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 Outsmarting the Intellectuals January 4, 2010
Ira E. Stoll
138 out of 152 found this review helpful
A book with the title Intellectuals and Society can be expected to range widely, and Thomas Sowell's latest does not disappoint, covering ground from economics to criminology and foreign policy.
In each area, Mr. Sowell's complaint is that intellectuals -- "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas - writers, academics, and the like" - are having negative effects. And, maddeningly, these intellectuals are "unaccountable to the external world," immune from sanction, insulated even from the loss of reputation that those in other fields suffer after having been proven wrong.
The reputation of certain intellectuals may not be quite so immune after Mr. Sowell has finished with them, because he is withering in assessing and recording their failures.
The newspapers take it particularly hard from Mr. Sowell, and not just the American ones. There was the Daily Telegraph's prediction that Hitler would be gone before the end of 1932, and the Times of London's description of the Nazi dictator as a "moderate." Add to this a New York Times column issued by Tom Wicker on the collapse of the Communist bloc, cautioning, "that Communism has failed does not make the Western alternative perfect, or even satisfying for millions of those who live under it."
This book does a wonderful job at marshalling facts to puncture commonly held notions of intellectuals and others who tend to be political liberals. It'd be hard to think the same way about income inequality ever again after reading Mr. Sowell's tremendously clear explanation of confusion between income and wealth and "confusion between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood human beings." By the time Mr. Sowell is done, the confusion is gone.
He does the same job on gun control, on the supposed epidemic of arson fires at black churches in 1996, and on various topics related to crime and punishment. Mr. Sowell can turn phrases back around at left-wing intellectuals like boomerangs. "What is called 'planning' is the forcible suppression of millions of people's plans by a government-imposed plan," he writes. "Many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world - differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing."
Even those already steeped in free-market economic thinking will find new facts and perspectives here. Who knew, for example, that restrictions on land use have so artificially inflated housing prices in San Francisco that "the black population has been cut in half since 1970"?
"The power of arbitrary regulation is the power to extort," Mr. Sowell writes, giving as an example a San Mateo, Calif., housing development whose approval was contingent on the builders turning over to local authorities 12 acres for a park, contributing $350,000 for public art, and selling about 15% of the homes below their market value.
Some of these historical facts may be relevant to our own times, such as Mr. Sowell's observation that, "As President, Hoover responded to a growing federal deficit during the depression by proposing, and later signing into law, a large increase in tax rates - from the existing rate of between 20 and 30 percent for people in the top income brackets to new rates of more than 60 percent in those brackets."
Mr. Sowell does sometime tilts his facts to favor his thesis. For example, there's a whole scathing section about intellectuals who opposed President Bush's "surge" in Iraq, but there's no mention of the fact that the idea for the surge came from a right-of-center policy intellectual, Frederick Kagan. While Mr. Sowell faults "intellectuals" for all kinds of bad thinking, in so doing he relies on and cites approvingly a string of other intellectuals -- Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Eric Hoffer, Paul Johnson, Robert Bartley, James Q. Wilson, Victor Davis Hanson. Mr. Sowell himself, by his own definition, qualifies as an intellectual.
If Mr. Sowell is angry at intellectuals, one reason is for covering up the progress and prosperity of his own country and the open-mindedness of its people. "Data showing the poverty rate among black married couples in America to have been in single digits for every year since 1994 are unlikely to get much, if any, attention in most of the media. Still less is it likely to lead to any consideration of the implications of such data for the view that the high poverty rate among blacks reflects the larger society's racism, even though married blacks are of the same race as unmarried mothers living in the ghetto on welfare, and would therefore be just as subject to racism, if that was the main reason for poverty," he writes.
Intellectuals and Society seems to have been written by Mr. Sowell out of a belief, or a hope, that the society will ultimately outsmart the intellectuals. Armed with Mr. Sowell's book, readers will be in a better position to help do that.
Intellectuals and Society is a Great Book by HowTheWorldWorks January 17, 2010
Devil's Advocate
100 out of 112 found this review helpful
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/RVRQTNW2YIKKS This is a book review by the YouTube channel [...]
Very Informative January 17, 2010
Crosslands (Maryland USA)
20 out of 23 found this review helpful
Dr. Sowell has written a very interesting and informative book about intellectuals and their role and effect in society. Sowell defines an intellectual as someone who works in ideas. According to Dr. Sowell persons in such mentally demanding occupations as medicine and engineering are not intellectuals because these occupations are result driven. The fault line is that such occupations are subject to external criteria of success or failure. For example a complex medical operation either succeeds or fails regardless of how the surgeon states his ideas or how nuanced the language the surgeon uses. Intellectuals operate in a difference situation. Their ideas are only internally verified. Intellectuals are not subject to penalty or loss of credibility for the failure of their ideas. Intellectuals are most often judged by their "verbal virtuosity".
Dr. Sowell then describes the effect of the ideas of leading intellectuals in economics, law, social issues, and matters of war and peace. In most cases the ideas of the intellectuals turned out to be disasters. Yet the intellectuals suffered no consequences. In essence the intellectuals are sealed off from feedback of the negative outcomes of their ideas.
Dr. Sowell points out that the work of scientists, medical doctors, engineers and other mentally demanding occupations have added vastly to human health and well being. He questions whether the impact of intellectuals in toto is in its net effect is positive at all, or whether the intellectuals in general caused much more hurt than benefit.
I do have some quibbles with the book. For example I do not think Herbert Hoover, even if a decent man otherwise, was anything but an abject failure as President. Hoover did not go off the gold standard when such a move was a matter of necessity. However this work is still excellent. The book is one of the better treatment of the intellectual class and is very well written in the bargain. The book should be read by everyone with a interest in the modern world.
Quick! Somebody get a copy of this book to the White House! January 19, 2010
Couts A. Moseley (San Antonio, TX)
29 out of 35 found this review helpful
Let me start by first taking issue with the reviewer that gave this book a single star review. I suspect that the author of that review either didn't read the book or simply shut his mind off during the first chapter, where Mr. Thomas Sowell clearly defines what he means by Intellectuals. We could postulate that all intelligent people that effectively use their minds in the pursuit of their professions, be them scientists, engineers, doctors, or newspaper columnists, are intellectuals. However, Mr. Sowell is very careful to narrow the definition to those "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas--writers, academics, and the like." He is not talking about people whose end products or services are tangible, such as inventors and doctors. That this person (the one-star reviewer) so misunderstood the definition leads me to believe that his post here is solely to attack a man whose logic is a clear and present danger to his own ideological leanings.
Mr. Sowell is further very careful to credit intellectuals who have made a mark in their specific core knowledge or field and only faults them when (believing themselves intellectually superior and apparently all-knowing) they opine on things over which they have no expertise (in some cases) or on which they are wholy ignorant (in others). Therefore, scientists that have created or discovered cures for previously deadly diseases are to be commended; similarly, writers whose "verbal virtuosity" separates them from the rest ought to be commended for their cleverness. When they apply that cleverness to mistaken notions is when they become dangerous.
It is precisely those notions that this book sets out to examine.* In the process, undeniably, Mr. Sowell slaughters many of the Left's sacred cows. Nowhere is he more effective at that than in Chapter 3 (Intellectuals and Economics) where he not only manages to slay some of the left's most sacred cows--the notions surrounding "Income Distribution"--but also grounds them, cooks them, and makes juicy hamburgers out of them. After several well-substantiated examples of intellectuals disregarding and/or ignoring proven (even basic) economic principles, Sowell concludes that many of the intellectuals who have sincerely and passionately supported economic re-distribution are simply economically illiterate!
Mr. Obama would definitely benefit (and the country along with him) from an earnest reading of this book.
*(In the interest of truth, let me state the obvious. Dr. Sowell himself fits the definition of an Intellectual as he defines them in his book--except when he is talking about Economics, as he is an expert in that field. But this is beside the point. There are (were) intellectuals (from the left, the middle, and the right) whose ideas may be valid, whose input does benefit society, and whose influence is still inspiring others to generate beneficent ideas. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln (to name just three), come to mind. The whole point of the book is not to deny that some intellectuals are brilliant. The point is to examine those ideas that did not work, and why even though they did not work, they're still permeating society).
intellectuals: the antithetical reason conservatism is not a fad January 14, 2010
photondn (Florida, USA)
33 out of 41 found this review helpful
Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society is about the intellectuals, their pursuit of their vision, and how pervasive their vision was in society. This book analyzes the attitudes, behaviors, and the vision of the intellectuals. It is somewhat a historical book on the intellectuals and the direction they have taken for society.
I was going give a 4-star rating because it was a tough read. However, I was so ticked-off after reading this book, I gave it a 5-star. The first 100 pages were tough reading but the rest of the book got a little easier. It was sickening reading the devastations and failures society incurred by following the visions of the intellectuals. If you're a previous reader of Sowell's book, the intellectuals and the anointed are pretty much the same.
Here are the highlights and my takeaway:
- The distinction between the tragic vision and the anointed vision.
- The intelligentsia had put society in very precarious situations.
- Unlike those from hard sciences, the intelligentsia lives and breathes on unconstrained ideas without accountability. The intelligentsia places a lot of weight on their ideas regardless of the efficacy of those ideas: vision first, everything else second. Hence, the history of intellectualism is wrought with failure. Unfortunate for society: the invalidated ideas are cheap.
- Since WWI, one could say that dictators' best friends have been intellectuals.
- Members of the intelligentsia might be knowledgeable in their fields of expertise, but by no means experts in all fields. Yet, the intelligentsia is driven to chart the destinies of the populace by means of government regulation and directives.
- Intelligence is a subset of wisdom.
- Intellectuals are very good with verbal virtuosity. So much so that the intellectuals are wowed by their own brilliance and take their own verbal virtuosity as faith without having to validate their arguments. As a result, they believe in unproven and unsubstantiated notions.
- Intellectualism and free markets do not go together.
- Disagree with the right, the right might you are on left-base. Disagree with the left and the left might think you're sub-human. The intellectuals take their beliefs quite personally and their egos can be provoked by questioning the beliefs. Intellectuals seem to have a lot of skin in their beliefs. Competing ideas must fall within acceptable parameters of the collective vision, otherwise it will be dismissed regardless if the idea was beneficial to society or not.
In simple terms, the distinction between the right (conservatives) and the left (the intellectuals) is the difference between living based on individual interests, goals, and pursuits (the right) and living based on limits imposed by a small collective (the left). Attaining individual pursuits, by definition, does not require collective imposition.
This is probably why the right and the left are so polarizing. The fundamentals behind the visions of the left and right are polar opposites. It is like comparing apples and oranges. It is like trying to get polar bears and penguins to get along.
Intellectuals have little faith on the self-reliance of society; probably because of the perceived view that society lacks the cognitive faculties to appreciate intellectualism that the intellectuals endear. Thinking that there is a better world than what the unsophisticated society is currently living and believing that they know more than society, intellectuals try to steer society towards that better world.
Unfortunately, intellectuals mistake intellect for knowledge, and as a result intellectuals try to piece together a solution given the limited scope of their knowledge. This mistake leads intellectuals and society to dangerous times.
I used to think that having intellect requires logic and reason; hence intellectual thought would be full of logic and reason. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. The intellectual thought is a vision based on notions that are derived from a limited scope of knowledge.
After reading this book, I think I know why Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News have made an indelible mark on modern American society. It is because they are the antithesis of intellectualism, which have pervaded the media for about 80 years. They provide an alternative view which is without the intellectual vision and makes the point about flaws in the intellectual vision.
There was a lot more details that I could have added to this review, but I decided to limit the size of the review. I would recommend this book to anyone want to understand the history of intellectualism, their influence on global societies, and how pervasive intellectualism is and was. In a strange way, it is a good antithesis of conservatism.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 26
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