Books Knowledge And Decisions
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Rating: - Impressed by honest conservatism
In this day of spurious conservatives seeking political power by any means, Sowell's conservatism deserves attention. If you are ready to be challenged, read it!

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Rating: - Anointed
Dr. Sowell offers a very readable argument for the proposition that people should make political choices on the basis of what is actually good for them, and not on the basis of what their self-appointed "betters" think that they ought to want. Required reading for anyone whose political feet are not already set in concrete. Love it or hate it, it will force you to think. (Your brain is more important than your abs.)

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Rating: - This book is excellent, but must be read VERY carefully.
I have read about 12 of Thomas Sowell's books now, give or take. They do tend to be over-wrought with detail, but in this case it may be that he really did need as many pages as he used to say what he did and could have used more by filling in specific examples.

Kudos to Sowell for using the very accurate idea of *social behavior* as a basis for explaining intergroup difference (rather than something so tenuous as IQ), and the separation of the actions of specific agencies from "society." Most writers do not bother to clearly delimit their operational terms and working notions. Also particularly clever was his observation of how institutions work as a matter of *self-interest* and create problems because it is in their best interest to have these problems.

The book must be read LINE by LINE. When he uses some of his very abstract statements to characterize a social process it is often NOT filled in with details. A theme that appears in many of his books is: "If it has happened once, it will happen again independent of settings." While you go through and read some of his statments, you will have to think back through your experiences of life and see if you have seen the same situation. And THAT is what makes this book take such a long time to read--expect it to take a month if read properly.

The index is excellent and I found it particularly useful for referencing subjects like black IQ research and things like that. Well researched if nothing else, and it goes a LONG way in explaining current situations by extrapolations of things in the book itself.

Perhaps it could have been made just a bit easier to read. Again: this is NOT light reading, and while it is chock full of information, it is WAY over the heads of most people.

This book is *required reading* for young black Americans. If paid careful attention to, it will do great things to break some of the bad habits that have infected us for a long time now. Really, it is a good book for any people who are looking for concrete reasons for group differences. And maybe in the case of the readers who would be the greatest beneficiaries of it (black Americans, from my view), it would undo some of the damage caused to young Blacks by Black Studies departments across the nations.

Feel free to email me with any questions/ comments.

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Rating: - Knowledge can be costly...
This is indeed one of Sowell's tomes. Knowledge costs are different for different people. Some knowledge is extremely costly to acquire in both time and money. Articulation may not be an expression of knowledge, but a talent for using words; however, some incorrectly think that if someone has good articulation, then he must know what he is speaking of.

Sometimes the most important decision to be made is WHO is to make a decision. The further away from the knowledge on which the decision must be based the "decider" is, the less informaiton he has and he is more likely to make an incorrect decision. This explains the folly of most regulation: generally speaking, regulators cannot know what it is they are regulating. Shocking as this might be, but it takes sometimes years - maybe decades - for one person to gain knowledge in some areas of patient treatment, but yet people in the FDA regulate the medical industry anyway with the total impossibility of them ever knowing even a fraction of a percentage of what they are regulating! Of course, this is not unique to the medical field, but applies to all fields - regulators are too far away from the correct KNOWLEDGE to make some types of decisions. This fact of knowledge is inescapable, permanent, and nobody can change it.

Sowell also shows the effects of insurgent movements on social policy and how the movements still exist long after they have outlived their usefulness - beyond their point of diminishing returns. He also shows how the courts really screwed up the judicial system by crusading for social causes instead of interpreting the constitution. In the quest for "solving" problems, many social insurgent groups forget that some problems will never be solved and we just have to live with the necessary trade-offs such situations present to us - some of these groups forget that their "solutions" create other problems that they did not forsee. They forgot that life's problems is weighing trade-offs and some "solutions" replace one problem with another.

The theme, for the most part, is coming to terms with a fact of life: we must decide what trade-offs we want to live with. We cannot perfectly manage all of the information out there, and some of the information is too costly to get for some people. We must balance what we know against the chances of what we do not know. Much is left to chance and that is life.