A new Thomas Sowell biography is out
I haven’t read it yet, but here it is.
I deeply admire Sowell and his work, and I know a lot of you feel the same way.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I haven’t read it yet, but here it is.
I deeply admire Sowell and his work, and I know a lot of you feel the same way.
MUST read Conquests and Cultures. Can’t imagine his research staff.
One item therein and elsewhere is how long cultural traits persist even when the population is a minority in a different culture. The Volga Germans and the descendants of Japanese immigrants to Brazil are a couple of examples.
The former were, in a couple of generations, overrepresented in local administration and the merchant class. In 1910, 2% of the population of Russia and 40% of the Czar’s officer corps. Still so distinct that Stalin prepared a particularly brutal extermination program for them.
Apparently, one can assimilate but not become identical.
As long as you are anouncing new books, Charles Murray (The Bell Curve) is publishing a new book, “Facing Reality”, to remind the reading public that the two most exhaustively documented findings of the American social sciences are that blacks are, on average, more violent and less intelligent than whites. I guess he didn’t get beat up enough for The Bell Curve.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/facing-reality-charles-murray/1138379266
I was just thinking today that it would be great if David Limbaugh wrote a biography about Rush.
I’ve had the good fortune to read it already. It’s not a biography in the usual sense, with emphasis about his personal life. It’s mostly a concise summary of his writings. Really good. I’ve already read a few of his books, I’m reading another now, “A Conflict of Visions,” which I highly recommend.
I have the Sowell book checked out from my library and with me on vacation in MI. Don’t know how much time I’ll be able to devote to it.
So just fix the culture then.
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/video-12-year-old-cousins-brutally-attacked-at-missouris-worlds-of-fun-theme-park/
What’s everybody waiting for?
Uncle Thomas should go give them a good talking to.
Just get the Policy Settings calibrated correctly and Sister Miriam Joseph will have them Twerking to the Terence Rap quicker’n you can say Catfish with Mayonnaise doth signify the End of Days!
“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” — but he had never seen Baltimore.
Zaphod:
That’s the first time I encountered the original Latin. Terence’s mother was taken to Carthage as a slave, so I rather suspect he had seen a thing or two.
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I am human and nothing human is alien to me.
–Terence, Roman playwright, born ~190 BC
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Weirdly, my high school Latin teacher was Sister Miriam Joseph. I got a tiny paranoid chill, when I saw her name in your comment.
Just who have you been talking to…
@Huxley:
*The* Sister Miriam Joseph?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Miriam_Joseph
I’ll bet she could instill Fear.
As it happens, I ran into this Thomas Sowell YouTube on slavery today. Quite good:
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But this is only to say that answers to questions about either slavery or race must be sought in facts not in assumptions or visions and certainly not in attempts to reduce questions of causation to only those which provide moral melodramas and an opportunity for the intelligentsia to be on the side of the angels.
–Thomas Sowell, “Facts About SLÁVERY They Don’t Teach You at School”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nuVhEdAgOY
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YouTube provides a computer-generated transcript to most videos these days — except conservative ‘tubes such as this one. I had to transcribe the above text by hand.
Zaphod:
News to me. No, my SMJ was a Dominican.
She’s still alive in Blauvelt. She was my favorite teacher in Catholic school.
I emailed her a couple times, but received no reply. I imagine she is enjoined by the Church not to be in contact with former students, given the abuse history
From what I understand the Church has removed most priests, brothers and nuns from American parochial schools.
@Huxley:
“From what I understand the Church has removed most priests, brothers and nuns from American parochial schools.”
Natural Attrition must play a great part in this. They’d have to import them in bulk from Africa or the Philippines if they wanted to make a comeback — which they don’t.
I’ve got nothing against Thomas Sowell, just think he’s a Borges or an Erdos. Did great work, but hardly representative of Argentinians or Hungarians.
Now *this* is my kind of African Outlier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sarah
His friend and fellow economist Walter Williams, who passed away in December, in a 1982 documentary on Good Intentions (part 1 of 3, 8 minutes):
https://youtu.be/P1r-r6iLBEI
(includes Charles Murray, who you see at the opening)
A quote from Thomas Sowell in an article posted yesterday:
https://fee.org/articles/unemployed-households-can-earn-25hour-on-welfare-in-21-states-new-study-finds/
I already ordered Maverick. Jason Riley is also a favorite of mine. Have you read Please Stop Helping Us?
Natural Attrition must play a great part in this. They’d have to import them in bulk from Africa or the Philippines if they wanted to make a comeback — which they don’t.
Zaphod:
That’s true. The average age of the American nun these days is close to 80 and she would be retired from teaching.
I went to parochial school in the mid-to-late 60s, the heyday of the American nun. Even so, we had nuns imported from Ireland to minister to the heathen Floridians. My high school is now effectively an expensive prep school.
Sister MJ did OK. I assumed she left the convent during the 70s upheaval. But no. She leveraged her position to get a Ph.D in psych and taught college.
The American nuns I had tended to be old school, but they were bright.
I wish that someone with the intellect and knowledge of a Thomas Sowell was our first Black President instead of the empty suit leftist Barack Obama. Sowell deserves the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Jason Riley is also a favorite of mine. Have you read Please Stop Helping Us?”
Agree and yes. Please Stop is getting older but still many apt observations. I just read it this year.
From what I understand the Church has removed most priests, brothers and nuns from American parochial schools.
Between 1965 and 2000, the annual number of ordinations to the diocesan priesthood declined by about 60%. At the same time, the number attending Mass each week declined by about 1/3. There are a variety of adjustments you can make – closing parishes, ordinations to the vocational diaconate, consolidation of services within parishes &c. One of them is going to be redeploying manpower – likely a good thing when you had priests assigned to administrative positions in the chancery, less so when you had priests assigned to teach school. Congregations tend to be a lot more resistant to parish closures than they do to any other disagreeable phenomenon (e.g. awful music). It’s amazing how pig-headed and innumerate are some Mass-going Catholics when the effects of the manpower problem arrive at your door.
Wretched as the situation is with the diocesan priesthood, with the religious orders it’s catastrophic. I was told by a sister of the Congregation of St. Joseph in 2001 that twice as many postulants had entered her order in 1961 and 1962 as had entered during the period running from 1970 to 2000, i.e they’d suffered a 97% decline in recruitment. Don’t know about men religious. If I’m not mistaken, ordinations to the regular clergy declined by 90% between 1965 and 2000. You’re talking 25 or 30 Jesuit ordinations per year, a half-dozen Franciscans, &c. That was before the pederasty scandals and the Frankenchurch disaster. Last I heard, the Christian Brothers, whose specific charism is school teaching, had a grand total of seven (7) seminarians. Maintaining the order at the membership it had in 1965 would have required about 20 ordinations per year. They weren’t managing even one a year.
NB, brothers, sisters, and religious clergy live communally and take vows which preclude their accumulating property. They are granted modest stipends, not salaries. Catholic schooling was crucially dependent on low cost labor which had had intensive religious instruction. Now you have lay teachers with families who might be rank-and-file parishioners at best.
Catholic schools are no longer sustainable and should be replaced with homeschool co-operatives. Look at the disaster at Charlotte Catholic High School a few years back if you want to see what the reality of Catholic schooling is. A real bishop would have closed the place and sold off the property toute-de-suite.
Am into the last chapter of “Maverick” (the bio about Sowell), and Jason Riley does a very nice job of it (although I would expect no less from Riley.) Riley can give only highlights in his short book, but what a richness of highlights they are. I’ll note that one of Riley’s emphases is to give lots of attention to Sowell’s courage in maintaining his perspectives and conclusory reliance on empirical facts, in the face of decades of criticism that is mostly ad hominem & refusal (or inability) to engage on his arguments.
Were someone wanting to introduce a novice in economics to Sowell, one could do worse than start him off with Riley’s very readable overview of Sowell’s background, and his governing philosophy, and finally, his work.
Sowell’s lifetime oeuvre is so vast that to contemplate reading its totality is quite intimidating. …and yet, because it’s founded in empirical data, though some dated, most of his conclusions still stand firmly today.
I’ve read Sowell’s “Basic Economics,” “A Conflict of Visions,” “Vision of the Anointed,” “Black Rednecks and While Liberals,” and “Knowledge and Decisions.” Yet, I have barely dipped my figurative toe into the depths and breadth of his work. Riley’s book has pointed me to a few more (such as “Conquests and Cultures”) that I’ve now added to my “must read” list.
The Bonus Quotation of the Day, June 16, 2021, from Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, 1987, posted today at the Cafe Hayek blog:
https://cafehayek.com/2021/06/bonus-quotation-of-the-day-656.html
The Quotation of the Day, 6-16-21, from Walter Williams:
https://cafehayek.com/2021/06/quotation-of-the-day-3565.html
Link to the syndicated column where it first appeared:
http://walterewilliams.com/the-racism-of-diversity/
And a tribute to Walter Williams posted today as well:
https://cafehayek.com/2021/06/my-tribute-to-the-late-great-walter-williams.html#more-52421
Professor Boudreaux’s tribute was first published in the Wall Street Journal, but he made it available today at his blog.