This will be the first of many posts about economist, political columnist, and author of a ton of books dating back to the 70s – Thomas Sowell. Sowell grew up in Harlem, moved out at 17, and joined the army and served in the Korean war. When he came back home he got his undergrad, graduate, and PhD at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, respectively.
Not really surprisingly, his initial political views were Marxist, and it was only the experience of working a government job where he came to understand the inherent flaws and misaligned incentives that tend to come with any government run operation. So, like a lot of people who end up being conservative or libertarian-leaning later on in life – he was on the left in his younger days. I defy you to name me examples of people where the opposite scenario worked itself out.
He picks on the very core of our inherent biases as people, and filters them through an economic lens – and this allows the people who read him to see and understand the motivations and various manifestations of knowledge that inform political movements, social movements, government policies, and simply the mindsets of sets of people that make daily decisions.
Under what constraints and limitations as human beings do we operate under? What IS sufficient knowledge required to make a given decision? Why can (and do) so many unintended things happen when a decision is made, despite the highly plausible pretenses that were the impetus for the decision in the first place? Why does money forcibly changing hands in the form of taxes, subsidies, and other regulations tend to have a longterm and disastrous net effect on an economy, and ultimately serve to benefit no one – save for the people that were elected to execute the initial policy?
These are the kind of thoughts that are neither popular, nor easy to think about and work through. We have been grown up in such a luxury that we can directly benefit from an economic system we know nothing about – and that ultimately is very dangerous. If we don’t know how our current system works and how it gave us what we have, we can’t really know or comprehend movements, ideas, or people that may threaten this system in the name of ego-stroking and ambiguous and ill-defined language designed precisely to numb our docile little minds into subservience.
Needless to say, I love this shit. It runs directly counter to prevailing ideas and wisdom, but man, does it teach you how to think and organize information. You know when you defragment a computer and it reorganizes all the files and data so that when you make a command, the thing runs more smoothly? Reading Sowell is like doing the same thing with your mind.
As I’ve said before, leave the details for someone else. Instead, learn to think about and understand the details you WILL come across in abundance, so you can more smoothly discard obviously bad ones and further explore the good ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell
(^^ This one is very very difficult to get through (its taken me a few weeks to get through 60 pages), and I would suggest starting with something lighter like his “Controversial Essays” books, but this book really helps you understand his points from the ground up, and will GREATLY enhance your understanding of economics)
