Yes, terrific books. Absolutely recommended. I look forward to celebrating his 100th birthday. If you've not come across him The Vision of the Anointed would make for a interesting introduction.
'Dangers to a society may be mortal without being immediate. One such danger is the prevailing social vision of our time - and the dogmatism with which the ideas and assumptions and attitudes behind that vision are held.'
"People say 'you’re a very tough person'. I’m not tough. Life is tough. I’m merely trying to acquaint you with those facts."
"We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did."
"Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly—and repetition has been accepted as a substitute for evidence."
"The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesn't work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds so good."
"I cannot understand people who say that minorities should be represented everywhere and yet are upset when there are blacks represented in the conservative movement." (Sowell is black)
I don't know, I think we "solved" eg indoor running water, which dramatically reduced mortality.
You can say there was a "trade off" in the respect that it costed a large amount to install that. But it was worth it, like many other expenses are worth it. You have to actually do the value/cost calculation, not appeal to an unconstrained stonewalling gesture.
Sowell isn't an engineer so the sort of thing he's talking about are mostly long standing social problems, not engineering problems. For example, his criticism here is levelled at the sort of people who claim they know a solution for poverty, crime, unfairness, etc.
I'm often pretty happy to be living in a world where labor unions, entrepreneurs, market forces and capital owners have solved plenty of things.
Dunno who John Anderson is but let's look through his other Interview titles on his web page:
Conversations: With Louise Perry, Author and Journalist
Conversations: Featuring Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto I
Conversations: Featuring Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto II
Conversations: Featuring Dr Jordan B Peterson and Dave Rubin
Conversations: Featuring Claire Lehmann, Founding Editor of Quillette Magazine
Conversations: Featuring Douglas Murray, Author and Journalist
Conversations: Featuring Dave Rubin, Host of The Rubin Report
Conversations: Featuring Baroness Caroline Cox, Humanitarian, Life Peer of the House of Lords
Conversations: Featuring Niall Ferguson MA, D.Phil, Senior Fellow, Stanford University III
Conversations: with Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University
Conversations: with Douglas Wilson, Minister and Author
Conversations: with Zuby, Rapper, Author and Podcaster
Conversations: with Paul Rahe, Professor of History at Hillsdale College
Conversations: with Klon Kitchen, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Conversations: with Patrick Bet-David, Author and Entrepreneur
Conversations: with Katharine Birbalsingh, Headmistress of Michaela Community School
Conversations: with Dennis Prager, Founder of PragerU, Radio Host & Writer
Conversations: with Victor Davis Hanson, Historian and Writer
Anderson and Joe Rogan must use the same booking agency.
He is displeased by the fact that there are people who dare to give voice to those who are labelled 'conservative' or 'right-wing' by the talking heads in the corporate press, thereby acquiring a taint in the way a Linux kernel acquires one by giving space to non-GPL modules: "if you listen to those people we will not take anything you say seriously because you're tainted".
I happen to agree with the tainting mechanism in the Linux kernel but I vehemently disagree with this type of political tainting.
The idea that there are no solutions is absurd. Sure there are trade offs with everything, but there are numerous situations where the solution so drastically outweighs the trade-offs that we generally accept that we’ve solved the problem.
There is a type of political dialog wherein one group says that things are so complicated that they can never be better. Usually if you look behind the curtain they’re benefitting from the status quo.
In my view the fundamental disagreement between progressivism and conservatism is whether or not there are tradeoffs at play, whether or not we can have our cake and eat it too. A conservative is inclined to say that we can't and a progressive is inclined to say that we can.
The conservative is usually right, but all progress (whether social or technological) depends on when they're wrong, hence the eternal conflict.
Edit: Another way of saying this is that the conservative plays as if she is in a game with a concave payoff function and the progressive as if the payoff is convex.
The conservative is only right in the sense that he'd rather throw the cake into a furnace than allow someone to have a piece. Then he'll turn to you and say "see? I told you we couldn't share cake!"
> he'd rather throw the cake into a furnace than allow someone to have a piece
Funny, that's exactly the view I have of progressivism as an envy-driven ideology that would rather see everyone be equally miserable than some few being less miserable than others.
Great, four minutes of two fellas philosophically spinning their wheels.
> The trade-offs are as bad as the solution, quite often.
Embarrassing. This overgeneralization is so broad you could pass the US national debt through it sideways. It’s perfectly fine to take a subject matter, say lock downs or climate change, and talk in concrete terms about the trade-offs of different proposed solutions. But as presented here, it’s just noise that undermines public discourse.
> You’re not gonna solve anything
> There are no solutions. There just aren’t.
Reductive and cynical generalization. We solve things all the time. Yes, every solution in the practical world has trade-offs. Yes, some solutions are worse than others. But the insinuation that solutions are and have to be perfect is false. Is he suggesting that we should just do nothing because we’re fallible, mortal beings incapable of perfection? Another quote comes to mind: Perfect is the enemy of good.
> What we’re reducing politics to is series of one-trick pony shows
> there’s a crisis here, and it’s the only thing we’ll talk about
He knows full well governments balance a wide assortment of issues at any given time. However, as severity increases, it bubbles up chain of leadership to a group that has the mandate, resources, and experience to address the crisis. When you have lots of crises in play, you have to rely on an efficient executive to prioritize your responses and manage those resources. That can lead to bottlenecks, and when it comes to government, that can damage people in many ways.
Today, we’re faced with a lot of severe crises that often play off one another. Talking about our governments’ ability to effectively and efficiently address problems at the scale they are affecting us is one thing, but the proximity of these two statements (whether he intended it or not) read as a handwavy dismissal of public or political reactions to climate change and lock downs as gimmicks.
> I’m not conservative
Disagree, I’ve read your substack.
> I have some conservative views, some not-conservative views
There have always been a bunch of weird shibboleths that let people know you're on their "team", those now have devolved into hashtags. A funny way to let people who are ostensibly very resistant to the concept of safe spaces know they're in one.
You gotta appreciate the grift of conservatives, always cashing in on the industries they deregulated and privatized, austerity for the poor, socialism for the wealthy. "There are no solutions, only trade-offs", even their "intellectuals" sound like babbling fools, and conservative people think this is profound wisdom, imbeciles.
Conservatives crying about actions against climate change feels almost hysterical, its not like liberals are doing anything about it so what are you getting so upset about. At least liberals pretend to care about a dying planet, while protesting a homeless shelter in their backyard of course, but it's some improvement I guess. I mean at least they don't want to murder gay people.
/edit I know unpopular opinion, but I think its important to remind people that there isn't just conservatives and liberals, and liberals aren't leftists so conservatives pretending liberals are on the left fighting against climate change and liberals thinking to themselves "yeah we do that!", it always bugs me.
