Thomas Sowell: Social Justice Fallacies

Hi, everyone.

I'm Brian Kilmeade. Welcome back. Joining me now is Thomas Sowell, author of a brand new book called Social Justice Fallacies, one of the most respected minds and voices in the country today, and it's my privilege to have the multi New York Times bestseller as our guest. Professor, welcome back.

Good being back. First off, tell me about what do you mean by social justice fallacies? There's some truths that aren't truths, I guess.

I'm not sure. One of them is, for example, that there's something very strange about different groups, whether by race, sex, or whatever, have very different representation and different kinds of institutions and activities, and that therefore something sinister must be going on. In point of fact, disparities are virtually universal, as I mentioned in the book itself. You can read reams of social justice literature and not encounter a single example of a country where people from different groups are equally represented in different occupations or activities.

And that's true if you go back, whether you're looking at countries around the world today, or you're looking back through history, you know, for over 1000 years. I mean, you know, there's a lot of people in the Midwest aren't doing what here is discrimination. They want to say it's racism. When you say there's a logic behind almost all of it, and that we can't script outcomes, we can only script opportunities. I think one of the things that we see is born in the middle of the ghetto with muscles identical to those of Rudolph, the great ballet dancer, the chances of that kid becoming another Rudolph must be one in the thousands if that high.

Because he's not going to grow up oriented towards that kind of thing. One of the things that bothers me back when people talk about the days when they had ability grouping in the schools, and it wasn't really ability grouping. It wasn't ability grouping. It was the ability grouping. It was the ability grouping. It was the ability grouping. It was the ability grouping.

And so I think we've seen a lot of people, a lot of people's ideas about how to do that. But we see a lot of people who are not able to go without grouping because we have some students who really don't care about school one way or the other. I don't know how you know what his ability is. Exactly. How they apply themselves. But yet they look at what test scores and they judge what kind of teacher you are, what kind of school system you're in. You also say there's just certain things that are universal and it has to do with the environment. It doesn't mean that society is unequal or people are trying to hold you down. There must be a bias. There must be a reason. There is a reason, but it's not bias, right?

There are more Asians in that area because there's a higher number of Asians with degrees in engineering. That's not, that's not an unfair advantage. That's just a fact.

Yes. And the other thing too is that the idea that we should resent people who have a, who are doing better than we are, I mean, one of my favorite examples personally is, is basketball. Now, when I tried to play basketball as a teenager, I was really awful. I mean, I was lucky to hit the backboard, you know, not, nevermind the basket, but if I were into social justice, I would then hate Michael Jordan because he's such a great basketball player.

Actually, I was a big Michael Jordan fan because I realized that he really could do some stuff. But there's an idea that when someone like say Bill Gates comes along and becomes a multimillionaire that he's somehow subtracting from the wealth of the rest of the society. But there's no fixed or predestined wealth out there. He's probably created trillions of dollars of wealth around the world. And if he becomes a multimillionaire out of it, so be it. But to all those other people who can do any number of things better with a computer than they can without it, all those people benefit financially and otherwise.

And we're talking to Thomas Sowell and that people might be saying, well, that's just conservative thought. That economic thought is, you know, out of the success, you have other people that work for you. Like I might work for Bill Gates and then I might become a manager there. I might learn, I might split off and get my own company, hire other people because I was able to go be a part of a great organization. And that's the theory.

So Bill Gates becomes richer and I have an opportunity to do the same thing because the Microsoft exists. Oh, absolutely. And then as far as conservative thought, I have no objection to people having whatever kind of opinions they do have. What troubles me a lot is that we have notions that catch on in some intellectual elites and these notions are treated as if these were demonstrated facts. In many cases, when you look at the data, you find that the exact opposite happened compared to what they had promised. For example, putting sex education into the school, which is not a new thing, by the way. What was new is the parents found out about it because of COVID had led to a lot of homeschooling. But sex education came in on a mass scale in the 1960s and it came in with a promise that it was going to reduce teenage pregnancy and teenage venereal diseases. And if you go look at the facts, the fact is the teenage pregnancies and teenage venereal diseases were going down in the 1950s. As of 1960, the infection rate for syphilis was among teenagers, was half of what it had been in 1950. Pregnancy rates were going down. You brought in sex education.

All of those things immediately reversed and shut up and they have not come down since then. Similarly with crime, especially homicide, homicide rates for black males in the United States went down by 18% in the 1940s, went down by another 22% in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the federal courts, the Supreme Court especially, created all sorts of new rights for criminals, changed the whole nature of criminal law. And instantly, the murder rate tripled, doubled from 1963 to 1973.

So you could run through a whole list of things like that where you're supposed to produce a good result from this wonderful new bright idea. And in fact, the fact that they'd all show that things got worse. So Thomas Sowell, I know that you tell the story about growing up and that you grew up in Harlem and that you said you never even heard a gunshot in Harlem, but yet we always had the Second Amendment.

Oh my gosh, yes. You know, out here in California, there's a place, East Palo Alto, which a few decades ago had the highest murder rate in the country. The next year, the murder rate was way down. And so the question is, did they discover the root causes of crime? You know, did they get rid of all injustices? No, they put more cops in there and the homicide rate drops. And a number of places, people have pointed out things like this and said, oh, it was amazing. There's even some great coincidence that when you send in a lot of cops, fewer people get killed. Yeah.

And that was so weird to describe this, I almost think you're talking about today. We think the problem was there's too many people in jail and that it's not fair to poor people that they can't afford bail. So now we have zero cash bail and unless you're a violent criminal, you get to stay out of the court.

You get to stay out and be free until your day in court and you see the results. And now instead of backing off on this, Illinois just started it. California's reaffirming it and New York is trying to get out of it.

Well, at least in New York, they looked at the data. But politics is a strange institution. Politics is an institution where you can end your whole career just by admitting the truth that you made a mistake. And in the economy, for example, you know, when Coca-Cola tried to change the flavor and they thought that was a bright idea. When people started to rather stop buying Coca-Cola, suddenly the choice between the people who ran the company was, are we going to pretend that we were right or are we going to stay here and go bankrupt? They decided they'd admit being right and go back to the old cola flavor. Understood. We're talking to Thomas Sowell here.

His book is now out. It's called Social Justice Fallacies. And believe me, these are conversations that people have and they give their opinion. But what you have done, Professor Sowell, is you looked back at the stats and you look at the results through time in this country. And hopefully we'll learn from it because you have no agenda. You just want to get to the bottom line and see if we could change education the way people are viewed and stop blaming everything on prejudice, racism and sexism.

And this week I'm reading the paper today, getting ready for this interview, and I see this story. In New York, they're looking to raise taxes on high income earners. They think they deserve another 5% income tax on what they make, over $250,000, another 7.5% of people make over $323,000.

Now the result has been what? People who make a lot of money, 26 to 45 especially, are leaving this state of New York because they're being taxed too high. What is wrong with the thought of taxing the rich because other people need more money?

Oh my goodness. One of the most successful attempts, actually one of the most successful programs to get money from high income people was done in the 1920s. After the Woodrow Wilson administration, the top tax rate was 73%.

It was pure Republicans in the 1920s, and back in those days, Republicans had some kind of principles. But they came in and they reduced the top tax rate to 25%. Great outcry that this was tax cuts for the rich. In point of fact, the federal government collected more revenue at 25% than they ever collected at 73%. Because at 73%, people put their money into tax exempt securities and it wasn't taxed at all. And so one figure that I remember is at the beginning, people who made a million dollars a year paid 5% of all the income tax revenue. After they cut the tax rate to 25%, people who were making a million dollars a year paid more than 15% of all the tax revenue. And for the simple reason that 25% of something is larger than 73% of nothing.

Understood. And the other thing that you always talk about is people think you're going to just take their money and they're not going to do anything. Like of course, if you're going to take 75% of my money, I'm going to put it someplace else where you can't get it. I know how hard it took to earn it. And what we always hear from this president in particular is, I'm not for you being wealthy.

I don't care if you're going to be wealthy. You can do that, but just pay your fair share. That bothers you a lot. What do you, what is fair share? Well, they will never define it because it has no meaning. It's what, it's, it's, someone wants to ask, Samuel Gober is the great labor leader. Well, what, what, what does labor want? He said more. And that's true of politicians.

They want more so that they can never tell you what the fair share is or on what basis you would figure it if you could, quite aside from whether you ever collected. So Thomas, the other thing you talk about too is civil rights legislation and what it meant. Was there a need?

Absolutely. You know, in 1865 we ended the civil war. Reconstruction kicks in. We have the compromise of 1877. We take a huge step backwards with the end of reconstruction, essentially, separate but equal and the Jim Crow laws come into effect. But the one thing that was happening, as evil as it was, the black family was intact.

And as much as no one will ever make excuses for back of the bus, separate water fountains, they'll, no one will ever say that that'll ever be okay. The one thing about the African, the black family, can't even say African American, could be Caribbean American, doesn't matter, is that the family was intact. How important was that family unit in retrospect? Oh, it was huge.

It was huge. And you can tell that by what happened when, when the family disintegrated. There's a, there's a monumental study called the Black Family and Slavery and Freedom by Herbert Gutmann. Anyone who wants to get some facts that's distinguished from rhetoric, rhetoric should read that. The, there were, there were, there were heart-rending stories after, after the end of slavery where many people began looking for their relatives who had been sold somewhere else and being illiterate that they would have someone write, write letters for them.

They would send them to some local church where they thought maybe a son or brother or a cousin was, and then these would then be read out the church. And so the enormous struggles to reconstitute families that had been split by slavery itself going on for decades after the Civil War. And today we have places where, you know, there are women on welfare who've had children by a number of men, none of whom take any interest in them, even though the kid is right, right down the block. And that is not peculiar to blacks, by the way. The very same pattern exists in England and to the very same degree. And yet near the underclass is predominantly white. So they have no, they have no racism to face. They have no legacy of slavery and they have the exact same phenomena. You have it in schools as well as in the families. And so the seizing upon this historical tragedy to explain everything leaves out the fact that the black family in 1940, more than four fifths of all black children were raised in two parent families. Before that century was over, it was down, you know, to less than a third. So this happened after the welfare state came in.

So I want you to hear Tim Scott is getting criticism, and I don't think he minds it. I think he wants a debate just recently said about that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has not helped the black community. As you know, South Carolina senator running for president, let's listen. Black families survived slavery. We survived poll taxes and literacy tests. We survived discrimination. What was hard to survive was Johnson's Great Society, where they decided to put money where they decided to take the black father out of the household to get a check in the mail. And you can now measure that in unemployment, in crime and devastation. So people, Democrats got offended that he took on the Great Society. Where do you stand, Thomas Sowell?

Everywhere he said it was absolutely correct. The Democrats should stop being offended and start facing facts. On the other hand, the Republicans are not always facing facts either. So in the Great Society, it might have been well-intended, but the result was the essentially incentivization of getting welfare checks. And if you have at one point a single-parent family, you'd get more money.

Oh, absolutely. And the data in my book shows that, you know, black married couple families have had poverty rates under 10 percent for more than a quarter of a century, every year for more than a quarter of a century, starting in 1994. And so the differences between races are not necessarily racial differences, either in the sense of genetics or in the sense of discrimination, that where there are behavioral differences from different cultures, which there always are, those who have a certain behavior pattern do not have the same consequences. By contrast, white female-headed families have had much higher poverty rates than black married couple families. It's not the race as such.

It's the behavior patterns. And you think one of the great things that happened to you is you did have a two-parent family. You were adopted. You were living in New York City, and you asked your family, you know, when did I start talking?

He goes, we don't know, because your feet never hit the floor. You were being held so much. And that really laid the foundation to be this great person you ended up becoming. Well, I know that it was really more like a four-parent family in the sense that I was the only child in a family of four adults.

So I had a lot of people there to, and in the early years especially, when everything is so crucial. And Thomas, also, you bring up the fact that there's reasons why certain people are successful. For example, the oldest child in a family tends to be more successful because at a time they were the only child.

And you said it's not a coincidence that most astronauts were the oldest in their family. How does that figure into what you become? Well, the question about it, because they saw things, even though they had little education, they were thinking ahead about my future. And of course, when I was a kid, I wasn't thinking about the future.

To me, the future was two weeks from now. But they met some kid who was very bright and very intellectually oriented. And they immediately, the light bulb went on that he should sort of take me in hand.

He's a year older than me. And it was through him that I went into a public library for the first time, having no idea what a public library was. Little things can change lives. As you look at your life now and look at what we've experienced as a country, you remember the segregated South. That's not stranger to you. You don't have to read that in the book.

You lived it. But as we look now, we seem to be more racially aware now than ever before. But in essence, is America more equal than it ever was?

Oh, no, I know. The painful irony is that as the rates of intermarriage have risen to levels far beyond what they were in the past, everybody is now more intensely into a racial identity. And that's not the issue to the United States. The same thing you see it in New Zealand, where the Maoris are constantly talking about their identity.

I don't know if there are any, how many pure-blooded Maoris there are in New Zealand as compared to those who are Maori and white. And what are you going to do if you're going to have reparations, for example? How are you going to unscramble all these people when an absolute majority of black Americans have Caucasian genes? So do you look at America? I mean, would you see progress in race relations today? I see progress where people have been left alone to work things out themselves. I see a lot of retrogression where there are presumptuous people among intellectuals and among opportunistic politicians who are playing up racial differences in order to win votes. And today, when you saw the George Floyd riots and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and then you mentioned reparations, especially in the West Coast, the brainchild of your genius planner, are those things, do you think, show progress? Are they disturbing to you?

No, no, no. My gosh, it makes me wonder if we're not buying problems much bigger than any human being can solve. The George Floyd riots were especially painful to me because when you think about it, what were the people protesting? They say, well, they protested what the policeman did. It was an evil thing that the policeman did. Everybody I know, one of the most conservative radio broadcasters went ballistic denouncing the policeman.

I can't think of any incident in American history where there was more, at the very least 99 percent agreement. The cops shouldn't have done it. He should have been fired. He should be indicted.

He should be tried, convicted and sentenced. All of that happened. So what was the, you know, if you're going to riot with his unanimity, what are you going to do when there are differences of opinion? And then we saw what happened. It rippled through the country.

Then the pandemic hits and it was a very stressful time in America. Just looking back at race relations, I wrote the President Freedom Fighter. You study Frederick Douglass and where he came from, slavery, how the meager means in which Abraham Lincoln came back from, and then picking up where he left off, Booker T. Washington, who overlapped with Frederick Douglass, was able to put together educational institutions in the segregated South. Yet today, Booker T. Washington is not necessarily embraced by the black community.

Do you understand why? Oh, his program was different from theirs. He was trying to make sure that the blacks acquired skills at Tuskegee Institute, which he founded. And one of the skills they taught was building skills. And so many of those buildings were built by the students themselves on the basis of what they had been taught. And they were making their own bricks. And even in the segregated South, whites would come over to Tuskegee Institute to buy bricks because they could get a better deal there. And then in the end, it was all about raising intellects and academics, but also learning a trade. Because at that time, the white community wasn't looking necessarily to hire blacks. So make yourself invaluable.

For yourself, for others, start your own business. Yes, there was segregated South and there was racism. Overcome it was his attitude. Does Thomas Sowell have that same attitude?

Yes, I think that we get so much attention to racists. When I look at groups around the world, and I spent a lot of time studying that over the years, the groups that rise from poverty to prosperity almost never have any charismatic leaders who believe them protesting against other groups, no matter how justified the protesting would be. They invest their time and energies into acquiring skills that have value in the marketplace. And that's how they arose. In the United States, for example, there was a time 100 years or so ago when the people of Japanese and Chinese immigrants could not legally own property in California. They didn't spend their time worrying about that.

They built up their own skills and went on. But now I don't believe racists today can do half as much damage to the younger generation of blacks as the teachers unions are doing every day. And because the way they, the low expectations, the lack of quality care, it's not a lack of money, lack of funding, you see the staggering results on academic standards when it comes to the cities. Most of them run by African-American mayors, run by school, most of them are filled with minority students. But it's not because minorities aren't capable of everything others are capable of. It's all about the situation which they're born into and the classroom as well as the curriculum.

Yeah. Well, I did a book on charter school a few years ago in which I compared schools in New York City where the black and Hispanic kids were in charter schools were located in the very same building with black and Hispanic kids from traditional public schools. In fact, I myself went to one of those schools when I was a teenager. And those schools, the ones, the black and Hispanic kids who are in the traditional public schools reached the required level of math 7% of the time in the charter school, in the very same building, serving the very same community, 100% of the students met the standards.

Now, you know, you can't explain that by race, you can't explain it by race, and you can't explain it by test bias. So the thing is, Dr. Sol, for the most part, teachers in the public school are even getting paid more and their days are shorter. So you can't say, well, you get what you pay for. Not really. If you look at what they're producing in these charter schools, you're getting a longer day, more demands, usually a uniform, and the demands result in better results.

Worse than that. People don't understand that charter schools were set up with the idea that you would have an experimental kind of school, and if some things worked there, you could transfer that to the larger, regular public schools, fine. What happened is that the charter schools have so outperformed the traditional public schools that the traditional public schools know they're never going to be able to do what the charter schools are doing. And so there are laws, including in California, that are forcing the charter schools to do the counterproductive things that the public schools are doing in order to save the jobs of the unionized teachers and in order to continue for the unions to take in billions of dollars in union dues every year. And you would think that, OK, well, I love what that charter school is doing. Let's learn from that.

Instead, they look at them as the enemy. And I don't know if you've been involved, but I watch what's happening on in New York all the time, and they're trying to keep down the charter schools. It was supposed to be dozens more, but they're just leaving them empty. And they're not staffing them up and putting kids in there because it would hurt the amount of people in the public schools. But if you really cared about minorities like you claim to, you'd want to fill up those charter schools because you want the results. Better educated, highly motivated students. Yeah, the last time I checked, there were 50,000 students in New York City trying to get into charter schools and not able to do so.

In California, it's even worse. In 2019, a law was passed saying that disruptive students cannot be expelled from from charter schools. Now, you know, in other words, the charter schools had had behavioral standards. And so instead of raising the behavioral standards in the public schools, they would rather deliberately handicap the charter school.

It is quite cynical. I just like to go back in history, by the way, with talking to Thomas Soler's new book that you need to read, The Social Justice Fallacies. He goes out and gets the facts about institutions and the families and races and lets everybody know that we aren't necessarily in a, we're not in a racist society. There were societal reasons why certain things happen. And one of the things we could all do is if you want to raise somebody, you raise them in a stable family.

That's probably the best thing you could do if you want your kid to be successful. But just looking back in history, it's just amazing how the smartest people, if you look back in time, had opinions because that's how they were brought up. I know Benjamin Franklin was brought up and he was a guy who had slaves and he just thought, well, whites are smarter than blacks and that's just the way it is. And then later on he would find out and see black kids in school and see the results and start noticing there is no difference. He became the ultimate abolitionist in his lifetime. And then other people like Booker T. Washington would notice that people were brought up in environments where they were always told from the time they were kids that whites were smarter than blacks or blacks weren't smart.

And that would gradually change with time. And then you see people like Andrew Carnegie and the rich and famous who stand up and speak out and support people like Booker T. Washington and do the best they can to help the African American cause because things change. People are born with perceptions and they're wrong, but it doesn't mean they're necessarily evil.

It means they need to be better educated and exposed to the realities, which your book does with exposing the fallacies. But if you look back in time and you say, well, Benjamin Franklin had slaves. We got to hate him.

Well, George Washington had slaves. We got to hate him. I think that's a very dangerous thing to do, don't you?

Yes. What our schools are doing is teaching kids to hate strangers who have done nothing to them. Now, that is not a good future either for those kids or for this whole society. Because once you start tolerating that from one side, you'll start seeing the same thing happening on the other side. At that point, there'll be such outrage that the actual substance of issues won't matter anymore.

There'll be people out for revenge and counter revenge on and on. So when you see the taking down like they voted in the city council, I feel like I'm talking a lot about New York, but the city council is voting to possibly take down seven statues in Manhattan of George Washington, a place where we actually had the first White House where he got and said goodbye to his troops after winning the Revolutionary War. I mean, does this astound you that we got to this point as a black man? Do you agree with that?

How do you feel about this? I think it is staggering that in a place like New York, with all the problems they have, the murders, being overwhelmed by these tens of thousands of immigrants and everything else, that someone has time to spend on statues, what they say about Washington and other such people is a gross distortion of the reality. But that's a wholly different question. The more fundamental question is how serious are you when children are being killed? You are worrying about statues.

Absolutely. So at your point in your life, you've accomplished so much and gone through so much, and people can learn about this country by looking at your biography. Why was it important for you, now in your 90s, to put out social justice fallacies?

Was there something you're seeing that you felt you needed to address? Well, yes, we have reached the point where people try to silence those who face something different from what the current fashion is. And that's dangerous because human beings, whatever their beliefs, are all fallible. And the one saving grace is that we can see other people's fallacies and they can see ours. But if some people think they have found the ultimate truth, then they want to shut out everybody. Unfortunately, even our most prestigious educational institutions have that policy that you can go through from literally kindergarten to the PhD without ever having seen a different viewpoint on many issues. Is that why we're so divided today? We just can't see the other side because we haven't been asked to open up our minds? It's worse than that. We have been told to close our minds, that if someone says A and someone else says Z, they don't bring out their arguments and counterarguments.

They engage in ad hominem dismissals. And that's when you're really dangerous. You have it all figured out and you don't want to hear what anybody else has to say. So do you know, as much as you've accomplished and as much as you know, you approach every day knowing there's the opportunity to learn, right?

Absolutely. Because like so many other people, I had very different views when I was in my 20s than I have today. And the difference is I've had, you know, many decades of studying facts and virtually all the things that I thought were true. And when I was in my 20s, I see now the facts go completely the opposite way. So interesting.

And then you're still so motivated to get the word out. Are you worried about this country? Yes. I think that the disasters that clever people have committed over this all throughout the 20th century successfully, they may have the power, in fact, they may well have the power to destroy Western civilization, which would be an appropriate encore for what they've done in the 20th century. What do you mean by that? For example, a genocide was created by people on the political left in the 19th and the days of progressives in the early 20th century. We got into World War II because the fad of the times was that the way to stop wars was to disarm. Well, of course, we found out that, no, that's how you can start wars because the other side doesn't disarm and they see a chance to attack you. The Great Depression was grossly mismanaged largely by highly intellectual people. And now, of course, the whole social degeneration is set in the wake of the 1960s, not only in the United States, but throughout Western Europe and in other parts of the world. The trends don't look good. And when you look at what's happening in Ukraine and the Russians on the march and their combination with the Chinese and North Koreans in Iran, do you see another Axis powers formulating?

Oh, yes, yes. Most people don't realize no nation with nuclear powers has been invaded by another army. The Ukraine had nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union broke up. Under pressure from many other countries, including the Obama administration, they gave up the nuclear weapons and now they're invaded. I don't think that anybody would have invaded them if they had kept their nuclear weapons. But I don't see anybody even mentioning this as one of the factors going on.

They just pass over it because they cannot admit to having been wrong. Right. And that's what's a part of your book, The Social Justice Fallacies, proving with facts and data and research what is right and what is wrong. Thomas Sowell, thanks so much. Congratulations on the book. Thank you. Listen to this show ad free on Fox News Podcast Plus, on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music with your prime membership or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.