Sowell Food for Thought

Another Uncommon Knowledge interview with economist Thomas Sowell came out this week, coinciding with the updated version of his book Discrimination and Disparities. There’s always wisdom that comes from listening to this octogenarian (I hope he lives at least another 20 years). Some of the stories I’ve heard before. I’ve read his biography. But some of it is new, or clarifying because of current data. He’s big on finding evidence from the data.

Thomas Sowell, on Uncommon Knowledge
screen shot from here

He has added a new chapter to the book, and here’s an example quoted from that:

The poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10% every year since 1994. As far back as 1969 young black males whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards had similar incomes to those of their white counterparts. Academic outcomes show a pattern of disparities similar to the pattern of disparities in the amount of time devoted to schoolwork. Apparently, lifestyle choices have consequences.

Host Peter Robinson asks him about that:

PR: So this is the constrained vision once again. Welfare state, that’s government; we don’t rely on that. Affirmative action, government; we don’t rely on that. We rely on hard work. We rely on the institution of marriage. That’s correct?

TS: Yes. In other words, these things— I don’t think it’s the marriage as such or the library cards as such; it’s that there are lifestyle choices that have been made. And the comparison I made was between—if you look at the poverty rate among blacks, it was at 22%, and among whites it was 11%, but among black married couples, it was 7.5%. So they not only do better than blacks as a whole; they do better than whites as a whole. So it’s lifestyle choices.

That’s not something we hear in the news, or from mainstream opinion commentary.

new edition, with new chapter

Thomas Sowell talks some about minimum wages. That was a particular interest of his, back when he was working on his PhD, and was still a Marxist, but was academically committed to empirical data (which, of course, is what led him in the opposite direction of Marxism so many decades ago). When he tried to get data from one department of government to another, he couldn’t. There was a sense that people’s jobs—in the government—were at stake if evidence showed, as some believed, that higher minimum wages led to greater unemployment.

Of that experience he quips:

I worked in the US Department of Labor, and I began to realize—well, a number of things—that the government is not simply the personification of the general will, like Rousseau or others would say. The government institutions have their own institutional interests.

His own life example about the minimum wage was as a 16-year-old high school dropout, when he got a job as a Western Union messenger, delivering telegrams on a bicycle. The minimum wage for the job, as set by the US Fair Labor Standards in 1938 was 40¢/hour. But by 1948, when he got the job, he started at the bottom, getting paid 60¢/hour—the going rate to get the workers, rendering the minimum wage irrelevant.

But then “compassionate” government stepped in to “help” by raising the minimum wage. The result is that 20 years later a black kid (or for that matter a white kid) can’t get a job.

Sowell and Robinson spend some time discussing the difference between the “constrained vision” and the “unconstrained vision,” from an earlier book, A Conflict of Visions. Constrained means that you pay attention to reality. Unconstrained means there’s an assumption that good things happen all by themselves, but if bad things happen there’s some institution to blame—even maybe civilization itself. 

So, when there’s disparity, there’s one side that looks for data and evidence to compare one approach to another (the constrained side). And then there’s the side that assumes there’s racism or some other social ill at fault (the unconstrained side).

Most of the time, in our country today, disparities are not racially caused. He talks about another possible effect contributing to poverty:

TS: Wherever you look around the country, around the world, you find people that live up in the mountains poor and backwards. Even in the richest country, including the United States. I believe the poorest county in the United States was in a mountain community which was almost 100% white.

PR: Somewhere in Appalachia? West Virginia? Southern Ohio?

TS: Yeah. And men in that county had a life expectancy ten years less than men in a county in Virginia.

PR: And the unconstrained vision says, “Lets fix that. Surely we can pass a law that would improve that.” And the constrained vision says, “Well, now, wait a moment. If people who live in isolated pockets in mountains are poor and backwards all around the world, and we see this pattern over, and over, and over again, maybe there’s something very deeply rooted in reality about that that is hard for us to get at.” Correct?

TS: Yes.

Robinson reminds him of a recent column in which he challenged Nicholas Kristoff, a New York Times writer who thinks whites should pay reparations for the legacy of slavery.

PR: Kristoff had ascribed the gaps between African Americans and whites in America—gaps in wealth, gaps in educational achievement, the usual gaps—to, and this is a quotation from Kristoff: “to the lingering effects of slavery.” And here’s Tom Sowell:

“If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood 100 years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on the legacy of slavery with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.”

And so there it is. Life is hard; you use the word hard. You use the word serious. You use evidence. Tom Sowell is a man of the constrained vision through and through and through. Correct?

TS: Yes. Part of a vanishing breed, I might add.

There are a couple of times in the conversation that charter schools come up. They’re educating better than children in privileged areas are being educated. And they’re not getting the cream of the crop; they’re allowing students in by lottery, without even looking at they’re academic history. But they do have high expectations, and they don’t tolerate nonsense.

Near the end they cover charter schools in more detail. Robinson points out that Democrats—and he can’t remain nonpartisan about it—prevent quality education for those that need it. And Dr. Sowell agrees:

TS: That really is one of the moral outrages, that for many kids who come from a very poor background, and whose parents might not have had much education, a decent education is the one thing they have to have to have a better life.

And these schools have been absolutely spectacular. The charter schools. The successful ones. Now there are some that weren’t, but— For example, a few years ago on the New York statewide math test, there was an elementary school, grade 4 I believe, in Harlem, whose students passed those tests at a higher rate than any 4^th grade kids anywhere in the state of New York. I mean, we’re talking Scarsdale, Radcliffe, places like that. The Success Academy schools as a whole, their students pass both the math and the English statewide tests at a higher rate than any school district in the entire state of New York.

The vast majority of the kids in the Success Academy schools are either black or Hispanic. If you look at the five highest scoring school districts in the state, in terms of the percentage of students who pass the math or the English tests, their average family income ranges from four times that of the kids in the Success Academy schools to more than nine times the family income of the kids in the Success Academy schools. And yet, the Mayor of New York is doing his darndest to put a stop to the expansion of these schools in general, but his special ire is aimed at the Success Academy schools. And this is happening all across the country.

PR: Because they make the teachers unions look bad, in the public schools? What’s the political motivation? Why would Mayor de Blasio have it out for the charter schools such as Success Academy?

TS: Well, the teachers unions are the major reason. And we talk about the money they contribute, the votes they contribute. What’s happening, again, not just in New York, but other parts of the country, including California, is there’s all kinds of chicanery to prevent the charter schools from expanding. That’s why you have tens of thousands on the waiting list. It’s not that the charter schools aren’t willing to expand, but every conceivable obstacle is put in their way. Because, if you let that go at the natural pace, it would be very hard for public schools to compete.

There it is again: something about that government institution having its own institutional interests—apart, and probably in conflict with the stated goal.

What’s missing is a search for—or even a valuing of—evidence, or truth. The current rise of socialism’s popularity is an example—51% approval from those in the 18-29 demographic, according to a recent Gallup poll. How can that be?

TS: Yes. Socialism is a great idea; that does not mean it’s a great reality. One of the things that disturbs me tremendously is about this enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and socialism at a time when people are literally starving in Venezuela, an oil rich country. And they’re breaking into the grocery stores to try to get food. And they’re fleeing to neighboring countries, most of which are not all that prosperous themselves, but at least you don’t starve to death in them. And none of that makes a bit of difference. I don’t think most of the people that are out there cheering for Bernie Sanders have given a thought to Venezuela.

PR: To the evidence.

TS: That’s right. To the evidence, yeah.

So that’s one theme for this conversation: get the evidence, so you know what you’re talking about.

And this is another common Sowell theme:

TS: In the government you have surrogate decision makers, and they cannot possibly know as much as the individuals whose person decisions have been preempted.

The third would be about lifestyle choices:

PR: Tom Sowell’s view is, get an education, stay married, and do your job, roughly?

TS: Yeah.

It sounds like what we’ve been saying here for years. If Thomas Sowell agrees with us, I think that means we’re on the right track.

Disparate Impacts

There’s a new Uncommon Knowledge interview with Thomas Sowell, with the release of a new book—his fifth since turning 80. The book is called Discrimination and Disparities. I’m glad he keeps writing, even though he’s no longer doing a weekly column; it’s never enough.

Thomas Sowell, Uncommon Knowledge, May 3, 2018

Much of the discussion is about the term disparate impact, which Wikipedia defines this way: 

Disparate impact in United States labor law refers to practices in employment, housing, and other areas that adversely affect one group of people of a protected characteristic more than another, even though rules applied by employers or landlords are formally neutral.

It’s a controversial idea, because it’s ostensibly about fairness while being literally unfair. And it introduces into law the idea that a person with no intention of discrimination is held accountable as if there were mens rea (intent to commit a crime) based on outcomes that simply appear discriminatory.

Interviewer Peter Robinson starts the discussion with a quote from the book:

The disparate impact standard represents a major departure from American legal principles where the burden of proof is usually on those making the accusation.

Disparate impact is a tool used in cases of employment, housing, and credit, among others. And, for the sake of setting up the discussion Robinson asks,

the latest book by
Thomas Sowell
cover image from Amazon

But, Tom, what about the notion that we need a disparate impact test because discrimination, particularly racial discrimination, particularly against African Americans, is so deeply embedded in the fabric of this country that people discriminate all the time without even being aware of it?

And Thomas Sowell answers:

If you're going with that assumption, then you don't need the disparate impact theory. You just simply say what you've just said. To dress it up as the disparate impact theory, the disparate impact theory depends upon the truth of the assumptions.

What assumptions?

This implicit assumption that all of the groups are very similar in their capabilities, what they want to do and so forth. When you look at facts, you find disparate impacts everywhere.

For example, he looks at three groups of immigrants: Irish, Jewish, and Italian. Disparities depend on what you’re looking at:

If you look at things like politics, the Irish were so far more advanced politically than either the Italians or the Jews that for generations you had Irish politicians representing neighborhoods that were overwhelmingly Italian or Jewish.

Many disparities are natural. Like tornadoes.

You find 90% of all the tornadoes in the entire world occurring in one country, namely the United States. And only in a part of the United States. You don't hear about tornadoes in Maine or in the Pacific Northwest. So think how much land area there is in the world, and 90% of them right in this one little place.

If disparities are not an inherent evil, but simply part of nature, do we accomplish something good by adjusting to get rid of the disparities? Or do we accidentally cause some other problem?

Maybe we should start by questioning the assumptions. Are differences necessarily the result of bigotry? Or are some differences the result of personal choice and ability?

Sowell’s book refers to a 50-year study of 1500 people with IQs in the top 1%.

What I point out in the book is that the disparities within that narrow range, the top third, for example, had more than 10 times as many post-graduate degrees as the bottom third, among people who were all in the top 1%. So there were obviously many other things that had to come together. The other thing was that two people who failed to make the 140 IQ cutoff ended up getting Nobel Prizes in physics. There's nobody among these 1,500 that did, so obviously there have to be a lot of things coming together.

So intelligence is not the differentiating factor. What is? Family background.

It doesn't matter how much brain power you may have, if you're not raised in a home where people are thinking, where they're doing intellectual things, you're not in the same position as someone with the same IQ who's in a family that has that kind of background.

I talked about that in the last post. It’s not really about victimization, or a victimized underclass. It isn’t even much about innate ability. It’s about family.

Government interference—on the assumption that society is doing something evil, such as bigoted oppression—doesn’t get the positive results it claims to want, because it isn’t addressing the actual problem.

Dr. Sowell even gives examples of societies where there is actual racism, and government interferes by enforcing that racism, and yet people flout the law when it makes economic sense to do so. It happened in Apartheid South Africa. More black workers were hired than white, even in jobs where it was illegal to hire blacks. More blacks than whites lived in white-only neighborhoods.

Quoting the book, “Black incomes in 1900 were almost half again higher than they had been in 1867 to ’68.” So, in the American South, after the Civil War, where employers had agreed to suppress earnings for black workers and sharecroppers, black earnings had a higher rate of growth than the American economy overall.

The market is more powerful than racism, or any other bigotry.

Dr. Sowell explains this related to minimum wage laws:

If you have a minimum wage, and that's set above where it would be in a free market, then that means you're going to have more people applying because there's a higher wage, and there are going to be fewer people hired because of the higher wage. So you're going to have a chronic surplus of applicants.

Now, in a market where there's, say, a chronic surplus of qualified people of, say, 200, and there a hundred blacks, for example, who are qualified, then if the employer refused to hire all hundred black qualified people, he still has 200 others he can call on, and that's it. And it's cost him nothing. But if there's no minimum wage now, and there's no chronic surplus, every time he turns away a qualified black person, he has to have someone who's not black who's also qualified that he can hire….

[And he may not be able to find that person] at that price. Therefore, the price will have to go up, so it's costing him. And if he doesn't raise the price, he's going to have to keep his customers waiting because he doesn't have enough people to do the job.

In short, minimum wage laws are going to have an intensifying effect on existing racism, while free markets tend to lessen discriminatory hiring.

Another example of unintended consequences is housing in northern California, where home building is restricted in the name of saving the environment. The result, of course, is higher housing costs. And then officials ask, “What can we do to get more affordable housing?” The obvious answer is, build more houses. Instead, they appoint a committee to study the issue. Dr. Sowell quips,

It's like appointing a blue-ribbon committee to go out there and find out why the ground is wet after the rain. I think it's almost miraculous the way they can avoid the obvious.

So, what is the disparate impact of the higher housing costs resulting from government imposed home-building limitations? Blacks, among others who started out lower income, instead of moving up in the economy, get priced out—what Peter Robinson calls a sort of “soft version of Jim Crow.”

The progressive/liberal/tyrannists tend not to apply their disparate impact rules on their own “good intentions,” however. Because they want to keep feeling good about their intentions regardless of the harm they do.

Here’s another quote from the book:

The plain fact is that the black poverty rate declined from 87% in 1940 to 47% in 1960, prior to the expansion of the welfare state that began in the 1960s under the Johnson administration. There was a far more modest decline in the poverty rate among blacks after the war on poverty began.

He lists several more disproportionately negative effects for blacks. Quoting the book again:

In the United States, murder rates, rates of infection with venereal diseases, and rates of teenage pregnancies were among the social pathologies whose steep declines were suddenly reversed in the 1960s. Nowhere was rampant violence and other social pathology as common among low-income people in the first half of the 20th century, when they were more deprived, as in the second half, when the welfare state had made them better off in material terms.

Since we’ve been talking about sex education in schools recently, let’s look at that. Sex education was implemented in schools in response to disease and teenage pregnancy—both of which were going down on their own. By 1960 the rate of venereal disease was half what it was in 1950. Then they started teaching it in the schools, and rates rose dramatically, as did teenage pregnancy. And that hit blacks particularly hard.

In 1960 two-thirds of black children were being raised in families with both parents. By 1995, two-thirds were born out of wedlock. Today 85% of black children live in single-parent households. And that’s while, in some places, like New York City, more black babies are aborted than are born.

We know—the data is astoundingly clear on this—that children fare best in homes where they are raised by their two parents. The results of failure to these children is calamitous.

As Thomas Sowell puts it,

It’s not the legacy of slavery that destroys the African American family. It’s the legacy of the welfare state that destroys the African American family.

And, if you want to destroy or oppress a people, the simplest way is by destroying the family—the basic unit of civilization.

Did they do it on purpose? I’m not willing to go that far. But, if they had intended it, they couldn’t have done a more thorough job.

Dr. Sowell puts it this way:

For one thing, it [the welfare state] makes it unnecessary for fathers to support their offspring. And in fact, it makes it counterproductive in many cases. A very poor man who might be able to support his family realizes his family will be better off without him. But on the other hand, someone who's strictly irresponsible, either the man or the woman or both, now pays no price for being irresponsible. The taxpayers pay the price. And actually, the harm done to the taxpayers, which is serious, still is not comparable to the harm done to the families, especially the children.

Thomas Sowell is an economist; he’s about data. Let the data take you where it takes you, and then see what conclusions you need to draw. You don’t start with a premise and then dismiss data that doesn’t fit. Sometimes there’s an outlier, but sometimes it’s a clue that your original assumptions are wrong.

Disparate impacts—or simply differences—are not necessarily the result of a nefarious plot even so secretive that people don’t know they’re thinking it up. The simpler answer might be that there are a lot of factors—including personal choice—that go into various differences.

But allowing for freedom, and free markets, along with encouraging strong families—that gets us to better, more positive outcomes overall, than interference gets us, no matter how well intentioned.

Maybe we ought to switch it around: hold government accountable for negative impacts of their interference, and put a stop to it. And stop holding individuals and businesses accountable for discrimination that was never intended, thought, or practiced.

Disparate impacts, then, are really just a narrow, limited view, of one portion of a larger picture that, if you could see the whole picture, would become nothing worth acting on.

How do you know whether a particular policy is one of those, or something really worth acting on? Try applying this Spherical Model axiom about unintended consequences:

Whenever government attempts something beyond the proper role of government (protection of life, liberty, and property), it causes unintended consequences—usually exactly opposite to the stated goals of the interference.

Class, Culture, and Moving Upward

I mentioned the other day that I’ve been reading J. D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. It’s been on my reading list since late 2016, when it made a stir by explaining why so many people who used to vote reliably Democrat voted for Donald Trump.

I heard about the book when the author gave an Uncommon Knowledge interview. What interested me wasn’t so much the explanation for Trump voters, although that’s interesting. But it explains the value of social capital, and most particularly the value of strong families.

J. D. Vance (right), screen shot from Uncommon Knowledge

I appreciate Vance’s ability to identify the social and psychological issues, with a clear, insider’s view of what policies haven’t worked and why. By the end of his Marine Corps service, he was politically conservative. And life—if you can understand it from the inside—probably leads naturally to that viewpoint.

What surprised me much more than I expected about the book is how much his story resonates with me personally. So I’m working through that too.

But I’d like to share a few of Vance’s insights, because I think it’s another support of the Spherical Model, with the political, economic, and social spheres all interrelated.

In his late teen years, J. D. worked at a local grocery store. He handled plenty of people on welfare, and gained some insights:

I also learned how people gamed the welfare system. They’d buy two dozen-packs of soda with food stamps and then sell them at a discount for cash. They’d ring up their orders separately, buying food with food stamps, and beer, wine, and cigarettes with cash. They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.

Mamaw [his grandmother] listened intently to my experiences at Dillman’s. We began to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust. Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole. Every two weeks, I’d get a small paycheck and notice the line where federal and state income taxes were deducted from my wages. At least as often, our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else. This was my mind-set when I was seventeen, and though I’m far less angry today than I was then, it was my first indication that the policies of Mamaw’s “party of the working man”—the Democrats—weren’t all they were cracked up to be (pp. 418-420)[i].

He adds in some outside commentary at this point:

Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation. Some blame race relations and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement. Others cite religious faith and the hold that social conservatism has on evangelicals in that region. A big part of the explanation lies in the fact that many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s. As far back as the 1970s, the white working class began to turn to Richard Nixon because of a perception that, as one man put it, government was “payin’ people who are on welfare today doin’ nothin’! They’re laughin’ at our society! And we’re all hardworkin’ people and we’re getting’ laughed at for workin’ every day!”[ii]

He goes on to share a bit more of Mamaw’s seemingly contradictory feelings—more like “those hateful Republicans” than the Democrat voter she was:

Hillbilly Elegy
cover image

She’d rant against people we’d see in the grocery store: “I can’t understand why people who’ve worked all their lives scrape by while these deadbeats buy liquor and cell phone coverage with our tax money.”

These were bizarre views for my bleeding-heart grandma. And if she blasted the government for doing too much one day, she’d blast it for doing too little the next….

Mamaw’s sentiments occupied wildly different parts of the political spectrum. Depending on her mood, Mamaw was a radical conservative or a European-style social Democrat…. I began to see the world as Mamaw did. I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse (pp. 223-227).

Even though he wasn’t much of a student in his teen years, he was a curious reader. This section strikes a chord with me:

I consumed books about social policy and the working poor. One book in particular, a study by eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson called The Truly Disadvantaged, struck a nerve. I was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longer support such large populations with high-quality work. Those who could—generally the well educated, wealthy, or well connected—left, leaving behind communities of poor people. These remaining folks were the “truly disadvantaged”—unable to find good jobs on their own and surrounded by communities that offered little in the way of connections or social support.

Wilson’s book spoke to me. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him that he had described my home perfectly. That it resonated so personally is odd, however, because he wasn’t writing about the hillbilly transplants from Appalachia—he was writing about black people in the inner cities. The same was true of Charles Murray’s seminal Losing Ground, another book about black folks that could have been written about hillbillies—which addressed the way our government encouraged social decay through the welfare state (pp. 432-434).

Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart talks about some of the same issues, although more generically about the poor and their behavior that keeps them from social and economic mobility, rather than about blacks in particular. The wealthiest zip codes live a certain way, morally, but they don’t seem to dare share those secrets with the working poor.

Vance continues:

It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith (p. 435).

In Vance’s case, he manages to graduate from high school, spend four years in the Marines, graduate from Ohio State, and then Yale Law School.

It turns out that, for someone of his income level, Yale Law School is not only a better education, but a cheaper option than anything else he might have tried. They have needs-based financial aid available just for such cases. But students like him have no way to know that. As he says, “That first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn’t know how the world worked” (p. 626).

An earlier example is the picture of him and his grandmother, near the end of his high school years, trying to fill out financial aid forms, being asked about his father’s income. But his legal father had been totally absent from his life for over a decade. Obviously, the form wanted to know what other resources the student had, and clearly his father wasn’t a resource. But, to them, puzzling through something they have no experience with, they’re trying to figure out how to get this unknowable piece of information in order to comply to the powers that be.

This was so familiar to me. Back in junior high (7^th-9^th grades) I was earning straight As, but at that point in my life, I was completely unaware that there was any possibility I could ever go to college. The message I got was, people like us (i.e., lower-middle-class people like our family) don’t get those kinds of lives.

By 9^th grade my friends planted the idea that, of course I could go to college; I just needed to get a scholarship. I thought that meant I had to be the one, smartest, highest GPA student in the high school, and once we combined with another junior high for high school, I didn’t believe that could be possible. (Fortunately, even when I thought that, I didn’t give up. Eventually I got scholarships—after filling out all the forms myself—that covered more than half my tuition, and I graduated, paying my own way through, without debt.)

When I asked about college at home, I was told, “Why would you want to do that? You’re just going to be a housewife.” And, “You’ll have to pay for that yourself, because we’re not paying for it.” Also, I wasn’t allowed to work unless my mother decided to be willing to drive me to and from—walking alone as a girl was not allowed. There was also a slightly more subtle, class-based discouragement: “People that go to college think they’re so smart. They just want to look down on people.”

There’s a lot about my story that is simply about my mother’s psychological issues. But some of the discouragement stems from a lower-middle-class farm and labor environment. I’ve wondered about the Scots-Irish connection, which does appear in that family line. But I think it’s more a matter of living without the understanding of what’s possible.

Vance talks a little bit about solutions—and the difficulty of finding them:

People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to “solve” the problems of my community. I know what they’re look for: a magical public policy solution or an innovative government program. But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist. A good friend, who worked for a time in the White House and cares deeply about the plight of the working class, once told me, “The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can’t fix these things. They’ll always be around. But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.”

There were many thumbs put on my scale. When I look back at my life, what jumps out is how many variables had to fall in pace in order to give me a chance (p. 711-712).

In his favor were his grandparents’ constancy. And, among the “revolving door of would-be father figures,” at least his mother never chose abusive men. There was his sister, his aunt and uncle, good teachers, and friends.

Remove any of these people from the equation, and I’m probably screwed. Other people who have overcome the odds cite the same sorts of interventions.

He lists several. Here’s what they had in common:

They had a family member they could count on. And they saw—from a family friend, an uncle, or a work mentor—what was available and what was possible (p. 721).

I’ve often discussed with my husband the people I was surrounded by that made a difference in my life. As I’ve written before, I grew up in Utah, at a time when the community was pretty safe, and families were large and strong. Despite the message I got from home that the happy successful world wasn’t available to someone like me, I had teachers and friends, and mentors from church, who told me otherwise.

I was also blessed that, because we were Mormon, there was no drinking in our house. The most negative person in my life was always sober. And I had examples all around me of people living the lives of civilization to good effect.

While there was a lot of discouragement and uncomfortable angst in my home (and probably less verbal expression of love than J. D. had), I wasn’t in a neighborhood that kept my possibilities limited. Until quite recently, I didn’t recognize how different my growing up experience was from so many friends around me; when you’re a fish swimming in the water, you don’t realize you’re wet. I see now that I was lucky to have gone on to thrive. That thumb was on the scale for me.

As Vance points out about the results of one study, “I wasn’t surprised that Mormon Utah—with its strong church, integrated communities, and intact families—wiped the floor with Rust Belt Ohio” (p. 724).

The problems Vance sees with his community, and maybe other similar poverty pockets, aren’t really about programs. As he says, “the fault lies almost entirely with factors outside the government’s control. It’s what happens at home” (p. 731).

Here’s Vance’s conclusion:

As a cultural emigrant form one group to the other, I am acutely aware of their differences. Sometimes I view members of the elite with an almost primal scorn….But I have to give it to them. Their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer” (p. 752).

That’s the message we need to find a way to share with anyone who’s willing to hear it.

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[i] I used an e-reader edition, which identified page numbers when I saved my notes. However, the print edition is listed as having 288 pages, so my page numbering seems to relate more to location within the book than to actual pages. It looks like there are around 770 digital pages.

[ii] Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008

And the Wall Came a’Tumblin’ Down

The 30^th anniversary of President Reagan’s memorable speech at the Brandenburg Gate was in June, but his speechwriter, Peter Robinson, switched chairs on his online interview show Uncommon Knowledge, and was interviewed by longtime friend Pat Sajak, which came out just this week.

They talked about the circumstances that led to that line in the speech: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” And it was a piece of history worth revisiting. I’ll share a few bits of the conversation, and then offer the whole interview.

Here’s the story of how a 25-year-old who had never written a speech got a job as a White House speech writer:

Peter Robinson: This is not a story that reflects well on me or on a couple of people we know or on the federal government. After college, I studied at Oxford, you mentioned I got a degree from Oxford. I stayed in Oxford an extra year to try to write a novel. At the end of the year I had a novel so bad that I couldn't stand reading it, and William F. Buckley Jr, the late and great conservative journalist who much to his credit encouraged young conservatives, suggested that I try to go to Washington and become a speechwriter.

It was 1982 and Bill said get in touch with my son Christopher who was then writing speeches for Vice President Bush. So, I flew from Oxford to Washington, presented myself to Christopher Buckley, hoping he might have a lead on a job writing for a member of Congress or for the Postmaster General. Christopher said, “Well, I'm about to leave this job in two weeks and my replacement just fell through. I don't see any good reason you shouldn't write speeches for the vice president of the United States, and while you're here, go downstairs, downstairs in the old executive office building and talk to Tony Dolan who's the president's chief speechwriter.” I did that. While I was talking to Tony, the phone rang. It was the gubernatorial campaign of a man called Lou Lehrman who was running against Mario Cuomo for governor of New York. Tony Dolan, and they needed a speechwriter. Tony said, “Ah, I have just the man.”

Christopher the next day told the Bush people that he found the perfect replacement for himself, yours truly, but that they'd better move fast because Lou Lehrman wanted me. Tony told Lehrman’s people, “I found the perfect guy for you, Robinson, but move fast because the Bush people want him.” So I went back and forth from interview to interview, New York to Washington, and at the end of two weeks they both offered me a job and nobody asked if I had ever written a speech before.

He worked for the Vice-President for a year and a half, and then joined President Reagan’s staff, so he had five years of speech writing under his belt by 1987. And he knew the President’s mind and voice thoroughly by then.

I was looking at the timeline, to see where I was back then, because I'm only a year or two younger. In 1982 I was married and working as a contract writer for a university, writing curriculum. My academic career wasn’t as impressive as Peter Robinson’s, but I was a working writer, which I thought, maybe rightly so, that I was very fortunate. So I can see how fortuitous his situation was. I suspect he had some writing credentials that he underplays here, or he wouldn’t have been so successful once he got the job.

Robinson explains that the practice was for speech writers to be anonymous, so he never made any claims about the speech—or the famous line—for a good decade. But then he had to:

PR: It was Ronald Reagan from beginning to end, and if we get a chance to discuss how it came to be, you'll see that only he would’ve delivered it. In any event, for the first 10 years I didn't say a peep about it. I didn't associate myself with it in any way. Then I discovered that one of the diplomats who in fact had tried to stop it was in Germany where he was then making, he'd been nominated to a high position in Germany and a friend of mine in Germany sent me a German, I had to have a translator, this guy was taking credit for it. I thought, “That's not right. That's just not right.” It was Ronald Reagan and we speechwriters were, it was our job, it was not, it was not an apparatchik at the State Department. I wrote a piece about it then and it turns out that it's all right, it's easy to live with because people only become interested in it about once every five years. I have the feeling that on this, the 30th anniversary, you and I, I’m discussing it now for the last time. I don't think anybody will be all that interested 35 years from now.

Here’s the story of the research that went into the famous speech.

PR: I was there for research. I was only there for about a day and a half. I went around to various sites in Berlin beginning with where the president would speak, and then that evening I broke away from the American party. That is to say the advance men, the press people and the security and so forth, and got into a cab and went out to a suburban home in West Berlin where the Elz-es, Dieter Elz and Ingeborg Elz, whom I had never met before but we had friends in common in Washington put on a dinner party for me of West Berliners, simply so I could get to know some West Berliners.

We chat a little bit and then I said, “I have to tell you that the ranking American diplomat in Berlin earlier today told me, President Reagan's speechwriter, don't make a big deal out of the Wall. They've gotten used to it by now.” I had been flown over the Wall in a US Army helicopter. So I said, “It looks to me as though it would be the kind of thing it would be hard to get used to. Is it true? Have you gotten used to it?”

And there was a silence, and then one man raised his arm and pointed and he said, “My sister lives just a few kilometers in that direction, but I haven't seen her in more than 20 years. You think we can get used to that?” They had stopped talking about it but they hadn't gotten used to it. We went around the room. Another fellow said, “I walk to work by the same route each day. I pass under a guard tower and there's a young man on that tower with a rifle over his shoulder who looks down at me with binoculars. We share the same history. We speak the same language. But one of us is a zoo keeper and the other is an animal. And I've never been able to decide which was which.”

Then our host is a lovely woman called Ingeborg Elz who just died a couple of years ago. She was a lovely woman. She was a gracious hostess, but she became angry and she said, “If this man Gorbachev means this talk, this perestroika, this glasnost, he can prove it by coming here and getting rid of that wall,” and that was—.

Now by this point I'd been in the White House for five years. I knew Ronald Reagan. I don't mean to say that I played cards with Ronald Reagan or that I was a guest at the ranch. Nothing of that kind. The relationship was entirely professional, but we speechwriters, it was our job to know the mind of the president, to watch which material he liked, to understand how he thought, and I just knew the moment she said that, that if Ronald Reagan had been there, he would have responded to that. The simplicity but the power of that remark. So, I put it into my notebook and went back to the White House and that did become the basis for “Tear down this Wall”.

The famous line was controversial. Reagan and his speechwriters liked it, but the other reviewers of the speech especially wanted that line out—too controversial. But Reagan, Robinson reminds us, besides being a genial and lovely man, was also boldly aggressive, and he saw this as an opportunity to press his advantage. He wanted the line. Robinson knew it he wanted it. And so it stayed. And now it is historic.

It’s history we should remember. There’s something really wrong with a government that must wall in its citizens to keep them from escaping. Tearing down that wall—which happened two years after the speech—was a symbol for freedom for all people. If you don't know this piece of history, you really need to hear him tell the story.

I hope you’ll enjoy watching the whole conversation.

Some More Political Philosophy

I was listening, last night, to the latest Uncommon Knowledge interview, with Sir Roger Scruton of Great Britain. He specializes in political philosophy, which is what we do here at the Spherical Model.

Sir Roger Scruton
photo from Uncommon Knowledge

Host Peter Robinson describes his way of thinking like this:

I take it that you decided that you intended to work in the tradition of Aristotle, philosophy as it bears on ordinary political life. Is that correct?

And Sir Roger Scruton answers,

Well, yes. I've always thought that philosophy has ordinary life as its subject matter. That's what it's about. But it's also a reflection on ordinary life and its meaning.

Philosophy in those terms, instead of, “I wonder if I can prove whether this tree really exists,” seems more likely to be fruitful.

He particularly got my attention when he was talking about former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher:

Sir Roger Scruton: She came into our lives as a representative of our country at a time when the country looked particularly enfeebled by the trade unions, by the whole labor party attempt to rope society into a communal prison run by the state. All that was wonderful. We felt, we don't actually have to go along with all that crap. We can do our own thing. And we can revert to our natural condition as rebellious, eccentric Englishmen. But she felt that she had to embellish it with a complete doctrine, which she borrowed from the Institute of Economic Affairs, and about the need for market solutions to every social problem. Now, I'm all in favor of market solutions where they apply, but not every social problem does have a market solution. There is a need for the maintenance of traditions in education and in culture and in the law, which are not traditions of free enterprise.

They continue this conversation:

Peter Robinson: Again, [Scruton’s book] How to Be a Conservative. "Pressed for arguments," I'm quoting you, "Mrs. Thatcher leaned too readily on market economics, and ignored the deeper roots of conservatism in the theory and practice of civil society ... " You've just said this, but I want to tee it up again. " ... family, civil association, the Christian religion and the common law were all integrated into her ideal of freedom of the law. The pity was that she had no philosophy with which to articulate that idea." She felt it. She knew it. But she had not thought it through in a way that permitted her to articulate it. Here's Mrs. Thatcher.

Now, if I may go a step backward, and I am doing something very dangerous, because my knowledge of this history is tenuous. Yours will be deep. Winston Churchill had the capacity to articulate this deeper conservatism. Throughout the war he's talking about love of native land. He uses the phrase ... He actually uses the phrase, which would today have the man thrown in jail. He uses the phrase, "Christian civilization." Yet, in the 1945 election, in the face of the socialists, because he lacked a vocabulary to talk about free markets, he was naked before Attlee and this socialist impulse.

So what I'm getting at is, it almost seems to me as though there's a kind of ideological teeter totter. Conservatives in Britain either get to talk about free markets, or they get to talk Churchill, McMillan, Eden to the extent that he talked about anything. Heath later on. Or they get to try to talk about cultural conservatism. Somehow, the two don't seem to go together. Is there some reason for that, or is it mere happenstance?

Sir Roger Scruton: That's a very insightful observation. I think since Edmund Burke, we've had this tension between the adoption of the free market as the instrument of economic organization, the primary way in which a society should create and exchange goods, and the sense that some things should be withheld from the market, and that those things are just as important but much more difficult to defend.

Of course, Burke was talking about those things which should be withheld from the market: love, family and so on. All societies have recognized from the beginning of history that a market in sexual relations is the end of all social coherence. It's always very hard to say why. That's just one example. All the things that matter to us, as soon as we recognize how much must they matter, we want to withdraw them from the whole business of exchange and proliferation and, as it were, have them to ourselves. It's that aspect of humanity which is so difficult to articulate. But as you rightly say, Churchill did articulate it. And does it so much easier when it's under threat.

Hmm. So, we have free-market conservatism, and we have social conservatism. And we should mention that this is within the frame of thought that the people are choosing how they will be governed—which is what we call classical liberalism, but since the term liberal has been hijacked to mean its opposite, we mean freedom of limited government, as guaranteed in the US Constitution.

So there’s a political sphere, an economic sphere, and a social sphere. To be conservative, then, is to reach for political freedom, economic prosperity, and social civilization. The opposites, whatever words they use today—liberal, socialist, progressive—reach for political control over people, or tyranny: economic control over people, or poverty; and social decadence, or savagery.

The Spherical Model is a way of saying that these three spheres of conservatism interrelate. To be an economic conservative only is to be incomplete. To be a social conservative only is to be incomplete. To expect freedom without a free economy and a self-governing people is an impossibility.

Later in the conversation, they were talking about cultural issues, particularly concerning sex, marriage, and family:

Sir Roger Scruton: We all of us fall away from the standards that are required in this area. That is undoubtedly the case, because this is the biggest area of temptation. But it is also the biggest area in which examples are needed, and in which a culture of resistance is needed. That culture of resistance was absolutely vital to the protection of the working class family, and especially of children who need a father at home and have lost that protection.

It is undeniable that it's liberal propaganda which has made it almost impossible to say those things. It's not possible to say the things that are needed in this area, unless you're Charles Murray and don't care what's said about you anyway.

Peter Robinson: Or Sir Roger Scruton.

Sir Roger Scruton: Yeah.

Peter Robinson: That makes two of you.

Sir Roger Scruton: Yeah. Exactly. The point is, it's an area in which the truth has been made unsayable by the liberal censorship.

When pressed, he said that liberal censorship is a main reason Donald Trump was elected:

Sir Roger Scruton: People have been living under a regime of liberal censorship, which makes it very hard to say things without being accused of faults like racism, xenophobia. You yourself mentioned this, which nobody wants to be accused of, but which are very easy to—  These are accusations, which are very easy to make, because there's no criteria on the basis of which to make them, other than the feelings involved.

We do, as individuals, have non-mainstream-media outlets. Like this blog. I can say here what Charles Murray and Sir Roger Scruton say, but I am only safe from the accusations while I am obscure. Even so, the accusations sometimes come. I will nevertheless keep speaking truth as clearly as I can, because I love truth.

I just want to add one more of his comments—this one about immigration issues, particularly illegal immigration. He has a way of making the issue clear:

Sir Roger Scruton: You have a house, which you share with your wife and children, assuming you have them. You do recognize the right to keep out of that house people whom you've not invited in. Don't you?

Peter Robinson: I do.

Sir Roger Scruton: Having invited people in who start smashing things up, you recognize a right to exclude them?

Peter Robinson: I do.

Sir Roger Scruton: Yeah. Just multiply that by a few hundred thousand, and you'll recognize that people taken as a whole have that right. That is another part of democracy, that we live in a place. We have the right to exclude from that place those whom we think are not going to fit into it or to whom we don't want to extend a welcome. If we didn't have that right, we wouldn't feel secure in occupying the place that we claim as ours.

Political philosophy has the means to explore the ideas, and find the truths—aside from the push and pull of political waves. While we still have to function in a political world, at least we can have the depth of understanding that explains what it is we conservatives want to conserve.

Some Klavan on the Culture

The other night I happened upon a short video by Andrew Klavan, explaining God. And that led to another suggested Andrew Klavan video. And then another.

Andrew Klavan
screen shot from Uncommon Knowledge interview

Andrew Klavan, a novelist and conservative Christian commentator (who has the talent of being simultaneously funny and insightful), talks about culture. A lot.

The first introduction I had to him was a Klavan on the Culture video in which he compares liberal ideas to zombies that keep coming back from the dead. This was around 2009. I didn’t know how to save a video, so I sat through it multiple times to transcribe it—just so I would always have it. It turns out he’s extremely prolific, so I couldn’t keep doing that.

Anyway, a couple of the videos I watched the other night were a bit of a look back in time, both following books he had recently written. 

In this one, from 2013, he has written A Killer in the Wind, but the talk, he says, is about “Sex and German Philosophy,” two things you should never attempt at the same time, but that are related. In the end, he summarizes with this (around 20 minutes in):

The arts naturally, inherently, by nature, support the conservative view of man. They naturally—they cannot help, left to themselves, but produce a view of spiritual people with a right to choose for themselves.

And what we have to do, as we take back the arts, and take back the culture—and we will do it—is we have to keep from being seduced into being censors and scolds, and simply let the arts speak the truth. Because if the arts speak the truth about spiritual man and what makes him happy, then they will sing the song of human freedom. I know this for a fact, because they always have.

In other words, have faith in the truth. I agree.

The video that got me thinking I ought to write about culture, here in this early January 2017 post, was an Uncommon Knowledge interview (yet another of my favorite things) from 2008, following the publication of his book Empire of Lies.

Peter Robinson talks with Andrew Klavan about his journey to Christianity (from a non-religious Jewish upbringing, through atheism). And they talk about art—particularly in Hollywood, where Klavan both works and criticizes.

Toward the end they cover speaking truth to power—which he says is not what Hollywood does.

PR: So, last question in this segment: Do you get the feeling that Hollywood today—this notion that the arts are always avant-garde, the cutting edge—my feeling is, that’s nonsense. At the present hour, they’re a lagging indicator. You could parachute into Kansas, anywhere in Kansas, walk into the nearest diner and find people who have a much more acute grip of reality than you could by strolling up and down Wilshire Blvd.

AK: No question about it.

PR: And so, is it purely a question of time? All these studio heads who are in their 60s are going to retire soon…. My view would be, let’s buy them places, since we’re…. In other words, is there going to be just kind of a healthy turnover, or is there more kind of an enduring ideological fight that has to be fought?

AK: I’m very optimistic. I think there is an enduring ideological fight that has to be fought. I think the reason they’re a lagging indicator—perfect phrase for them, because they are straight-jacketed by their ideology; they’re the most conformist group of people, backward group of people, you can imagine. But we, conservatives, have let them get away with this.

I’ve said this again and again. But if you win the White House, if you win the Congress, if you win the Supreme Court and lose the culture, you will lose the country. It’s the culture… You know, Shelley was right, the poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. It will take a longer time, but if you lose the culture—if you let them drip this poison into the consciousness of America forever, they will win.

And I think it really is going to require—I’m very optimistic about it, but it is going to require an effort to take the culture back from these people, who are, as you say, conformist, backward, living in the ideology of a generation ago.

They end with a discussion from the novel, which I appreciate:

PR: OK. Let me put the same question in a slightly different way, and ground it in your Empire of Lies, your new novel. Here’s a quotation from Empire of Lies:

The day it began was an autumn day, Saturday afternoon in October. I was sitting in a cushioned chair on the brick patio at the edge of my backyard, looking down half an acre of grassy slope to where my two boys were organizing some kind of Frisbee game around the swingset.

I loved our neighborhood—Horizon Hill, the Hill for short. Big yards. Craftsman houses. Lake views. Friendly, mostly like-minded people. Hard-working dads, housewife moms. Not too many divorces. Lots of kids.”

Andrew Klavan, I charge you with having become irretrievably bourgeois. You are attempting to do something that cannot be done: you’re a novelist; you seek to inhabit the world of the entertaining, the hip, the cool. And yet here you are, as a Christian, a conservative, holding up for praise the square, the unhip, the conventional. You’ll never be cool again.

AK: I may never be cool again. I’ll certainly never be called cool again. And yet, and yet, I cannot help but think that at the center of the arts—because at the center of human life—is the experience of love. And that love is not excluded from the suburbs. It’s not excluded from the bourgeois life. It never was; it never has been. It frequently finds its best ground to grow in there.

My life is deeply affected by my marriage, which is an anomalous marriage in its romance. It’s been a 30-year romance. And I know that’s anomalous, and I know that’s not something that everybody gets. And yet it does give you an insight that this is a possibility—that love, in marriage, is a possibility.

It seems to me that that possibility has been excluded by the so-called avant-garde, who really are the behind-garde. It seems to me that that possibility has been excluded, and that putting it forward is in fact a revolutionary act. Putting it down is in fact saying, “You know what, you know, this is here. You can’t close your eyes to it. You can’t constantly tell us that all marriages are Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? without us coming back and saying, ‘You know, I live in this neighborhood, and I see marriages that aren’t like that at all.’”

Yes. Because family is the basic unit of civilization.

There’s a section near the end of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy that I’ve written about. When the Hobbits return to the Shire, and Sam Gangee musters the courage to go talk to Rosie—and begin what becomes a happy family life. That is, I think, what all the mission was to secure.

I’m often puzzled by the word bourgeois. I think it means middle class, but it’s pejorative, implying corruption. In the real middle class, where families live their lives, mostly happily, but with real life struggles, and love one another—that is where you're most likely to find civilization.

There’s a section of the Spherical Model where we talk about what civilization looks like, and it includes cultural arts:

Creativity abounds; enlightening arts and literature exceed expectations. Architecture and infrastructure improve; innovation and invention are the rule.

People feel free to choose their work, their home, their family practices, their friendships and associations. And they generally self-restrain before they infringe on the rights and freedoms of others.

When people are secure in their persons and property, and have the freedom to choose their own life paths, but are self-restrained by the love of one another—mainly because of family—then civilization is set up to thrive.

It is in the northern hemisphere—of the political, economic, and social spheres—that we get the good outcomes. Nothing that drags people into the southern hemisphere and keeps them there can get those positive outcomes.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.—John Keats

Andrew Klavan is right about culture: truth in art leads to conservative values--the values of freedom, prosperity, and civilization. We need to take this opportunity, while we have more outlets for expression, and find better ways of saying so.