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Thomas Sowell

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Famous Thomas Sowell Quotes

“Affirmative action hiring pressures make it costly to have no minority employees, but continuing affirmative action pressures at the promotion and discharge phases also make it costly to have minority employees who do not work out well. The net effect is to increase the demand for highly qualified minority employees while decreasing the demand for less qualified minority employees or for those without a sufficient track record to reassure employers.”

EconomicsAffirmative Action
Book:Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
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“How, then, can women as a group be so far behind men as a group, in both incomes and occupations? Because most women become wives and mothers and the economic results are totally different from a man's becoming a husband and father. However parallel these roles may be verbally, they are vastly different in behavioral consequences. There are reasons why there are no homes for unwed fathers.”

EconomicsEquity And Inclusion
Book:Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
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“With women, as with racial and ethnic minorities, the effects of policies must be carefully separated from the intentions of those policies. The crucial question is not the desirability of the professed goal but the incentives and constraints created and what they are most likely to lead to. The imposition of monthly equality in pensions, rather than lifetime equality, has the net effect of making pension plans more expensive, the more female employees there are [because women live longer than men]. Viewed as prospective behavioral incentives, rather than as a retrospective status pronouncement, this means that employers will find it more costly to hire female work- ers with a given pension plan and more costly to institute a given pension plan when there are more female workers. Reducing the demand for female workers or reducing the likelihood of creating a pension plan is hardly the intention of the courts, but it can easily be the result. It is not clear that anyone is economically better off after such a symbolic ruling.”

EconomicsEpistemologyEquity And Inclusion
Book:Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
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“People who want special taxes or subsidies for particular things seem not to understand that what they are really asking for is for prices to misstate the relative scarcities of things and the relative values that the users of these things put on them. . . Making anything artificially cheap usually means that it will be wasted.”

TaxesWasteEconomicsScarcityPriceCheapPricesSubsidy
Book:Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
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“Despite the massive intellectual feat that Marx's Capital represents, the Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed. This neither denies nor denigrates Capital as an intellectual achievement, and perhaps in its way the culmination of classical economics. But the development of modern economics had simply ignored Marx. Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical tools to which Marx contributed nothing, and have recourse to Marx only for ideological, political, or historical purposes. In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a blind alley, however historic it may be as the centerpiece of a worldwide political movement. What is said and done in its name is said and done largely by people who have never read through it, much less followed its labyrinthine reasoning from its arbitrary postulates to its empirically false conclusions. Instead, the massive volumes of Capital have become a quasi-magic touchstone—a source of assurance that somewhere and somehow a genius "proved" capitalism to be wrong and doomed, even if the specifics of this proof are unknown to those who take their certitude from it.”

CapitalismEconomicsMarxismKarl MarxDas KapitalDevastating Criticism
Book:Marxism: Philosophy and Economics
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“The Marxist constituency has remained as narrow as the conception behind it. The Communist Manifesto, written by two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods—much less for the social consequences of their vision—has had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people. The offspring of privilege have dominated the leadership of Marxist movements from the days of Marx and Engels through Lenin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and their lesser counterparts around the world and down through history. The sheer reiteration of the "working class" theme in Marxism has drowned out this plain fact.”

CapitalismEconomicsMarxismKarl MarxDas KapitalDevastating Criticism
Book:Marxism: Philosophy and Economics
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“The dominant orthodoxy in development economics was that Third World countries were trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty that could be broken only by massive foreign aid from the more prosperous industrial nations of the world. This was in keeping with a more general vision on the Left that people were essentially divided into three categories - the heartless, the helpless, and wonderful people like themselves, who would rescue the helpless by playing Lady Bountiful with the taxpayers' money.”

PeopleWorldHeartCountryThreeLeftNationsVisionPovertyWonderfulBrokenDevelopmentEconomicsThirdsAidsCyclesMassiveCategoriesDividedTrappedRescueHelplessDominantViciousProsperousTaxpayersOrthodoxyThird WorldHeartlessThird World CountriesForeign AidVicious CyclesCycle Of Poverty
Book:Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays
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“Perhaps the most widespread misunderstanding of economics is that it applies solely to financial transactions. Frequently this leads to statements that "there are noneconomic values" to consider. There are, of course, noneconomic values. Indeed, there are only noneconomic values. Economics is not a value itself but merely a method of trading off one value against another.”

ValuesCoursesEconomicsMethodFinancialStatementsTradingMisunderstandingTransactions
Book:Knowledge And Decisions
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“Most intellectuals outside the field of economics show remarkably little interest in learning even the basic fundamentals of economics. Yet they do not hesitate to make sweeping pronouncements about the economy in general, businesses in particular, and the many issues revolving around what is called 'income distribution'.”

LittlesShowsInterestEconomyIssuesFieldsParticularEconomicsFundamentalsIncomeDistributionSweepingRevolvingIncome Distribution
Author:Thomas Sowell
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“At least half of the popular fallacies about economics come from assuming that economic activity is a zero-sum game, in which what is gained by someone is lost by someone else. But transactions would not continue unless both sides gained, whether in international trade, employment, or renting an apartment.”

GamesLostSidesHalfEconomicActivityEconomicsTradeAssumingInternationalEmploymentZeroApartmentBoth SidesFallacyTransactionsInternational TradeZero Sum Game
Author:Thomas Sowell
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“People who know nothing about advertising, nothing about pharmaceuticals, and nothing about economics have been loudly proclaiming that the drug companies spend too much on advertising - and demanding that the government pass laws based on their ignorance.”

PeopleKnowsHas BeensGovernmentLawCompanyToo MuchIgnoranceDrugEconomicsAdvertisingProclaimingDrug Companies
Book:Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays
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“However little president Obama knows or cares about economics, he knows a lot about politics - and especially political rhetoric. 'High-speed rail' is simply another set of loft words to justify continued expansion of government spending. So are words like 'investment in education' or 'investment' in any number of other things, which serves the same political purpose.”

KnowsLittlesGovernmentCarePoliticalPurposePresidentNumbersEconomicsInvestmentSpendingSpeedJustifyPresident ObamaRhetoricExpansionRailGovernment SpendingHigh SpeedInvestment In EducationPolitical RhetoricHigh Speed Rail
Author:Thomas Sowell
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“Economics is a study of cause-and-effect relationships in an economy. It's purpose is to discern the consequences of various ways of allocating resources which have alternative uses. It has nothing to say about philosophy or values, anymore than it has to say about music or literature.”

WayPhilosophyUsePurposeValuesLiteratureCausesEconomyStudyEffectsConsequenceResourcesEconomicsVariousAlternativesCause And Effect
Book:Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy
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“The question is not what anybody deserves. The question is who is to take on the God-like role of deciding what everybody else deserves. You can talk about 'social justice' all you want. But what death taxes boil down to is letting politicians take money from widows and orphans to pay for goodies that they will hand out to others, in order to buy votes to get re-elected. That is not social justice or any other kind of justice.”

WantKindHandsOrderSocialJusticePayLibertyRolesEconomicPoliticianTaxesDeserveEconomicsVoteSocial JusticeTyrannyWidowsOrphanDeserve YouWidows And Orphans
Book:Controversial Essays
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“People who are very aware that they have more knowledge than the average person are often very unaware that they do not have one-tenth of the knowledge of all of the average persons put together. In this situation, for the intelligentsia to impose their notions on ordinary people is essentially to impose ignorance on knowledge.”

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Author:Thomas Sowell
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“If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working.”

IfsChildrenCareForceParentQualityLibertySeriousPoliticianEconomicsBurdenHeavyLibertarianLibertarianismTaxationLiftingChild CareHeavy BurdensDay Care
Book:Controversial Essays
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“No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems - of which getting elected and re-elected are number one and number two. Whatever is number three is far behind.”

TryingTwoProblemPoliticalThreePoliticsUnderstandingNumbersBehindsPoliticianEconomicsElectionSolveAfrican AmericanProblems And SolutionsNumber ThreeCareer PoliticiansPolitics And Economics
Book:Dismantling America and Other Controversial Essays (Large Print 16pt)
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“Four things have almost invariably followed the imposition of controls to keep prices below the level they would reach under supply and demand in a free market: (1) increased use of the product or service whose price is controlled, (2) Reduced supply of the same product or service, (3) quality deterioration, (4) black markets.”

UseBlackLevelsQualityFourProductsDemandEconomicsConservativeControlledFree MarketImpositionDeteriorationSupply And Demand
Author:Thomas Sowell
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“The vocabulary of the political left is fascinating. For example, it is considered to be 'materialistic' and 'greedy' to want to keep what you have earned. But it is 'idealistic' to want to take away what someone else has earned and spend it for your own political benefit or to feel good about yourself.”

WantFeelsPoliticalPoliticsLeftMoneyExampleBenefitsEconomicsGreedSpendingFeel GoodFascinatingAbout YourselfGreedyVocabularyMaterialisticLeftistsIdealisticPolitical IdeologyLefties
Author:Thomas Sowell
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