I thought so in 1980, and I still do. But I, at least, quit reading the book a few chapters in, when the authors addressed cultural differences among nations, and wholly rejected that cultural differences could explain any differences among national results, with their WHOLE AND ONLY argument being that “Canada and the United States were English colonies, but so were Sierra Leone and Nigeria.
Here is where social (and geographic) mobility becomes important, and Piketty comes into play. Pour en savoir plus, veuillez vous référer aux conditions générales de ces promotions.
. Spaniards looted 200 tons of gold and 18,000 tons of silver. Or they seized more of what others produced or had what they produced taken from them. His basic arguments are fairly well-trodden ground (including being trodden by him), but pithy and exquisitely expressed, and therefore ideal for “beginners.” At the same time, he expands those arguments in ways that aren’t always obvious, and the clarity of his language and thought makes his arguments seem simple and inevitable. Sowell says that over time, there are different people in different income categories.Uh Oh: Sheriff Refuses to Respond to Library's 911 Calls A University of Michigan study traced people over a 15-year period and found that 95 percent of those in the lowest quintile at the beginning of the study were in a higher quintile by the end. “Slippery use of the word ‘privilege’ is part of a vogue of calling achievements ‘privileges’—a vogue which extends far beyond educational issues, spreading a toxic confusion in many other aspects of life.” So much for “white privilege,” surely one of the stupidest neologisms of the decade, the use of which merely serves to show the ignorance and mendacity of anyone who uses the phrase without laughing hysterically.Economic inequality is, and has been for several years now, the talk of the town.
My children do, but only because last...Among the many tools of the superbly effective Left propaganda machine, one of the most effective is its control of publishing. Thomas Hughes published his book in 1989, when Americans believed that the...If the word hagiography had not already been coined, it would need to be invented for this book. Wealth, Poverty and Politics challenges the assumptions, the definitions, the evidence and the reasoning of most of what is said about differences of income and wealth by people in the media, in academia and in politics. . At least this is true of its causes; of its effects, most of all its social...A Time to Die is a small gem of a book which works on two levels. Neither of these are a big deal, of course, but if I had any criticism of the book, other than that I preferred the first to the second edition, this would be it.Do any American children learn about William Tell today? And since cultural receptivity and flexibility is, for Sowell, the touchstone of the ability to flourish in productivity (it is the opposite of cultural isolation), that spells bad things for the Arabs. So, in the US, Latinos agitate and stagnate; Vietnamese work and get ahead.The Great Transformation, published in 1944, is an ambitious book. Sowell drags it back to center focus.For Americans who think that so-called liberal democracy is neither, and in any case is a dead end, successful modern societies with a different political model always intrigue.
But that's not right, because massive foreign aid has been provided to Third World countries and has yet to produce the economic results Germany has had. For someone who came of age imbibing the narrow, facile, weak, always-second-place conservative pieties of the late 1980s and the 1990s,...Much modern popular history is mendacious, written with an ideological agenda that deliberately distorts, or omits, or simply lies about, the truth. And his main accomplishment in the book is ruthlessly reasoning to a conclusion, peeling back extraneous layers and illogical reasoning to bring out a clear, defensible, and essentially irrefutable conclusion. Evidence for this lies in the fact that the physical wealth of Germany was destroyed in World War II but in just a few years it was again a wealthy nation. By this he means characteristics of a group as a whole, as opposed to individual behaviors that create culture. It is quite another experience to observe...The classic American path to technological success has been for driven tinkerers to obsessively work to solve a problem, from Eli Whitney to Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. Because there are so many areas of life in which we have ignored or discounted the cost of accurate and applicable information. Sowell in this section particularly shows his knack for digging deeper than most writers. For example, Spain conquered indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere. Sowell points out “None of the usual explanations of racial disparities—genetics, racism, poverty or a ‘legacy of slavery’—can explain this retrogression over time.” He attributes it to “ghetto culture, essentially an offshoot of the dysfunctional redneck culture of the South.” (He also explicitly rejects slavery and later discrimination as an explanation for black failures; it’d be interesting to see Sowell feed Ta-Nehisi Coates into his intellectual meat grinder.)