Sowell on the Firing Line

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

His conservatism riles many blacks but impresses Reagan

Thomas Sowell was bound to be a favored intellectual at Ronald Reagan's White House. A prolific (eleven books) economic historian, he is an impassioned defender of conservative dogma. His own life is an advertisement for the American Dream: born poor, he dropped out of high school, attended college on the G.I. Bill, won a bachelor's degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago, and went on to a distinguished teaching career. Perhaps equally attractive to the Reaganauts, Sowell is black--and claims to reflect the views of a vast, quiet black mainstream.

The White House would like to believe him. Said Presidential Counsellor Edwin Meese III at a conference of mostly conservative blacks organized by Sowell last December: "Some of the people who purport to represent the black community are talking about the ideas of the last ten years. You are talking about the ideas of the next ten years."

Sowell, 51, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, seems to be everywhere arguing his case. He has three new books out: Ethnic America (a historical analysis of how various groups have fared). Pink and Brown People (a collection of newspaper columns) and Markets and Minorities (an examination of whether the underprivileged are more successful with or without government assistance).

Sowell's positions are anathema to many blacks, and he has few supporters among black scholars. Cornell Political Economist Manning Marable, for instance, dismisses him as an "ebony version of Milton Friedman." Indeed, Sowell studied under Nobel Prizewinner Friedman at Chicago, and many of his positions bear a free-market stamp: forced school busing is insulting and destructive to blacks as well as whites. Affirmative action and quotas, with their accompanying threat of antidiscrimination suits by those who do not win promotions, lead employers to hire only the safest risks--the most talented and credentialed members of minority groups. The minimum wage has quintupled teen-age unemployment among blacks, because employers eliminate jobs rather than pay more than unskilled youths are worth.

His latest scholarly publications minimize the present-day importance of white racism and blame defects in black attitudes and skills for much of the still wide lag in income of blacks behind whites.

To his mind, this is a pragmatic judgment, not a moral one. Says he: "Cultures are not 'superior' or 'inferior." They are better or worse adapted to a particular set of circumstances." Because slavery so distorted the black experience in the U.S., Sowell suggests blacks could measure their progress as though they were recently arrived immigrants. Even so, he is contemptuous of blacks who feel they should be given special treatment because of the lingering effects of slavery; when one compares "the average standard of living in Africa to the average standard of living of black Americans, the grotesque conclusion of this arithmetic might be that blacks pay whites compensation."

Sowell considers demographics as influential as culture. In Ethnic America, he attributes many apparent differences in income among ethnic groups to differences in average age and place of residence. Blacks, for example, are disproportionately young, thus still climbing in income, and live more often in the South, where average wages are lower.

He debunks any suggestions that blacks are genetically inferior. IQ scores for ethnic groups, he says, change over time. They reflect family background and cultural assimilation. As proof he cites a group of Jews tested during World War I. Many of them were first-generation immigrants from Russia and Poland, and they had "some of the lowest scores on mental tests of any of the numerous ethnic groups tested." Now their descendants rank among the highest.

He believes enduring ethnic traits have led to success or failure. Each immigrant or minority group's values are its "human capital." Thus Japanese Americans have succeeded, despite generations under restrictive laws and incarceration during World War II, because of intense commitment to "the honor of the family." Italian Americans, though similarly family-centered, have done less well, he says, because the abler members of each generation were taught that upward mobility would estrange them from--even betray--the rest of the family. Some of these group traits sound like pernicious stereotypes, especially his portrayal of blacks. Writes Sowell: "With little incentive to work any more than necessary to escape punishment, slaves developed foot-dragging, work-evading patterns that were to remain as a cultural legacy long after slavery itself disappeared. Duplicity and theft were also pervasive patterns among antebellum slaves, and these too remained long after slavery ended." But Sowell sees other, more optimistic signs. Says he: "I'm always amazed, when I drive through Harlem, at the kids dashing out to wash windshields. Decades of abuse haven't stamped out the initiative of the people."

The unifying theme in almost all of Sowell's work is that the American free enterprise system has worked for every other group and is working for blacks who play by its rules. The system has certainly worked for him: Sowell says that Reagan offered him a Cabinet post but that he preferred to pursue his own projects. (He is, however, serving on the Economic Policy Advisory Board.) Married, with children, Sowell is aloof and passionately private. He believes above all in self-reliance. The hardest time in his life, he has been quoted as saying, was when he transferred from predominantly black Howard University in Washington to Harvard. "But, thank God, there weren't any bleeding hearts around in those days, and I finally made it on my own.'' --By William A. Henry III. Reported by Eileen Shields/San Francisco

With reporting by Eileen Shields

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