A review by inquiry_from_an_anti_library
Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell

adventurous emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective tense fast-paced

4.0

Is This An Overview?

There are many factors that create disparities between people.  Human bias that is part of discrimination is a single factor, among many factors.  Discrimination does not have a monopoly on creating disparities or even always a dominant factor, as there are many factors that influence human achievement.  There have been societies with industries dominated by ethnic minorities, who did not control politics or other social aspects.  People with the same skill sets, do not necessarily want the same things, do not want the same outcomes.  As people do have different skills, different people and groups can excel in some achievements while lag in others. 

 

Nature itself is not egalitarian, as resources are not distributed equally between political boundaries.  Knowledge can be used to transform nature, but not all societies have equal access to the same information.  Geographically linked people have more access to information and develop faster than geographically isolated people.  Even with access to information, cultures need to be receptive to different ideas to make use of the information.  Not all cultures are receptive to different ideas.

 

What Can Be Done About The Disparities?

Social justice activists may want to fix social problems, but that does not mean their claims and policies achieve their goals.  Intervention in society is claimed by social justice activists as needed to ameliorate the problems, but they can fail to share supporting evidence that intervention is needed.  Social justice activists tend to hide evidence of how the problem they sought to ameliorate was ameliorating before their intervention, and do not share evidence of the problem being exacerbated after the intervention. 

 

Politicians who advocate social justice to gain votes, learn to enact politically desirable policies even as there are negative consequences for society.  Society might suffer, but the politician gains political support.  There are increased chances that terrible policies are enacted for their political desirability, when the politicians do not face the consequences of being wrong.

 

People react differently to the imposition of rules and policies than expected.  They do not simply accept and carry out someone else’s grand design.  Policies can have the reverse consequences than expected, such as raising tax rates with the expectation of increasing tax revenue, can have the consequence of lowering tax revenue as people find ways of avoiding the taxed activity or product.  Alternatively, lowering tax rates can increase tax revenue as more people will find the activity or product attractive.

 

Caveats?

While the author shares the biases of the opposition, the author has biases of one’s own.  There are various examples of how the opposition used evidence incorrectly or did not share the appropriate evidence, while the author presents favorable alternative evidence to support the authors’ claims without questioning the evidence in the same way.

 

This book contains examples and ideas found in various other books that the author wrote, without many changes to the examples or additional examples.  This book can be used as a short reference book to the authors’ other books.