coddling note is that college used to be a place where students were taught How to think, not What to think. Today this fundamental idea is being challenged on many campuses. Hence the student riots and protests designed to keep certain speakers out these past few years.

I remember sitting in an adult Sunday school class in the 60s in which guests representing various alternative beliefs were invited so they could present their views and be questioned. I can't recall most other than the one from SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, an antiwar group which eventually spawned the Weathermen, a radical branch that used terrorist tactics including bombings. (In one 18 month period from 1971-72 there were five bombings a day around the country!)

The point here is that giving voice to other perspectives was all part of what students fought for in the Sixties Free Speech Movement. How strange it is to find students fighting for just the opposite, shutting down speakers whom they disagree with.

ALL THIS TO SAY that for open-minded people seeking to examine both sides of various issues, the pro and con of Health & Medicine, Education, Political Issues, Science & Technology and more, this is a site worth bookmarking: PROCON.ORG

I've not gone through every category here but the topics I reviewed seem to represent, in a fair and intelligent manner, both sides on many of our most controversial issues. 

It's an approach that I like because few of us, if any, can be experts in every category of every issue. Yet somehow we're continually prodded to "take a stand" on all these issues based on whatever media feed we pay attention to. Sometimes people will even pressure you. "How can can you not know what you think on this?" But the truth is, unless you have researched things a bit, how can you not remain on the sidelines? Issues are complex and multi-faceted.

I believe it is useful to listen to the other side. How can we practice discernment if we always wear earplugs? The ability to discern, to weigh things in the balance, to give them their proper weight, is all part of growing up.

Related Links
The Coddling of the American Mind and its associated website.
Bubble-Wrapped Americans: How the U.S. Became Obsessed with Physical and Emotional Safety

The Cult of the Amateur

It's shaping up to be a beautiful day here, one that will be talked about for weeks to come. But let's not go there and discuss an issue that has been debated for decades but now has a new face.

In 2006 Andrew Keen produced an essay which went on to become a book about the destruction being wreaked upon professional journalism and culture by the proliferation of Internet content created by amateurs. A polemic, a diatribe, a venting of the spleen -- Keen's point is that all this proliferation of free content is costing us in a variety of unseen ways that are damaging to us in the long run.

The book, which I have never read but have read about on several occasions, reminds me of another book lamenting the damaging effects of pop culture, Edwin Newman's Strictly Speaking: Will America Be the Death of English? Newman was a news correspondent for NBC when he wrote this book in 1974. His carefully pointed analysis likewise laments the way things are going with regard to language and culture, though he is more concerned about language than what it was actually doing to the people whose jobs were involved in utilizing it.

Keen's book is decidedly aimed at bashing one of the foundational tenets of the Internet: "Information wants to be free." Keen notes that "free" always costs something, and to some extent he's right. For example, Duluth, MN has something like 29 "free" public parks. I had lunch this week with someone involved with the city who reminded me that free public parks are expensive to maintain.

For the longest time I have been watching the magazine industry as it strives to transition to the Internet. Some are doing it better than others. Yes, there are pressures being placed on journalism, but think of all the writers who have finally found a voice, who can own their own soapbox and not be squeezed out from publication and kept away from readers because they failed to have suitable credentials. Every writer knows that the publishing game was in need of an overhaul. You jump through hoops and hope somehow to bypass the gatekeepers so a managing editor will pick up your query and read it while they still have half their brain engaged after shuffling through 3,000 other queries.

If Keen's rant shows up in audio format at our library I will certainly make an effort to give it a fair shake. In the meantime, I will read the reviews. Here are some of Olly Buxton's comments at Amazon.com:

Since Andrew Keen is so instinctively dismissive about amateur contributors to the Internet - people like me - it's hardly surprising that I should instinctively dismiss his book, so let me declare an interest right away: I like Web 2.0. I've been a contributor to it - through Amazon customer reviews, Wikipedia, discussion forums, MySpace, Napster and so on - for nearly a decade now, and I've followed the emergence of the political movement supporting it, exemplified by writers such as Larry Lessig and Yochai Benkler, with some fascination. and no, I've never made a dime out of it (though I have been sent a few books to review, not including this one).

Andrew Keen is that classic sort of British reactionary: the sort that would bemoan the loss of the word "gay" to the English language, and regret the damage caused by industrial vacuum cleaners on the chimney sweeping industry. His book is an impassioned, but simple-minded, hearkening to those simpler times which concludes that our networked economy has pointlessly exalted the amateur, ruined the livelihood of experts, destroyed incentives for creating intellectual property, delivered to every man-jack amongst us the ability - never before possessed - to create and distribute our own intellectual property and monkeyed around mischievously with the title to property wrought from the very sweat of its author's brow.

Keen thinks this is a bad thing; but that is to assume that the prior state of affairs was unimpeachably good. You don't have to be a paranoid Chomskyite to see the pitfalls of concentrated mass media ownership (Keen glosses over them), or note that the current intellectual property regime - which richly rewards a few lucky souls and their publishers at the expense of millions of less fortunate (but not, necessarily, less talented) ones, isn't the only way one could fairly allocate the risks and rewards of intellectual endeavour.

Well, there you have it. Hope you'll now get out there and enjoy your weekend. Make it a good one.

Values Formation and Black Urban Culture

How much of who we are is influenced by our fathers and how much do we choose?

I woke this morning thinking about some of the ways our fathers influence us. Education was important to my dad, and it pleased him when we got good grades. I don't know exactly how long it lasted but a dime for each A on my report card led to more diligent efforts in elementary school. My second grade report card had quite a few A's and a series of D's for handwriting. I don't recall ever being rebuked for those D's, with the subsequent result that my penmanship has never been a thing of beauty. And I always expected that I would one day go to college, as sure as it felt inevitable that I would one day grow up and marry.

What's interesting is how our tastes can also be shaped by our dads. My appreciation for classical music goes to those early years as well. Dad frequently read the Sunday paper while listening to Rimsky-Korsakov, Dvorak or Beethoven. He liked baseball and I wanted to be a baseball star. He listened to pop music on the radio as we drove in the car, and he watched the television shows which were popular in their day, such as Bonanza, Perry Mason, and Saturday Night at the Movies.

My dad's days were quite proscribed by the rituals of rising each morning, putting on the radio at 7:00 a.m., making breakfast and driving off to work, returning at 5:30 every evening. After supper, he would sit in his chair reading his books with the TV on. Having grown up poor, Dad valued frugality, saving and responsibility.

I even noticed that some of my tastes with regard to humor were related to the way Dad responded to various comedians. The Marx Brothers were funny, Jerry Lewis was not. He never told me I couldn't laugh at Jerry Lewis, but one could sense his scorn and it shaded the way I responded at the time.

In short, the dye runs deep into the fabric of our developing souls, and it can be challenging to identify where our own personal values get chosen and where they get imprinted.

What about people who grow up without fathers? Who shapes their values? In particular, I'm thinking here of the up and coming generation of inner city black youth with absentee fathers and fractured families. Or rather, I was reflecting on Orlando Patterson's New York Times editorial, "A Poverty of the Mind."

Patterson, a Harvard professor of sociology, opens the discussion with this. "SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it."

After pointing out examples where the problems of black youth are systemic, he notes, "What's most interesting about the recent spate of studies is that analysts seem at last to be recognizing what has long been obvious to anyone who takes culture seriously: socioeconomic factors are of limited explanatory power."

Patterson's editorial gives me the impression that the problems of race in America are going to be with us for a long time. The freedoms won by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., including the elimination of Jim Crow laws, are external in nature. Whether red or yellow, black or white, there are deeper internal victories that each individual must achieve in the arena of their own souls.

We all tend to oversimplify problems, in part because we'd also like an easy fix. Lenin, in the Russian Revolution, put forth education and electrification as the twin objectives that would make for the brightest tomorrow. We hear it here all the time. If only the schools were better.
Unfortunately, it is not that simple according to Patterson.

An anecdote helps explain why: Several years ago, one of my students went back to her high school to find out why it was that almost all the black girls graduated and went to college whereas nearly all the black boys either failed to graduate or did not go on to college. Distressingly, she found that all the black boys knew the consequences of not graduating and going on to college ("We're not stupid!" they told her indignantly).

SO why were they flunking out? Their candid answer was that what sociologists call the "cool-pose culture" of young black men was simply too gratifying to give up. For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation's best entertainers were black.

For young black men, however, that culture is all there is — or so they think. Sadly, their complete engagement in this part of the American cultural mainstream, which they created and which feeds their pride and self-respect, is a major factor in their disconnection from the socioeconomic mainstream.

What we're seeing is a bi-product of our racist past. Fortunately, a majority of blacks, according to Patterson, have escaped these social patterns. This does not mean we can close our eyes to the serious cultural issues in our inner cities.

The article, whixch is worth reading, challenged a few of my cherished notions which may need to be discarded or re-examined.