Thomas Sowell: Facts Against Rhetoric, Capitalism, Culture and Yes, the Tariffs | Hoover Institution

One guest on this program, one is more requested by far than any other. Thomas Soul on Uncommon Knowledge. [Music] Now, welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Thomas Soul lived in Gastonia, North Carolina to the age of nine when his family moved to Harlem. After attending New York City public schools, Thomas Soul worked in machine shops, tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, moved to Washington DC to join the civil service, became a United States Marine, and finally settled into a track in higher education that would take him from Howard University to Harvard University where he

did his where he where he received his undergraduate degree to Colombia where he earned his masters and then to the University of Chicago where he earned his doctorate in economics. After teaching at institutions including Douglas, Cornell and UCLA, Dr. Soul joined the Hoover Institution here at Stanford where he has remained a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution for more than four decades. Dr. Soul is the author of thousands, literally I checked this thousands of newspaper and magazine columns and of some five dozen books. His newest project is a website factsag against rhetoric which you can

find at facts against rhetoric.org. We're announcing this website today in this podcast for the very first time. So let me repeat it. Facts against rhetoric.org. Tom, welcome back. Good being here. Tom, your website I've spent hours with it now. It repres represents a kind of syllabus or curriculum for the right way the correct way to think about modern life with topics ranging from culture to economic issues to education to war and peace. Why did you go to the trouble of pulling these materials together? Wouldn't students come across this material in ordinary college courses in any

event? No. Uh I thought I thought of it as enabling students to get an education despite being in [Laughter] college. All right. Um questions. All my questions today are drawn from the website or use the website as a point of departure. Economic issues. Under the heading on the website of economic issues, you provide a link to your classic work, basic economics. A brief passage from that book. I'm quoting basic economics. Empirical questions are questions that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well-being of others. Perhaps the most important distinction is between what

sounds good and what works. on the one hand what sounds good on the other what works. Why is that distinction so important? I guess it was because uh rhetoric and and uh visions play such a large part in in in higher education uh that that uh the question of whether some vision is correct what what they believe is correct. I saw a re recently a replay of something by AOC, the congresswoman. Yes. Uh from New York. And as I listened to her, I I just was amazed that uh there seemed to be no factual issue

as far as she's concerned. She just pronounces things to be so and that's the end of it. And unfortunately I think uh many too many certainly uh college students and students in high schools for that matter are introduced to a certain vision of the world where for example the capitalists are exploiting the workers and so on and they just memorize that and they talk about as if it's a known fact and there's and there's no uh developing in those students the ability to look at two different views and and try to figure out which of

them is is correct. Uh to me that back when I was teaching if I I taught a course that had a lot of controversial stuff in it, I would spend a great deal of time of putting together a reading list where I would find the strongest argument on one side of a particular argu argument and then the the opposing view the f best best example I could find of that and I would then present that to the students and when I tested them I didn't test them on which side you believed. I tested them on

whether they understood the arguments on both sides. I suspect from what I see and hear that that that is something that's rarely done today in in uh education at the college or high school level. I see. So the old-fashioned principle of teaching which is that before you make up your mind where you stand, you make sure you understand where the other person stands first. Yes. All right. Uh Tom, again on your website factsag against rhetoric.org, you provide a reading list, but you also provide links to a a number of videos and podcasts. Here's one. This

is a link to your old professor at the University of Chicago and then for many years your colleague here at the Hoover Institution, Milton Freriedman. In this video to which you link on your website, Milton is addressing the question, is capitalism humane? Take a look at this if you would with me, Tom. It's true that if you had a concentrated power in the hands of an angel, he might be able to do a lot of good as he viewed it, but one man's good is another man's bad. And the great virtue of a market capitalist

society is that it pre by preventing a concentration of power. It prevents people from doing the kind of harm which really concentrated power can do. So that I conclude that capitalism per se is not humane or inhumane. Socialism per se is not humane or inhumane. But capitalism tends to give give free reign much freer to the more humane values of human beings. It tends to develop a climate which is more favorable to the development on the one hand of a higher moral atmosphere of responsibility and on the other to greater achievements in every realm of

human understanding. Thank you. All right, that's Milton. Now, it's one matter to argue that capitalism represents the least bad system, but it's another to argue, as Milton did just then, that capitalism produces quote, I'm quoting Milton in that clip, a higher moral atmosphere, close quote. And again, quote, greater achievements in every realm, close quote. Tom, wasn't your old professor and your Hoover colleague Milton Freriedman getting a little carried away there? I don't think so. Uh but but but I if he was uh uh it was um the way to the way to way to answer

would be to put put forth oppos opposite evidence to what he's saying and that that's what doesn't get doesn't happen. That is uh a lot of what is called education uh and in is really indoctrination. And so it's not a question of whether I happen to agree with Milton Friedman or or or anyone else who was watching. It's a qu it's a question of do they do the people who who would disagree with him have any facts any or any reasoning any logic uh that would that would be relevant to what he's saying. And all

too often that it's it's not it's not true. They don't. Could I ask you there's a the website again is facts against rhetoric.org and you've already told us that your the reason you pulled that together was to produce so evidence to be empirical to teach students to be empirical to look at the facts. On the other hand, from this passage I just quoted from basic economics, your book, empirical questions are the questions that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well-being of others. And then Milton just said in that clip that capitalism

produces a higher moral atmosphere. I just want to tease this out that as best I can tell you, your insistence on empiricism, on looking at the facts, yes, is is because you have a a a sort of moral groundwork on which you insist there's a preexisting sense of morality of right and wrong and of our duties to each other. Is that correct? A abs. Absolutely. All right. uh without that uh uh civilization would would just not be possible. I mean every one of us uh is vulnerable to all sorts of things. Uh if if we

couldn't uh rely on someone uh well take it from from birth. I mean we come into the world knowing nothing. We we don't even know that we need food much less how to get any. And so for so you must have a a a structure out there. It's also true that even as we move toward adulthoods or and into adulthoods the old age there there are times when other people and lots of them are essential uh to our own well-being. Uh I I think of uh I think of all this this talk about equality in

a sense there equality is enormously important and in another sense it's enormously irrelevant. Uh it it's important that we have equality before the law. Uh it's it's important that we we we regard each other with with a certain certain kind of equality. But to talk in terms of equality of capabilities is madness. I mean if if if you're the world's leading authority on some uh particular subject uh that doesn't mean that you have even minimal competence in a hundred other things. And it's the one of the most dangerous things in the academic world and among

intellectuals in general is they often seem to assume that they know better than other people about all sorts of things including things that these other people know uh from their own personal experience and that's what makes intellectuals are so dangerous. All right, back to your website Tom. Uh, under the heading biographies, you provide a link to a personal odyssey, which is your own autobiography or memoir. Here you are in a personal odyssey describing your response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. I'm quoting you. The idea seemed to be that white people's sins were

all that stood between us and economic and social parity through American society. The enormous amount of internal change needed within the black community in education, skills, and attitudes seemed wholly unnoticed. Civil rights were important in and of themselves as a matter of justice. But to expect civil rights to solve our economic and social problems was barking up the wrong tree. Close quote. Tom, this notion that civil rights, as important as they are in their in and of themselves, is a matter of justice, but that the black community needed, and I'm quoting you again, internal change.

Could you explain that? Well, I and in in one in one sense they that's well first of all I I I would repeat that now that all all groups have their own cultures and many and in many groups including blacks there are internal differences in cultures within the same race or ethnicity. And so uh one of the one of the great handicaps historically uh that the black community has had is that during the era of slavery uh blacks were concentrated 90% or more uh uh in in the south and the south in turn had its

own uh culture which was different from people who came from other parts of Britain. uh and and and and I've done I've gone into this length in a book called Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Uh and the people who came from the South, they had had this culture when they were back in Britain where where they were called uh uh crackers and rednecks and things like that. And it and it's and it's it's easy to understand if you understand the history of of of their life in Britain. But once they transferred to the United States,

that same culture was a huge handicap. And that's the culture that blacks grew up in. And so, uh, and and again with blacks, as with the with the whites, more and more generations of blacks begin to to to put aside that culture to to operate in ways that would be more productive for them in the new society. And now this counterproductive uh culture persists in in many lowincome uh ghettos. And unfortunately there are intellectuals and others who celebrate this uh uh uh culture and try to try to keep it going when in fact it's a

great handicap. M. So Tom, one of the um one of the themes that runs throughout your work and again it's on it pops up again and again on your website is this this what you refer to as this lost century of black achievement. From the end of the Civil War to the enactment of the Great Society programs a century later, black Americans made remarkable progress. I'm going to quote now from discrimination and disparities. one of your books to which you link on your website. Quote, "The plain fact is that the black poverty rate declined from

87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960 prior to the great expansion of the welfare state that began in the 1960s under the Johnson administration. And as late as 1969, twothirds of all black children were living with both parents." Close quote. So this African-Americans come out of slavery with no education, no what what the economists call human capital. I'm putting this out to make sure that putting this out to you to make sure I understand it correctly. Furthermore, they're handicapped by the ambient culture, white culture of the south, which places relative to culture in the north,

particularly say New England, it places little emphasis on education for example. And by 1940, blacks had not only uh uh begun to to better themselves economically, they'd begun to achieve education. They had begun to move into certain trades. You remark elsewhere that African-Americans are making progress in particular in construction, for example. They have by and large intact families. And all of this century of progress which predates the civil rights legislation of the 1960s almost receives almost no notice in the academic literature. It's as if you take a century of astonish really quite moving a whole

people making progress and push it down the memory hole. Is that correct? Yes. And this is part of a larger pattern in looking at statistics over time. Uh it applies for example many people uh credit Ralph Nater with having made the the country and the government conscious of various dangers and so that they can have laws and agencies to to uh control those dangers. And they'll point out that uh Ralph Nater's book unsafe at any speed put him on the map when he uh argued that American cars were being made without regard to safety and

uh uh that the that the corporations were put more emphasis on styling and that was costing people's lives and so on. uh and then after that these government agencies came in and then if you follow the data uh the death rate in automobiles went down and many people think that that's a convincing argument but if you're looking if you looking at statistics over time everything depends upon the date that you arbitrarily choose as the beginning and so if you were to go back 30 years before Ralph Nater you would find that automobile faith mality rates

were going down and were going down at a far higher rate than it did after Ralph Nater. But it's only a where you understand the importance of picking the right dates. In the case of blacks, I would I would pick the period from say 1940 to 1960. In 1940, uh 82% of black children were raised with two parents. uh after the the 60s the all and all the social things that happened that that fell to 17%. And so you've destroyed one of the key institutions of any society, the family and its influence and that's the

consequence. Similarly with uh things like violence, the homicide rate uh among black males fell during the 1940s by 18%. It fell again by 22% between 40 and 50. Now in the 1960s, which is when all progress is assumed to have begun, the Supreme Court began creating new constitutional rights out for prisoners and criminals. Uh and and and almost immediately beginning in the 1960s, the homicide rate doubled. Uh and and it doubled it doubled after three consecutive decades of of of falling homicide rates for the whole country. Now, you know, some things can be coincidences, but

I don't think that qualifies as a coincidence. But so much of what is said and you can go through things about the women's rise and so forth where you find in the very same pattern. Right. So Tom again let me quote if I may from discrimination and disparities. This is you writing in that book. There was a far more modest decline in the poverty rate among blacks after the Johnson administration's massive war and poverty programs began. And by 1995 only a third of black children were living with both parents. Among black families in poverty, 85%

of the children had no father present. Close quote. All right. This brings us to a very important question, which is did the great society did the we have government programs, civil rights. We have you've already said those were essential simply as a matter of justice. At roughly the same time, we get welfare programs, a massive increase in government spending, the so-called war on poverty. And we also get cultural upheaval, the shifting or erosion of certain cultural norms. And your argument is civil rights is what the civil rights legislation equality before the law was just and

necessary and overdue. We're happy that that happened. It needed to happen. But your argument is also that federal money that the rise of the welfare state and the erosion of cultural norms took progress among black Americans stopped it and reversed it. In other words, that they actually did harm or that or that they were merely irrelevant. They did harm and they did harm across the society, not just among racial minorities. Uh you have you you've had you have people who've had meaning taken out of the out of their lives. Uh people for for example uh

I I see in California especially people who have young people with cars will go into some street area and then do all kinds of crazy driving with a with a car in order to attract a crowd. and that that's what they get. But be people uh who who uh have meaning in their lives from what they're doing. If if if you have being having a family to support, having a child to raise, things like that, that puts meaning in in their lives. Uh but when when all of that is taken out of their lives by

the government and especially when the government is paying people when when they have no husband pre uh present and uh and not paying if there is a husband present. You're you're subsidizing a social change that is doing far more harm than than whatever incidental good you're doing just by handing out some money. All right. Um Tom, education. We spoke a moment ago about the internal change that was needed in the black community. One of the central elements in that argument is education. And your website again, facts against rhetoric.org. Your website links to your 2020 book.

This just amazes me. Which you published on your 90th birthday. You know, one of these days you really ought to pull yourself together and accomplish something, Tom. This is your your 2020 book published on your 90th birthday, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. Uh I'm quoting, "New York City has a substantial sample of ethnically and socioeconomically comparable students whose educational outcomes can be compared." Close quote. You identified five different charter school systems, each of which taught portions of its classes in ordinary public schools. In other words, the charter schools, it was a wonderful socio social test,

so to speak, or experiment because they drew from the same socioeconomic group and indeed conducted their instruction in the same buildings with public school students. And you prod produced two main findings in your book, charter schools and their enemies. Here's the first. you found that charter school students, especially black and Hispanic students, outperformed the public school students. Uh, and the second measure in the same building. In the same building, in the same building, you've got, in one example, only 7% of the kids in one public school passed a math proficiency exam. Among the charter school

kids on the other side of the wall being taught in the same building, the figure was 100%. So, let's pause with that finding. How can that be? Well, it it certainly s suggests that we ought to spend a lot more time uh comparing the these cases where where where the students are in comparable uh places. In other words, they're not only in the same building, they're serving the same neighborhood and all the and mo and most of them in both cases have low come from lowincome families and and they didn't put the smarter kids in

one uh system. They they the charter schools admit deliberately by lottery. So, there's no question that that uh uh uh that they're picking, you know, the smartest kids just to to start with. they're taking whoever wins the lottery. And and in this case at the the school that you mentioned, by the way, is a school that I went to when I was a teenager in junior high school uh in uh in in Manhattan, 129th Street in uh and Amsterdam Avenue. Uh and someone ought to be one of my great frustrations is that despite whatever praise

the book got, uh it it really changed nothing. And I think there'd be it should be a high priority in letting lowincome, black, Hispanic, and other other families know what what the what difference the the charter schools can make. Not all of them are good. But ironically, even the disappointing charter schools uh almost invariably still do better than the traditional public school housed in the same building with it. So this brings us to your second major finding in that book, Tom. The teachers unions opposed the charter schools. So you go through the history of this

battle in New York. I'm quoting you again. In New York City, this is as of 2020. In New York City, there are more than 50,000 children on waiting lists to get into charter schools. Yet New York has ended the expansion of charter schools and restrict and threatened restrictions on those already functioning. uh and even national black organizations oppose charter schools. In 2016, the NAACP called for a moratorum on new charter schools. What is going on there? What is going on is that the charter school uh collect billions of dollars in union dues and they spend

millions of dollars for financing the campaigns of politicians who will do whatever the charter schools want. Whatever the unions want. I'm sorry. Yes. Yes. Whatever the unions want. And it it's painful that uh even uh people who started out wanting to give parents the choice of where to go to school when when they get learn about the political realities, they they realize they're not going to get the charter school get the uh teachers unions money if they don't uh try to stop the charter schools. and and the kinds of things that are done to stop

them. Uh for for for example uh in various cities around the country uh where where there's been population loss over the years, there are plenty of vacant school houses because they're not needed needed in those places. the not only the the the whole educational establishment does everything they can to pre prevent those vacant buildings from being used by by charter schools because all New York is not the only one that has large numbers of uh students waiting on waiting list to get into charter schools. In some places they have absolutely they have simply uh demolished

the these schools that have been vacant for years to make sure that the charter schools can't use them. And that that's happened in uh Chicago AC in various cities across the country. Try again if if there was some way of letting the people in these uh uh low lowincome neighborhoods understand that this is what's going on. I think I think we would have a very we'd have a chance of giving a lot of kids a a better education. Tom, since you published charter schools and their enemies in 2020, a few developments. I'd like to believe

that at least some of this is a result of that book. Charter school enrollment nationwide has expanded up from 12% or almost 400 through or almost 400,000 students since 2020 since the year before you published your book. Now 400,000 students in charter schools is a relatively small number by comparison with the number of students across the country but it's up 12%. Many of the biggest gains have come in the most rapidly growing states over the last five years, up 26% in Texas, 21% in Florida, even in New York, even your in your old home state.

Charter school enrollment is up 15%. And school choice legislation has spread across the country. It's state by state. In the last three years, the number of states with universal school choice legislation has risen from zero to a dozen. That's since you wrote your book. In 2023 alone, 20 states expanded their school choice programs. And this very year, Texas is preparing to enact dramatic school choice reforms. Tom, have I encouraged you? Yes. Uh but there's another side to this as well. All right. The teachers unions are well aware aware of all this and they have put

in all kinds of roadblocks to make it more difficult for for for kids to be sent to charter schools. For example, in California, the the cal the California law has said that charter schools are not allowed to uh expel, suspend or expel students who disrupt the the the the uh uh the schools. Now, can can you imagine any educational benefit that anyone could imagine will come from that? What what is happening is one of the reasons the charter schools are good is that they insist on maintaining law and order in the schools and so when

you you know do all kinds of things in including beating up teachers uh the kid doesn't get expelled. So the the charter schools were put in there as an experiment. So that as they had more freedom to to choose what to do uh and some of those things worked out then presumably uh those some of those practices could be transferred to the to the traditional public school. What is actually happening is that when when that when is that when there's this gap between the two kinds of schools, you have laws and restrictions where you transfer

the things that are failing in the public schools and force them on the charter schools. So instead of bringing bringing the uh traditional schools up to the charter schools levels, uh the pol politicians are bringing the charter schools down to the levels of the traditional schools. All right. I tried to encourage you. I tried Tom. Affirmative action. This is another of the headings in the website. Again, it's facts against rhetoric.org. From your memoir, A personal odyssey. I'm quoting you. One of the ironies that I experienced in my own career was that I received more automatic

respect when I first began teaching in 1966 as an inexperienced young man with no PhD and few publications than I did later in the 1970s after accumulating a more substantial record. What happened in between was affirmative action hiring of minority faculty. Close quote. Explain that. Affirmative action impinged on your own life, your own reputation. Well, you know, I I I I I could give an an example of something that puzzled me for a long time. When I was in the Marine Corps, I was trained as a photographer uh and I worked in a photo lab

and there and in barracks there are a whole bunch of uh photographers. I was the only black photographer and this is down in the south in the 1950s. And I noticed that when uh some of the other Marines in the barracks, the white Marines from the south, when they had a took a picture, they went wrong and so forth, they'd come over there and they would come to me rather than to the white uh uh uh photographers. And I that baffled me completely uh for for about 20 years. and uh and and and what happened

happened at at UCLA when I was teaching I was teaching a course and uh students said said that they they like the course and all and one young man came to me one day with a with a textbook and he there was a passage in it which which he couldn't understand and asked he asked me to explain it to him and I explained it to him and he said to me are you sure and I said yes I'm sure I wrote the textbook book. But you see what people use race as a as a way

of u getting at other things. Uh these other these these uh white uh Marines in that barracks down south in the 50s had no way of knowing who who knew more about photography and whatnot. But they knew that if the Marine Corps had trained some black man to be a photographer, he was probably you knew he knew his stuff cuz he and conversely after affirmative action, you see now uh when I far far more experienced and so forth, the students are questioning whether I know what I'm doing. Got it. I see one of the articles

back to the website. One of the articles to which you provide a link on the website is your 2012 review of a book called Mismatch. And the argument in that view is that affirmative action often places minority students in schools in which they would have trouble keeping up even though they could have done well in other schools. I'm going to quote to you from your 20 from your review of that 2012 book. quote, "The authors of Mismatch have performed a major service for those of us for those who think that black students on campus should

be there to advance their own education and lives, not to serve in a role much like that of movie extras whose presence enhances the scene for others." Close quote. So affirmative action you suggest in that review is less to help black students, other minority students. It's less to help minority students make progress than to permit white liberals to feel good about themselves. Fair? Yes. And not incidentally. uh ensure they can continue to get hundreds of millions of dollars each at universities like Colombia uh uh which they couldn't get if if they didn't have a certain

percentage of minority students uh among among among their uh classes. uh and here again there's an an irony that these are places which have pushed uh affirmative action and now they realize that if they don't have uh uh minority representation similar to that in the population uh they can be accused of discrimination and that can cost them money. And so these these black students who are put in institutions where they're likely to fail even though there are hundreds of other institutions where where they would have succeeded. Uh they're they're there more or less as human

uh human shields. Tom, tell that story. You mentioned it again in your book, Personal Odyssey, but when you were at Cornell and you discovered that there were some black students at Cornell who struck you as extremely intelligent and capable, but they were struggling all the same. They were unhappy and even angry all the same, and you investigated. Do you remember that? Yes. Uh a after Cornell suddenly started admitting admitting black students with uh with uh qualifications not as high as as the the students already there. uh I discovered that half the black students were on

academic uh probation and so I went over to the administration buildings and l and looked up the the test scores. Now at that time the average black student at Cornell scored at the 75th percentile on SAT on the SAT score meaning that they were really smart kids. They they they they did better than threequarters of the other of the of the students who who took that test. But at Cornell uh liberal arts uh college which is where I taught uh the average student there was at the 99th percentile and so the professors teach to the

kinds of students they have and therefore uh they'll pursue it at a faster pace. they'll proceed with fewer explanations because the students already learn know so much themselves and and so someone who is perfectly capable of uh handling the work if it's taught at a way that's geared to students at the 75th percentile uh cannot keep up. It was even more extreme at that at MIT. the average black student in one of the studies uh done some some time back uh at MIT was at were was at the 90th percentile in mathematics uh which make

you know he's they scored higher than 90% of students who took the test but they were in so that made them in the top 10% but at MIT they were in the bottom 10% because at MIT is no there's no question that the vast majority of students are in the 1%. So it's a question only of where you are in the top 1% because course virtually everybody else is right and and so think that they proceed obviously at a pace uh and and a complexity with those kinds of students which uh most most American students

black or white wouldn't be able to keep up with. Right. Tom, here's another item to which you link on your website. This is a critique of affirmative action by the late Justice Antinine Scalia. It's a longish quotation, but it's on your website, and I'd like to read it to you. Quote, this is the late Justice Scalia. Quote, "I am entirely in favor of according the poor inner city child who happens to be black, advantages and preferences not given to my own children because my children don't need them. But I am not willing to prefer that

the son of a prosperous and well-educated black doctor or lawyer solely because of his race uh should be given preferences over the son of a manual laborer. The affirmative action system now in place will produce the latter result because it is based on concepts of racial indebtedness rather than individual worth and need. That is to say, because it is racist. Close quote. Now, it is one matter to say that affirmative action does a lot of harm. And you've just described instances in which it has done harm, taking very talented black kids and placing them in

a situation in which they're going to feel inadequate for four years when they could have felt at the top of the charts in other institutions. But it's another matter to say the affirmative action as we've experienced it across this 25 years or so is racist. Are you willing to go that far? Oh adjective uh not not always uh the main thing. Uh I'm I'm will ready to to deal with with the factual uh evidence that minority students uh do better when they are put in in institutions where the other students have qualifications similar to theirs.

Got it. and and the the the you the University of California system is a classic example. Uh back towards the end of the end of the 20th century, the great numbers of black and Hispanic students were being brought into the system and they were many of them were being sent to to B to Berkeley or UCLA, the the two top uh campuses in that in that large system. uh and and and they were doing very badly. And as they admitted more and more black students, the number who were graduating declined absolutely and so that was

clearly not working. The voters voted voted to end affirmative action admissions. Uh it was predicted that there would be no more black students. It turns out that uh over the over the next few years there were a thousand more black students who graduated from that system now that they were not being put it sent to UCLA and Berkeley but to the other campuses where the other students had qualifications very similar to their their own. Not only that, uh, black students who are put into these places where they simply can't, uh, it's a struggle just just

to keep keep in from being flunked out. They switch from difficult subjects to to tough subjects like from from difficult subjects like math, science, engineering into things like sociology, education and so on. Uh so what happened is that you had virtually no change in the total number of black students uh in in the in the UC system after affirmative action admissions were were outlawed. But you had a great increase in the number of black students who graduated. And really the point of going to college is not to be on campus but to graduate so you

can go out into the world and do something right Tom. Um, I'm going to try to encourage you again in the in the 2023 case of fair of students for fair admissions versus the president and fellows of Harvard College, your old alma mater. I know you get all misty eyed when I mention Harvard, Tom. 2023 case of Students for Fair Admissions versus Harvard. The Supreme Court found that Harvard had discriminated against Asian students in ad in admissions. That's the fact set and the court ruled that universities could no longer consider race in their admissions policies

looked at one way looked at strictly speaking that's the end of race-based strictly race-based affirmative action the exactly the kind of affirmative action that Anton antinine Scalia found offensive have I encouraged you un unfortunately Uh that decision included something in there by the chief chief justice uh about how you you you could somehow uh take read read stuff uh that told you what the students race was and consider that uh I don't know whether this how how this decision that they made is going is going to work out in practice. I see the same game

was played with the Baky decision years ago and and and what it what it amounted to in that case was that you can't have racial quotas if you call them quotas but you can have them if you call them something else. Now, I don't know whether this latest caveat how that's going to work out in practice, but I I I was found it very painful that a chief justice of of the Supreme Court would suggest some way in which you can evade the the decision that's being made. All right? Because that's the way I read

it. All right. Um Tom, a few last questions. We've been talking about your website, facts against rhetoric.org. ORG I'd like to ask you a couple of questions about contemporary events. Let's start with Donald Trump and tariffs. Uh let me begin by quoting again from your book basic economics. Quote, the Smoot Holly tariffs of 1930, the highest tariffs in well over a century were designed to reduce imports so that more Americanmade products would be sold, thereby providing more employment for American workers. It was a plausible belief as so many things done by politicians seem plausible. But

within five months, the unemployment rate rose to double digits and it never fell below that level for any month during the entire remainder of that decade, the decade of the 1930s. That's the that's Don that's Tom Soul in basic economics. Today, President Trump has imposed a number of new tariffs, including an average of 39% on goods from China, 25% on goods from Canada, and 25% on goods from Mexico. And the president has announced a further 25% tariff on all imparted cars and car parts effective April 3rd. As we record this, that April 3rd new tariff,

25% tariffs on cars will kick in the day after tomorrow. What do you make of the present president of the United States and his tariffs? It's painful to see what a ruinous decision uh from back in the 1920s uh being repeated now in in so far as he's using these tariffs for to get various strategic uh things settled and and and that and that he is satisfied with that. But if you set set off a worldwide trade war that that has a devastating history, uh, everybody loses because everybody follows suit and all that happens is

that you get a great reduction in international trade. The other it's it's it's disturbing in another sense. Frank Franklin D. Roosevelt when he was president in the 1930s said that you have to try things and if and if they if if they don't work then you admit it you abandon that and you go on something else and you try that until you come across something that that does work. Now that's that's not a bad uh uh approach. If you are operating within a known system of rules, but if you are the one who's making the

rules, then all the other people have no idea what you're going to do next. And that is the formula for having people s hang on to their money until they figure out what you're going to do. And when a lot of people hang on to their money, you can get results such as you got during the Great Depression of the 1930s. So if this is just a set of shortrun PS for various various uh limited uh objectives limited in time, fine maybe. But if if this is going to be the policy for four long years

that you're going to try this, you're going to try that, you're going to try something else. A lot of people are going to wait. uh I think what happened in the stock market recently when things came down uh substantially for for for quite a while and I note that various people uh uh are holding on to their to their money uh before they do anything because they don't know where this is going to lead. Right back to a question of race. Our friend Jason Riley published a column in the Wall Street Journal headlined, quote, "Trump

might have won the first post-racial election." Close quote. Now, I'm quoting Jason Riley. According to NBC News, since 2012, there has been a 15-point shift toward Republicans among black voters, a 32-point shift among Asians, and a 38 point shift among Latinos. Close quote. Once again, I'm going to make an effort to cheer you up, Tom. So, on my reading, one of the central questions, maybe the central question of American politics for the last 30 or even 40 years has been whether identity politics would become the dominant mode of all of our politics. And people would

vote according to their race. And to use George Will's phrase, we would not be conducting elections. Elections would simply be represent censuses. All the white people vote one way. All the black people vote another way. All and so forth. And Donald Trump, if I may say so, Donald Trump of all people is the one who has demonstrated that we can move beyond identity politics. that we can that uh African-American males move toward the Republican side. Now, you can like the Republicans or you can dislike the Republicans, but the argument would be people are making up

their minds for themselves as individuals, not simply voting on the basis of their race. Likewise, Hispanics, likewise, and so forth. Does that make sense to you? Yes. and it's one of the most encouraging uh developments and one I was surprised to see come finally. Uh, one of the reasons, for example, why the it's so hard to get a decent education for black uh, kids and low-income black kids, uh, is that the black vote goes automatically has gone automatically to the Democrats by a huge huge margins uh, for a very long time. uh and it and

it's the the Democrats who get uh the money from the teachers unions for which they will then allow the teachers union to do whatever they want regardless of whether that is is is bad news for the for for the black kids who can't get a decent education. So I think to to that to that extent uh this is this is it it is encouraging. It's it's however uh Jason rally writes for the Wall Street Journal which is an excellent publication but unfortunately low-income people are not likely to be reading the Wall Street Journal and and

I don't I don't know if there are enough people within the black community leaders who have a uh have sufficient interest in in making clear what these alternative educational things are like. Uh, I mean I I you you mentioned earlier I believe that the civil rights organizations have lined up with the teachers union and I think quite frankly they're doing it for the same reason that the politicians do it. They get money from them. I can remember decades ago a well a a black uh Democrat that I that I that I knew said, you know,

the NAACP has become uh a wholly owned sub subsidiary of the labor unions. He didn't say that publicly, but he said to me privately. Right. Right. Right. And unfortunately, that's not not uncommon. Something else that that that need needs a lot more attention. years ago, I did a book called Affirmative Action Around the World in which I looked at countries in various parts of the world, Malaysia, Israel, uh, England, wherever and again and again I see the same pattern of behavior uh, wonderful beliefs and and an and an utter uh, failure to look empirically at

what happens when you put the programs in in in in in in in in action. uh you I mentioned the thing about uh uh allowing uh some some consideration of race uh that this whole thing was enacted in other countries years ago in India uh when when the courts started saying no we can't really have this kind of blatant favoritism and so forth but you can take certain things in consideration immediately people began giving interviews on subjective. It would be subjectively evaluated. And of course, uh for the kids who are who are scoring low, they

give them high ratings on these things that are subjectively evaluated. And the ones who are who are high, they give them low ratings. And so they're back to to uh uh affirmative action in in in the bad sense. uh uh despite what's being said, Tom, the United States of America, your life has now spanned more than onethird of the entire existence of this country. Now, the country remains far from perfect. Uh on the other hand, you were born into the Jim Crow South. There you are. I know this from reading your book, A Personal Odyssey.

There you are as a student at Howard University in Washington DC. And then you later returned to Washington as a civil servant, and there were drinking fountains you couldn't use. And there were uh restaurants and cafes in Washington where only the whites were permitted to sit down and black people had to stand at the counter. That's gone. Um, you've led a remarkable life yourself in which in all kinds of ways the central theme of your work has been this country. What's wrong with the country? the competing visions, the so the vision of the anointed, the

way the intellectuals misbehave, the way we need to understand race and ethnicity in this country in the larger context of race and race and ethnicity around the world. So you're not just a remarkable figure, you're a distinctly American figure in my view. And students today are taught in all kinds of ways and sometimes explicitly that the United States is permanently flawed. They're taught to look down on the country. Tanai Coats. Here's a quotation. The American dream cannot exist without racial injustice. Close quote. Tom, what what should students understand about the United States? First of all,

they should understand something about the actual history of the United States instead of the propaganda. Uh that's not likely to happen. Uh if we and this is a a problem that extends beyond blacks or yellow and uh and other low-income minorities. this this longer than year long uh uh curse of anti-semitism all over the country and not not just anti-semitism and and words but actually forcing the you know violence and so forth. Uh, and that that and that is something that's going to be very tough to to uh to get rid of, but I think

it can be gotten rid of. And I think this this taking away the money from Colombia is a perfect first step. And Colombia is not the only one that's like this. They're the ones who got caught red-handed. And I think that uh we we need to stop thinking about these institutions as places that are so wonderful and have great people. Right now the the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is uh expressing outrage that the government dares to expect people to these institutions to live up to the laws. I think it is long

overdue for them to look up live up to the laws. Thank you. Tom, would you would you close our conversation today? I'd like to not only do I admire your reading, but I love your voice. And if this academic stuff ever blows over, you've got a great future in podcasting. But would you would you would you read for us what I take as almost the most important passage in all of basic economics? Yes. Yes. And it's the last it's the last uh paragraph in the book. However useful economics may be for understanding many issues, it

is not as emotionally satisfying as more personal and melodramatic depictions of these issues often found in the media and in politics. Dry empirical questions are seldom as exciting as political causes. the ringing moral pronouncements. Uh but the empirical questions are questions about what that must be asked if we are truly interested in the well-being of others rather than in excitement or a sense of moral superiority for ourselves. Perhaps the most important distinction is between what sounds good and what works. Thomas Soul, author of thousands of newspaper columns and magazine columns, author of dozens of books,

and now the author of a website, facts against rhetoric, facts against rhetoric.org. Tom, thank you. Thank you for Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation. I'm Peter Robinson.