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Thomas Sowell interview

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Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#361

Post by peterpeppers »

chmod600 wrote: post #145

One important impact he had on my thinking is that he rejects groupings of people based on snapshots in time. For instance, it is very common to use income as a proxy for your economic success, and then to group people into quintiles, calling the bottom quintile "the poor". It seems reasonable, but it's wrong enough to lead to very wrong conclusions. A college student living on their own will appear to be a "poor hou…

The problem with Dr. Sowell is that he believes that "when he adds everything up" that it tells an accurate and whole picture. To him, people are a simple variable to plug into an even simpler economics equation.

He could learn a few things concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty from Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman.

A few points...

+ Sowell never truly questions the data that's the foundation of his work. For Sowell, history and historical data as reported by "conquerors" is never to be questioned. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman have famously proved how problematic this approach is.

+ Sowell refuses to address human decision-making, judgment and uncertainty. For him, power and violence do not matter. If the black family structure was better and enough for self-improvement post-slavery then why did millions of blacks flee the South before the enactment of massive liberal civil rights policies?

In Sowell's world, America was great from 1863-1930. A time of great uncertainty and white terrorism that resulted in the Great Migration.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_%28African_Ame...

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#362

Post by JPKab »

RoboticWater wrote: post #130
tlear wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is immeasurable, undefinable, unchangeable. As a propagandist you must take care to use things that can not be countered. Systemic racism is one of those. What is the systemic racism measure for Canada vs US? That is his point, you can use that stick to beat anyone and anything you want without having to supply a shred of evidence. Just keep repeating it and call everyone who disagrees racist or Uncle Tom.

If it were immeasurable and undefinable, then we wouldn't have studies showing disproportionate sentencing of Black people [1] or the persistent negative effects of redlining [2]. And if it were unchangeable, we wouldn't be able to construct studies to show the specific choke-points of racial inequality, nor suggest policy solutions to remedy them. > What is the systemic racism measure for Canada vs US? I don't under…

Thank you for linking to studies on the systemic racism issue.

"Using rich data linking federal cases from arrest through to sentencing, we find that initial case and defendant characteristics, including arrest offense and criminal history, can explain most of the large raw racial disparity in federal sentences, but significant gaps remain. Across the distribution, blacks receive sentences that are almost 10 percent longer than those of comparable whites arrested for the same crimes. Most of this disparity can be explained by prosecutors’ initial charging decisions, particularly the filing of charges carrying mandatory minimum sentences. Ceteris paribus, the odds of black arrestees facing such a charge are 1.75 times higher than those of white arrestees."

It should also be noted that the vast majority of people talking about the sentencing disparity ascribe 100% of the sentencing difference to racism, when this paper states that it's actually a 10% delta, and the other 90% is due to previous criminal record, etc. It's not like activists ever cared about nuance.

The issue I have with the term "systemic racism" is that it is typically used in a purposefully nebulous fashion to capture and group a collection of specific, actionable issues that can be measured.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#363

Post by BurningFrog »

john-shaffer wrote: post #355
BurningFrog wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't tell if this is a joke or not. For the record, I'm not having that perception. But many will judge people by who agrees with them.

Not a joke. I got heated over (what seems to me) whitewashing of liberal racism. It is a very real problem that liberals can spout blatantly racist garbage ("You ain't black") but never actually get classified as racist. Yet merely thinking capitalism is a good system is enough to get one classified as a racist and a fascist. I apologize for getting triggered on the second part of your post and forgetting the first,…

You know, I thought briefly about rephrasing the "colored" part because the accidental "pun". But nothing came to mind.

I mostly agree with you about "liberal racism". Apology accepted.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#364

Post by Gibbon1 »

refurb wrote: post #335
chmod600 wrote: post #145

One important impact he had on my thinking is that he rejects groupings of people based on snapshots in time. For instance, it is very common to use income as a proxy for your economic success, and then to group people into quintiles, calling the bottom quintile "the poor". It seems reasonable, but it's wrong enough to lead to very wrong conclusions. A college student living on their own will appear to be a "poor hou…

Exactly. And when you try and track people across decades, things start to look different. https://medium.com/@russroberts/do-the-rich-capture-all-the-...

What I've seen contradicts the authors rosy glasses. 5 to 10 really good years often doesn't add much to 40 iffy years. And 5 bad years does a complete number on people.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#365

Post by tharne »

tdhz77 wrote: post #295
tharne wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, they advocate for "control", with them in charge, of course.

Who better to control the money and know how best to use money than the people?

People should be in control of the money they earn, because that's the only time there's any skin in the game.

If you think The Government == The People, you're out of your mind. It's a nice ideal, but it's never been achieved in a modern nation state. Some nation states are less abusive than others, but that's as good as it gets.

The government is careless with spending and can't be trusted with people's money because they didn't earn the money they have. They took it out of people's paychecks, and if they run out, they can levy more taxes or just print more, there's no incentive to be thoughtful, careful, or diligent. At any rate, when the government is reckless with people's money, it's never the government that has to feel any pain.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#366

Post by googthrowaway42 »

jahaja wrote: post #354
googthrowaway42 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are considered illegitimate since they are undemocratic. But these are voluntary structures? That's kind of the beauty of the free market. You have these little monarchal structures that go out and create something in the world. If people want to join they can. If and when these structures become too dysfunctional they go away due to market forces.

> But these are voluntary structures? They're not. No free person would voluntary accept all kinds of shit jobs that's out there unless indirectly coerced.

By "indirectly coerced" you mean that they need food and shelter and they don't have slaves to grow their food and build their house for them?

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#367

Post by MisterBastahrd »

baryphonic wrote: post #228
cma wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be charitable, he could be talking about the Dixie Chicks or anchors that were fired for questioning the Iraq war. Or for the biggest example of modern cancel culture, Kaepernick's firing after targeting by the president.

> Or for the biggest example of modern cancel culture, Kaepernick's firing after targeting by the president. Kaepernick was "fired" because he was poor at his job. Defenses started to understand his 1-dimensional attack and then shut it down. He was cut after the 2016 season, but had been benched in 2015 because the 49ers offense was struggling.[1] This was nine months before he ever took a knee before a game.[2] Did…

Kaepernick was blackballed by the league, full stop. Find me another instance of an uninjured QB under the age of 35 who led a team to a Super Bowl 3 years prior who was not only cut by his current team but not signed for even a backup role by another club.

There's a reason that Cam Newton has a job today and Kaepernick doesn't, and it's because Newton didn't get cancelled.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#368

Post by treeman79 »

kypro wrote: post #37

Thomas Sowell has had a huge impact on me and my views on economics. I'm from a poor working-class background and am often irritated by the needless language barriers of academics. > “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional infringement of their freedom of speech.” Sowell is unique in this respect. He's book, "Basi…

I spent months working 20 hour days on a major project. Got a huge bonus. More than half removed for taxes. I suddenly had opinion on tax policy.

Basic Economics was such a huge eye opener on how things really work. Not just aristocratic theory talk. So much better then college economics class I took.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#369

Post by MisterBastahrd »

gen220 wrote: post #340
pas wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the vocabulary, but the structure, the whole style. It's long, it's very meandering, it's very illustrative, but rarely direct and informative. Not many people have the time and desire to read something that presents so little value to them.

I might be a minority, but I'm willing to stick out my neck for meandering, illustrative, and indirect writing. Don't get me wrong, if it was the only thing available, I'd probably go crazy, too. But I believe there is a time and place in my "reading diet" for this kind of long-form journalism. As your adjectives suggest, New Yorker articles are less bullets of breathlessly-repeated facts, and more illustrations of n…

What about the bleatings of a person like Kevin D. Williamson, whose prose I identify as horrifically boring, not only because he isn't a deep thinker on any of the subject matter he writes about, but also because he spends about 80% of any essay trying to beat his audience over the head with how familiar he is with obscure and / or inconsequential tangential topics to the matter at hand. I don't have an issue with writers being descriptive. I very much have a problem with writers trying to prove they're the Dennis Miller of serious thought.

Re: Thomas Sowell interview

#370

Post by jahaja »

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #366
jahaja wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But these are voluntary structures? They're not. No free person would voluntary accept all kinds of shit jobs that's out there unless indirectly coerced.

By "indirectly coerced" you mean that they need food and shelter and they don't have slaves to grow their food and build their house for them?

> By "indirectly coerced" you mean that they need food and shelter

Yes, and more.

> and they don't have slaves to grow their food and build their house for them?

Is this the level you sink to as soon as Capitalist dogma is questioned? It's not the poor and workers that have servants in modern society.

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