Name: Wealth, poverty and politics
ISBN: 9780465096763

Wealth, poverty and politics

"Sowell...argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus exclusively on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture"--Amazon.com

What Hacker News says

ccorcosApr 2025

I asked ChatGPT to explain the arguments of Sowell and Piketty.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67eebae2-df3c-800b-aba9-6e36c04810...

I liked Sowell's book, "Wealth, Poverty and Politics". Can you recommend one of Piketty's books?

> raw materials - which often have to be sourced elsewhere

Is that necessarily true? The US has abundant natural resources. Tesla could be mining lithium a few hundred miles away from their factory instead of importing it...

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PathOfEclipseJan 2025

Thanks for the info. Can you give an example of someone on the right mistaking a symbol for reality? I've seen, I believe, the opposite in play. I've seen, for instance, thinkers like Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau argue the exact opposite; that a symbol is an approximation but also that it's utility is tied to fidelity with reality. And, over-simplistic viewpoints are found in abundance on the left.

As an example, a leftist over-simplifies that all group disparities must be caused by systemic injustice. This is deeply untrue, and, for instance, Sowell's "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics" is a treatise on the myriad of complexities that can result in group disparity that have nothing to do with social oppression or even occur in spite of it. But the SJW has a "map" of the territory, and it gives a seemingly univariate explanation for everything.

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PathOfEclipseNov 2022

At what point in the world's history has wealth not been concentrated? What, therefore, is your argument or evidence that wealth inequity isn't natural? Even in video games with an online economy and trade that resets periodically, within a week of a reset you'll see massive disparity in wealth between the top and everyone else that only grows over time. And I mean massive.

You should read "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics." It really is illuminating to learn at an academic level how wealth has been produced throughout history and some reasons why it is distributed unevenly.

https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Politics-Thomas-Sowell...

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PathOfEclipseApr 2022

I disagree, and so do other thinkers more well-known than I. With regards to "why are there poor and rich people", the answer is so complex as to occupy entire libraries. I've personally read Thomas Sowell's "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics", where he delves into a number of important factors for economic disparity that in vogue ideologues tend to ignore. And, that's the point. Their ideology blinds them to the complexity of the world.

There is similarly a non-ideological answer to "should I steal bread to feed my family?" It involves tradeoffs like:

* what will happen if I steal this bread? Could I get caught and therefore no longer be able to provide for my family? What effect will it have on myself and on society?

* what will happen if I don't steal the bread? Is there any other way to provide food for my family? Can I accept their death as a consequence for obeying a moral law?

You weigh the tradeoffs, risks, and expected outcomes, then make a decision for yourself, which may or may not be the right answer for your specific situation and may or may not generalize to other situations or other people.

As Jordan Peterson says: " Ideologues are the intellectual equivalent of fundamentalists, unyielding and rigid."

And also: "Beware, in more technical terms, of blanket univariate (single variable) causes for diverse, complex problems."

Your definition of ideology may differ from that, but in practice, I find that when we call someone an ideologue today, or refer to an ideology, it is always a false narrative-based over-simplification of the world.

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mercurialmavenNov 2021

"software that is more likely to falsely punish people of color does support the continued dominance of white people in a real, material way."

The statement is at best extremely misleading, and at worse, mostly false. It also represents a juvenile, immature, and myopic perspective on reality.

I would suggest reading "Wealth, Poverty, and Politics" or "Discrimination and Disparities" by Thomas Sowell. He has been debunking the "inequality of outcome therefore racism" logical fallacy for decades.

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dmixFeb 2020

That’s not how anything actually works in the real world though.

The arguments against libertarians are almost always some absolutist interpretation of some anarchist movie is world or worse Somalia which has tons of tribal systems, failed states (which includes a fair judicial system and enforcement of the law which markets absolutely depend on) and very little developed capitalist industries.

In reality most libertarians want a smaller government than is currently in place, they don’t want zero government. They most certainly don’t want an unstable state without centralize state run courts or law enforcement (outside of a very tiny extremist minority, a far smaller minority in the world than those who want actual vanguard communism again).

I’m a pragmatic libertarian leaning person which means that being realistic means compromise that some industry just simply makes more sense (as the amount of trouble it would cause to be market based via uncontrollable externalities). You could even factor in the amount of natural political meddling like we see in the US healthcare markets, which creates fake pseudo markets that provide few of the benefits of a real market where a single centralized public insurance option may actually be the least evil option, since the alternative has long ago become unrealistic. But that said I’d go as far as up to 50%+ up industry intervention and pro-social projects (ie helping the poor) are actually making things worse off overall had they not existed at all.

Thomas Sowell has written some great books documenting hundreds of cases of gov intervention coming with good intentions that have backfired (ie. rent control in Toronto and NYC in the 70s and 80s which dramatically reduced the supply of new low income development because no one wanted to build with rent control when they could build somewhere else).

I recommend “Wealth, Poverty, and Politics” by Sowell as a starter.

For other examples of failures of gov run central industry making them worse off than before I highly recommend reading the Venezuela economy Wikipedia about all the stuff they did after declaring capitalism is old and dead, creating mass starvation and unnecessary poverty in what could have been the most successful country in South America. Meanwhile countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong adopted markets after having large state run industry and dramatically increased the wealth of their entire country in a short few decades.

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