Transcripts For CSPAN2 Discussion 20131130 : vimarsana.com

Host you talk about intellectuals clustering together as a whole. What do you mean by that . Guest is someone called the herd of independent minds and they tend in a given era to believe pretty much the same things. They may change as the groove from one to the other. For example during the First World War intellectuals on the left were gung ho for the First World War. After they saw the carnage of it they all became pacifists, again as they heard afterwards and remained pacifists for i guess perhaps to this day. Host how to intellectuals trust when it comes to raise . Guest they have clustered in different ways. Early in the 20th century they clustered behind the belief that genes determine everything. That some races were inferior and some more superior and that means the people on the left and John Maynard Keynes who was one of the founders of the cambridge eugenics society, many distinguished leading intellectuals of that era were absolutely dogmatic on the subject. Then by the end of the century they swung to the other end of the spectrum, again as a group and anyone whod dared to disagree with them was regarded as a racist. Host dr. Thomas sowell on the where are intellectuals clustered in your view on this today . Guest they are still clustered. At the end it says that all differences between groups must be do or presumptively due to others. They are impervious to evidence. For example the housing situation, when they discovered that they were turned down by prime Mortgage Loans at a higher rate than whites that was due to racial information. If you look at the same statistics on blacks and whites and look at the statistics for asianamericans it undermines that completely. For example when blacks were turned down at a rate nearly double that of whites, at the very same time whites were turned down at a rate nearly double that of asianamericans. Moreover, blackowned banks turned down blacks at a still higher rate than the why dont banks did. So you find it very hard to reconcile with what they believed. But there is a tendency among intellectuals to have a preconception and when they find numbers that seem to fit that preconception they dont go any further. They have no reason to look up the data for asianamericans which undermines the whole argument they have made. Host in your book sub intellectuals and race you talk about the fact of emotion talking about race. How do you get rid of that factor or can you get rid of that factor . Guest you can to a great extent as a practical matter. One of the things ive noticed in many countries around the world people of different races to get along together and sometimes even lived as neighbors for generations and yet when the right demagogue comes along you can turn them against each other and they can be at each others throats. In india. It has helped and in sri lanka and its happened in nigeria. You can run through a whole list of countries so its not a wholly spontaneous thing. Many years ago one of the less memorable songs himself pacific said youve got to be taught to hate. Intellectuals have taught people to hate those that are better off than themselves. Host who are some of the demagogues he referred to . Guest oh happens they are different in different countries. Sri lanka was one of the most painful examples. Sri lanka was held up in midcentury as a model of the country where people of different races got along wonderfully and they did. The educated members of these two different groups lived in the same neighborhoods. They have different religions. They would attend Holiday Services in the house of worship and so on. That was fine until he decided he wanted the Prime Minister and then he turned them against each other and the tamils turned against the similes. These people who never had a race riot in the entire first half of the 20th century began to have riots which then escalated into outright civil war. It went on for decades with unspeakable atrocities and more People Killed in this Little Country than the americans lost during the entire vietnam war. So its a scary example of how a given time things may look very good on the surface and yet when the right demagogue comes along in the right circumstances people can be turned against each other with hate. Host at in your view sub toni had their been dr. Thomas sowell one on a have there have been in the United States . Guest its one of the most lucrative occupations. Some have said if i have tried to convert Jesse Jackson to my views in times said im sure Jesse Jackson makes 10 times what i make great how can you ask a man to reduce his income by 90 . Host what is there race that you talk about . Guest the naacp played an Important Role but one of the problems within the institution that has one goal is once they have achieved that old they dont say all right folks we are having a going out of business ceremony. They have to go on. The eeoc for example they have to prevent discrimination but is they have to expand the definition of discrimination so now if you dont want to hire people who have been in prison they think thats discrimination. Host you write in intellectuals and race that the kind of society to which that can lead when you talk about the race industry etc. Is one in which a newborn baby injures the world supplied with prepackaged grievances against other babies born on the same day. Guest yes, yes. This idea that you can redress history which we have seen in specific contexts in this country, its around the world. The czechs after the world war one of the goals they had was to address the injustices of the 17th century. Nobody from the 17th century was alive that they end of the First World War. They tried to take this out by having policies that would favor the germans and so on and they set in motion a chain of events in which the czechs and the germans were worse off than they have ever been before and both were victims of tragedy trying to undo what happened to people who were now long dead. Host do we have policies in this country that are formed in the same way . Guest oh yes. Affirmative action, the demand for reparations and so on. One of the sad things is that we talk in this country as if slavery was something unique to the United States or to blacks and whites and in fact slavery was one of the oldest institutions among human beings. They go far back as theres recorded history. Every single corner of the world. Pollination since late other polynesians. For most of history people enslaved people who work the same race themselves for the simple reason that they said they didnt have the resources to go to another continent and take people and move them someplace else but late in history and this is what happened in the United States in the western hemisphere. Many thanks, much of the pathologies of the black community is said to be a legacy of slavery. The irony is if you look at the facts, for example the breakdown of the family, most a lot kids grew up in homes with two parents. Under slavery itself in three generations thereafter and as late as the 1960s, most black children grew up in two parent homes. Its only when you started having massive societies and other such things that you see in in the family that has survived all of this for all this time now began to disintegrate. Host from intellectuals and race dr. Thomas sowell theres other evidence that the black sub culture has a negative effect on intellectual achievement. In other words brighter black students do not perform as well and settings where there are many other lakh students around them contrary to the theory that what is needed in educational institutions is some larger Critical Mass of black students clear guest studies that i sighed and there will show that subs not just my opinion. One of the studies i did many years ago was in Dunbar High School in washington which is a really outstanding allblack academic institution. Over the years from 1892 to 1894 think it was graduates of Dunbar High School went to amherst college. Threequarters of these kids graduated and of those who graduated more than one quarter for phi beta kappas soap clearly you dont need a Critical Mass. They never had anything resembling a Critical Mass. What you need is a good educational background and the absence of people who are distracting you from what the purpose of the colleges. Host is there a relationship or an important relationship between race and mental capacity . Guest capacity, if you mean by capacity potential, then who knows . You cant measure potential currently and i suspect for the next 100 years or so probably. What you can recognize and measure his capacity, developed capabilities over s. A. T. s and stuff like that but potentially you cannot. Guest . Host when it comes to race how does that play into the measurements that we have today . Guest im not sure what you mean by that great. Host is there a correlation between iq and what we have on what we are able to measure today and raise . Guest oh sure. There has always been a mom all sorts of people around the world. I mean people into hebrides island have the same iq as in washington the United States and probably for similar reasons. People from isolated cultures tend not to have the same as people who are in culture that have a larger culture universe to draw upon. So the data for measuring what is likely to happen with the given person in a given circumstance whether its the ultimate potential at the moment of conception no one has come close to making like that. Host in intellectuals and race and by the way where did this book come from . Guest [inaudible] host why did you break out for raise . Guest i was urged to bring a second book to begin with and i said what do she no . I realized she was right. So i said all right. Host how about asianamericans who often seem to as a group reform that are in school than other groups. Why is that . Guest i think the one fourletter word we cant use is work. They just work. I remember when i was teaching at ucla and i had to go on saturday nights to the Research Libraries and as i looked around almost everybody i saw were asianamerican. I looked in vain for any black students there and there werent many white students there so the following week when i go to classifying the asianamericans better prepared. Theres no real mystery to it to me. They work. Host do you teach here at stanford . Guest no, i have not taught here at stanford. When i first came there were little hence that i might when i went to seminars but i never got those hints. Host do you miss teaching at all . Guest yes and no. Teaching as it is today, no. Teaching as it was when i started out in 1962 in a Little College in new jersey, i really loved it. When i taught my last class at the end of the week i was looking forward to the next class the following monday. Over the years the academic world change drastically and now when i got the offer from the Hoover Institution which involved the teaching at all i said this is it. There are many people out there who may well have wanted to teach that the conditions of teaching in the universities became such that it was just not worth it. Host which one of those conditions has changed . Guest i think the attitude of the students, the faculty and the administration. It doesnt leave much else. [laughter] the students really began to think that they showed up her class that obey was a constitutional right. Students would come to me at the end of the class and they would say im a graduating senior. Do you believe in predestination . They thought it must my responsibility to see that they graduated. Ive never took that view. Host s dr. Thomas sowell is our guest and we are on the campus of Stanford University talking him about his most recent book intellectuals and race. How many books have you written . Guest you know i havent counted them. Host i think its about 25. Guest it may well be. Host as the milton and a friedman guest i was asked that as an Expert Witness in the opposing Attorney Says it says you here you are senior fellow. Just what is a senior fellow to . I said a senior fellow has no hours and no duties and the judge said i wouldnt mind having a job like that. Host do you just spend the day thinking . Guest thats it. I once wrote bears nothing but Brilliant Ideas and its just exhausting. [laughter] host dr. Thomas sowell hahne when you talk about cosmic justice what do you mean by that . Guest i guess with some people mean by social justice, which is the justice for groups, and initial opportunity to have the same life chances but i call it cosmic justice because no society is able to do that or has ever done that. What you are asking for is for the whole life chances to be the same and if you think of all the differences its virtually impossible. Some kids may be raised in families that are at the same economic level but one family has one set of attitudes towards education and the other while not. The one family that does not have that same attitude, he may be a fine fellow and maybe write in all of that but he doesnt have the same object entities. Theres almost no way he could have the same chance. Host our goals like economic equality or economic opportunity, racial equality, are those good goals for the nation . Guest if you mean by equality of opportunity, yes. If you mean any belief that you are going to get the same end results, the answer is no. With those kinds of goals do is simply tear a society apart often making them all worse off than they would have been otherwise. Its sad, affirmative action takes minority students and mismatches them with institutions. For example when i was at colonial the average black student enrolled in corneil at that time scored in the 75th percentile in the s. A. T. s. The average white student at cornell at that time scored in the 99th percentile. Half of the students were on academic probation. You have kids who would have been on the deans list that they were sent to colleges where they were virtually guaranteed not to make it. Host are there any affirmative action of them so you think are worthwhile . No. Thats the easiest question of all. Host . Or sowell i mightve just asked you this but ive are you forgotten the answer. Are you working on another book right now . Guest this is one of the few times in my life when i do not have another book underway at the moment. Well, im always up dating so if you mean that im always doing that. But if you mean in my starting on a new venture in bookwriting not for the moment. Host you mentioned that at the beginning of this interview that intellectuals in your field should have your approval. Guest i didnt say they should have. If they all get the same idea becomes unstoppable. Host do you have your approval . Guest i have never asked my peers for their approval. Host why not . Guest i dont care. Host what would you like your legacy to be when it comes to what your work over the years has created . Whatever it is its going to be, i wont be here to know it so it really doesnt concern me that much. Host do you like doing Television Interviews . Guest sometimes. I wouldnt want to put a percentage on it. Host how well did you know Milton Friedman . Guest i was a student of his at one time. Of course he was the reason that i was brought to the Hoover Institution with a book called knowledge and decisions. Really one of the fine h