- Tom Sowell and I have recorded some 20 shows over the last couple of decades.

Shall we make it 21?

- Yeah.

Thomas Sowell on "Uncommon Knowledge" now.

(upbeat classical music) Welcome to this special edition of "Uncommon Knowledge." I'm Peter Robinson.

Thomas Sowell lived as a boy in a house without plumbing in Gastonia, North Carolina.

Spent his teen years in Harlem, tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, how history might have been different.

(Tom laughing) Served in the United States Marine Corps, holds degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago.

Taught at Douglas College, Cornell, Howard, Brandeis, Amherst, and UCLA, has published at least 40 books.

There are different ways to count them depending on revised editions, new editions, reprints and so forth, and has served for 48 years now as a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Tom, you and I talked about the conversation we're about to have today, and you said you wanted to devote it to one topic.

Not economics, not race, not sociology or culture.

You want to talk about education.

- Yes.

- Why?

- The, the reason I, I, I have such a focus on education is one, that it is one of the major institutions of our society that is failing more so I think than most of the other major institutions of our society.

And it's failing in two different ways.

It's failing to teach students how to think.

It's failing to give them a background of knowledge, of history.

It's, it's, and it's, it's, and it's, and it's failing to allow them to express views that are different from what, what is being propagandized.

They, these have become propaganda agencies more so than educational institutions.

And I think more than that, the, the way the, these, these education is set up as a, as an, as an institution, there's nothing in it to cause them to change, to correct themselves.

If you are in private business, if you're making widgets, if you're not making widgets that the public wants or will put up with, then you will, you will discover that because you can't sell them, you will be losing money, and you will be forced out of business.

Milton Friedman used to say that people call this a capitalist society as a profits societies, says it's a profit and loss society.

And the losses are just as important as the, as the profits, because the losses force people to stop doing things that are not working.

And, and, and, and only those who are doing things that, that can be self-supporting can continue.

That's not true with education.

Public school education, you, you have the almost inexhaustible amount of money from the taxpayers.

Private schools are becoming private more in name than in reality, they're getting billions of dollars of taxpayers money, and there's very little following of what happens.

So, so that they can keep on doing things that are wrong for generation after generation.

My, my book "Inside American Education" is one that I, I want to have people take a look at, not because it's a new book, but because precisely because it's an old book.

By reading it, you see that things that we have newly discovered that are wrong with the schools sometimes as a result of the COVID pandemic.

- Right.

- That and, and the homeschooling that came out of that.

Those things had been like that for 30 years or more.

There's a, one of the, one of the particular items, for example, is the, someone discovered that in Minnesota the schools were teaching boys about tampons, and some people seized upon that say, "What a strange thing that is." It is, but if it was been doing that for more than 30 years, and you would never have known that, except for the pandemic, the any idea that the public can, can keep up with what is going on in the schools in any serious way is false.

You have to have something, some mechanism by which the school, the schools can be changed or the people can be allowed out of those schools without their having to, to be able to, to, to keep up with what's actually going on.

- Tom, as I, as I read your life, your life story here, "A Personal Odyssey," and we've known each other for a long time, one of the reasons you feel so deeply about education is because of the difference it made in your life.

- Oh, yes.

- Could I ask you just to, to tell a couple of stories.

You've moved from North Carolina to Harlem.

You meet a kid named Eddie.

- Mm.

- And Eddie takes you to a strange institution.

Can you tell us about that?

You still remember it vividly?

- Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Eddie came from a much better educated family than I did.

But the, but my family appreciated education and therefore, even before I arrived in New York, they had, they had picked out Eddie as someone that I must get to know because he can tell me things that they don't know.

- I see.

- And introduced me really to, to parts of the world that I, that they're not familiar with.

And the first thing he did was take me to a public library.

You know, I came into this big building with enormous numbers of books.

I wondered, "Why am I here?

I don't have enough money to buy one book." I was already thinking like a Chicago economist.

(Peter laughing) And I, and his explanation didn't, it was hard for me to understand, but he eventually convinced me to reluctantly take out a library card, and, and to borrow a couple of books.

And since I arrived in the summer, I had, I had no school to go to, there were no kids nearby.

And so I started becoming a reader.

And after a while, it became a habit.

And, and I had no idea at the time what the significance of this would be.

But without that, the rest of the story would not not have been the same.

- Have you ever given any thought to how your life might have turned out if you had stayed in North Carolina?

- I try not to think of that.

- All right.

That bad?

- Yes.

- All right.

- That was there.

I mean, there was a reason why Blacks were moving out of the south by the millions in the first half of the 20th century.

And they understood that there was no not much point staying to try to change the minds of the people in the south.

You get you, you simply take yourself out of the south.

Now, older people had connections that, that couldn't do that, but a disproportionate number of younger people just left the area.

And that, that had a major effect on their income and, and other, other opportunities.

- Right.

You went on to become, you developed the habit of reading.

We're compressing this just a little bit.

You developed the habit of reading.

You would become a student at Howard University.

You transfer from Howard to Harvard, and from Harvard on Tom Sowell becomes the Tom Sowell we know, an intellectual, and author, and academic, but there are years before you go to Howard- - Oh, yes.

- In which you have some very hard times.

So my question is this, on education, very few people are going to become anything like the intellectual that you went on to become, but all of us experienced hard times.

How did that habit of reading, of educating yourself, of acquiring knowledge, help to sustain you through those hard times?

- Well, it did in terms of morale and so on.

But there's another aspect of of my education that I think may, may have some relevance.

It was, it was common in those days when kids came out of the south and went to school in New York, at least the Black kids, I think it was probably true of the whites as well, that they would be put back automatically put back one year because the difference in the educational quality was that great.

And from I, when I enrolled at, in the first, when at in New York, they said they were gonna do that.

And I asked to see the principal.

And I thought, thought I, I was ready to, to take on the school in new in, in New York without being put back a year.

And I, and I convinced him he would, he would let me try.

It was, and it was a, it was a, a decision, it was a bad decision on my part, but it also tells you something about ability and, and what the limits are.

So I was put in a, I was put in four A three as the fourth grade, A being the fall semester.

And three, they, they had what they call ability grouping in those days, the best students were put in four A one, the second best in four A two.

And they put me in four A three.

And I found I couldn't do the work.

- You couldn't keep up?

- I couldn't do the work.

Having been one of the best students in my class in North Carolina, I was now the worst student in the class in Harlem.

And whoever was next to worst was probably a lot better than I was.

And I can remember at one point actually crying over my homework because I was just absolutely stunned.

And of course, when I turned to the adults for help, they said, "We don't have any kind of education to enable us to help you." And so it was a real struggle.

Now, at the end of that semester, I received a commendation card from the principal as the most improved student in the class, which I was happy about, but I still hadn't improved enough.

So when they promoted me, where I would normally have been, go from four A three to four B three.

- Right.

- I, they put me in four B four, the lowest class because I still had not caught, caught up.

And so I went, I finally got my act together and I got back, I went to five A three.

So now I'm, I'm, I'm up there with, with only the third, third lowest students.

- Right.

- And so, and, and he was only after that that I made it finally to five B one.

But it's a year and a half to do that.

And so despite what, what, the success I had in later years, the fact is that mere a raw ability by itself only goes so far.

And I think a lot of what is being said doesn't take that into account.

- The work, the decent schooling, dedicated teachers who know their jobs, it all still matters no matter how bright the kids are.

- Well, it, it, that's, well, that's true.

But it, but it's also true that the, the difference between Charlotte and New York was huge.

- Right.

- And moreover, in later years when I'm doing research on IQs, I, I happened to come across the IQs for the kids in that school, at the time that I was in that school, their average IQ was 84.

- Really?

- Yes.

And now I go on.

And so at the end of the sixth grade in elementary school, I was, I was then assigned to a predominantly white junior high school.

And now I entered at seven A one.

And, and, and it so happened that in this school there was also a, a different class called seven AR.

And that was the rapid advancement class.

And that was a class for students with IQs of 120 and above.

And someone in the school personnel decided they would find out if there were any kids who had IQs of 120 who were not in that class already.

And they discovered that they were four, and I was one of them.

And so despite that, I had to struggle for a year and a half to catch up with kids whose IQs were 84.

Now, I go into the, the seven AR and I remember the, the first first math exam there, they, they, when, when the teacher brought, brought back the corrected things, he said, "I didn't think this was a tough example class like this, but only one person made a 100 on it, and his name was." And he starts going through the things, trying to find it, "His name was." And being some, something of wise guy said, "Thomas Sowell." He said, "Yes, that's the name." - Oh, really?

- But the point is that, so I, I, I, here I am, I couldn't, I had trouble keeping up with kids whose IQs were 84 until I finally, a year and a half later got, got gotten up into, into the top class.

And yet when I went, at that point, I could then go, go anywhere and do anything.

- So that, so, as you have demonstrated pretty amply in the years since you have a first rate mind, but it would've been wasted if you had, that's a hint as to what would've happened if you'd faced the very sparse, poor educational.

If you'd stayed in North Carolina.

- Yes.

Yes.

- All right.

Tom, you and I have talked about the story of Dunbar High School.

- Yes.

- The high school, you first wrote about it in 1974, all Black high school in Washington.

I'm gonna quote you now, "As far back as 1899, Dunbar students came in first in citywide tests given in both Black and white schools." I wanna repeat that.

The black kids at Dunbar came in first.

- Wait, that, that, that, that was, that was, that was an error, that was an error.

- Oh, it was?

- Yes.

The, that was, that was from reading what someone else had said.

- Oh.

- In later years, I did my own research.

They came, there were four, and they came in ahead of two of two, two of the, of the three white schools.

- Okay, all right.

Alright.

Thank you for correcting your own work.

"Over in the 85 year span," 1870 to 1955, "Most of Dunbar's graduates went on to college, even though most Americans, white or black in those years did not." - Yes.

- All right, then we get the Supreme Court decision in Brown requiring schools to be desegregated.

Dunbar was all Black, they're shifting all around in Washington DC, they move in some white kids, they take Black kids from the local neighborhood.

It had been that Black kids from clear across town if they wanted to go to Dunbar, could go.

And Dunbar sinks.

And now I want to quote you again because this is something that I've heard you comment on often, quote, "Social pathology has held an enduring fascination for researchers, and nowhere more so than in the study of Black Americans.

Isolated successes receive occasional attention, but large scale or institutional progress and excellence seem to be almost shunned.

With all the voluminous outpourings on black educational pathology, there has been an almost total neglect of black educational successes." - Yes.

- Why?

- That, that is the question that I, I have not been able to solve, but which I hope someone in the younger generation will do that.

And then there have been other, there have been other schools.

One that I, by the time I came along to do, do my research on Dunbar, Dunbar had already, was no longer a, a school what it had been.

But there was one Black school that impressed me enormously.

It was in New York City.

And, and I was collecting data and I went, went to the principal's office there to ask if he had any data on the test score for the people in his school.

And he said to me, "Yes, and I'll show it to you later, but you won't believe the, the data unless you see that the students." And so this was in a regular ghetto school.

In fact, I phoned a friend I knew in New York and told him I was in town and we, could we get together for lunch?

And I said, "I have a rented car." And then I, I told him where I, where I was, and he said, "You sure are brave to park a car in that neighborhood." And he said brave, but I'm sure he meant foolhardy.

But nevertheless, and the principal, instead of giving me the usual attempted village tour, he, he said, "We'll walk down this hallway on each of these floors and you pick out whichever room you want to go into.

And we'll come in there and sit, sit for a while." And so that's what we did.

And I, every floor in the building, and I came in, and this is just a typical ghetto school.

All those kids spoke the king's English, all of them had very good answers to all the questions that were asked.

And it was, it was just as if it was some middle class or higher place.

And I, and I just two or three rooms on each floor, and it was all the same.

And I only after that, that he turned the, the test results over to me, and this school was far superior to any of the other schools in this district.

And it was by no means the any, any better off socioeconomically than, their neighborhood was certainly no better.

But it, it could be done.

That was half a century ago.

Nobody that I know of has ever taken a slightest interest in that, in that school.

- Tom, you're the first guest who can say, refer to work he's done half a century ago.

(Both laughing) But so this is related, the lack of interest, it's related.

Here's another point that I'm very struck by that you have made in our conversations over the years.

And that is that from the, from emancipation, from the end of the Civil War to before the Civil Rights Acts and before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, you've got a century, a clean century, pretty clean century, 1865 to 1965.

- Mm.

- And do African Americans remain inured in the status of former slaves?

No.

They get educations.

They're making tremendous progress.

Of course, they stay behind, Blacks, but there's, there is demonstrable progress.

The Black family by and large remains intact.

And there's progress of all kinds in that century, or I'll put it, Condi Rice and I went down to Birmingham, Alabama, about a year and a half ago, and we did a show there on Birmingham.

And we did a show because it was the 60th anniversary of Dr.

King's the so-called Youth March when kids from high school and so forth marched in Birmingham.

And I went down there thinking that Condi and her generation who had gone from segregated Birmingham to lead big, of course Condi is a special case because she set former Secretary of State.

But she made the point that from her neighborhood, lots of kids did well.

I went down there thinking that they were the heroic generation.

And of course those achievements are enormous.

But I decided that their parents and grandparents were the heroic generation because they had gone from zero education, as emancipated slaves in three, four generations, Condi's father and mother were both teachers.

Condi took me back to her neighborhood and she said, "In this neighborhood on Saturday afternoon, you'd have seen little kids playing.

But on Saturday morning, I had my piano lesson, the little kid across the street had a French lesson." All the kids were kept in to be educated, okay.

And yet this heroic to me, a heroic century has just disappeared.

It's gone down the memory hole.

We don't have historians writing about that.

It's a, it's a, it's a missing century.

Why?

I don't understand why.

Why isn't that part of our history?

- I think a good part of it would be that it would undermine the things that people are doing now that are supposed to be advancing the people who are low income and, and, and less educated.

And they want to take credit for, for the progress that's been made as if it all started with, with the 1960s.

And I mentioned, I mentioned the place in Brooklyn, but I mean, Dunbar High School, to give you some idea, out of Dunbar High School, there came the first Black man to graduate from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, the first Black General in the army, the first Black cabinet member, the first Black man to become a full professor at a nationally known university.

I think I left out one or two, but I, there was also a doctor who became internationally known because of his work on blood plasma, which apparently came in handy during World War II when there were a lot of injured people in Britain who, who needed blood, blood plasma.

And, and again, no one, no one, I know of nobody who's followed up.

There has been, there have been two, two books that I know are written about Dunbar, one by a former teacher and the other.

But there, there was not, the former teacher had some data in, in, in her book, but nobody since then.

And when I, and I, when I wrote it, I thought, you know, of course the, the whole educational effort following from the 1954 decision by the Supreme Court was that separate schools were inherently unequal.

And, and then it so happens that Dunbar High School was located within walking distance of the Supreme Court that declared its existence impossible.

Whether, whether, whether the Chief Justice, Warren, believed that himself or not.

And he takes this picture that you see, that Blacks, because the, they, they, they are, they're kept out of the white high schools.

This, this will so affect their picture of the world and themselves that it will be a big educational handicap.

Now it so happens, I went to one of those segregated schools in the south.

There were no white people in our neighborhoods.

There were no white people in our churches.

There were no white people in our, in our play, places where we played.

If we'd found white people in the, in the school, we would wonder what the hell was going on.

(Peter laughing) But, but just one false assumption like that can for years, decades now, keep, keep the, the truth from coming out because people get a vested interest in that.

Whatever people paid any attention at all to my work on Dunbar High School, and there were very few, spent their times paying, trying to discredit this, it's relevance.

See it, those, those were middle class people, none of them cited a speck of evidence that they had any idea of either the income or the occupations, or the parents of those kids.

Now it so happens, I did have some and it was not.

There were, and you know, there, there were, there, there were, there were some multiple number of kids whose mothers were maids as compared to those whose fathers were doctors.

- Right.

- And that was true back in 1895 when, when, when, when they bested two of the three high three white high schools.

And so what you have among intellectuals of all people is a notion that there, there's some set idea and, and anything that goes against that idea, they, they're not interested in pursuing it.

- Got it.

Got it.

Your 2020 book, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies," you examine a number of charter schools.

This is 2020, it's a good number of years after you grew up in Harlem, but you went back to Harlem and you discovered charter schools that were using classrooms in public school buildings drawing from the same population.

So it's the same kinds of kids being taught in the same buildings under the same New York State curricula as those in the public schools.

And here's what you found that not only did the kids, and we're talking here mostly about Black and Hispanic kids, not only did these kids do better than minority kids in public schools, but on one subject after another, they tested better than white kids out in the suburbs.

So you discovered what you've always known, but you bring forth evidence and you have appendix after appendix with test scores.

All the evidence is in the book, the 2020 book "Charter Schools and Their Enemies." We know how to educate little Black kids and little Hispanic kids and give them an opportunity.

And here is why it is called "Charter Schools and Their Enemies" because the charter schools were under intense political pressure from liberals.

And you note that Mayor Bill de Blasio, then Mayor of New York, had ended the expansion of charter schools.

He put the charter schools under pressure.

So I'm gonna quote you, "It is a painful irony that people who are promoting the make believe equality of inclusion and diversity in schools are attacking charter schools that are producing the real equality of educational achievement." Close quote.

Again, what's going on?

Why would, why, why wouldn't Liberals embrace, and celebrate, and try to promote charter?

Why wouldn't everybody attempt to celebrate this result?

- Well, for one thing, the, their whole vision of the world is one in which the government has to step in and rescue Blacks.

And, and, and, and the Liberals preempt this, the decision making of, of Blacks and of other groups in the past who have been low income and having, having difficulties.

And it will never occur to them that those people know their own situation far better than any Liberal knows it.

One of, one of the, one of the, one of the people who has written about this is a man who graduated, he graduated a summa cum laude from Harvard that, that may, charitable people may think of that as a mitigating factor.

But he, he says openly himself that he really has not looked at the data, but he's been writing articles and books showing why you shouldn't support charter schools.

And he and he and he said, "Well, obviously the, the parents don't, don't, don't know enough to be able to pick the right schools for their kids.

And something has to, has to be done for it." So it, it's a, I mean, facts are really a danger to the egos of a lot of people with high IQs and low information.

- Universities.

We've got the Trump administration taking all kinds of actions with regard to universities.

They've used federal funding to bring pressure on universities to end DEI.

They've used civil rights investigations to crack down on antisemitism.

They've instigated immigration and customs investigations of foreign students who've been accused of contributing to campus unrest.

They've used Title IX to keep biological men out of women's sports, and so it has gone.

Your old alma mater, Harvard University.

Yes, yes, yes.

Don't, don't feel guilty.

You didn't know any better at the time, Tom.

- I did know better at the time.

- Oh, you did?

- I didn't go to my graduation.

I gave them my forwarding address and left.

- Send the diploma to me when you get to it.

- Yes, and I've only kept in touch with one person.

There's a roommate of mine in Harvard.

I've never gone to any of these annual clash reunions, or even when I was living 30 at one year, a 30 minute drive from Harvard.

- All right, so he, let me quote the president of Harvard, current president of Harvard, Alan Garber, who, who was at Stanford for many years.

This is an interview he gave last spring.

"The administration's measures don't even hit the same people that they believe are causing the problems.

Why cut off research funding?

Sure, it hurts Harvard, but it hurts the country.

I don't know what Trump's motivations are, but I do know that there are people who are fighting a cultural battle.

They don't like what's happened to campuses." All right, so let me ask the Harvard man, does the President of Harvard have a point?

The Trump administration is using crude instruments.

- Whatever instrument instruments that they they're using, they should use more of them.

- Really?

- Yes.

Again, getting back to what Milton Friedman says, you know that the losses are as important as the profits.

That the big problem with universities is that you very seldom, almost never find that university going out of business.

No matter how bad they, they, they, they are, the money keeps coming in.

And as far as research, there's no reason in this world why research can't take place in, in places other than universities.

In fact, I strongly suspect that most research, whether, whether to find cures for cancer or anything else is going on to a great extent outside of universities already.

And so there's no, there's nothing indispensable about what universities are doing.

And I think if one or two Ivy League universities went bankrupt, I think it would be a a very good thing to, for the other universities that survived to understand that they don't get the taxpayers money just because they're used to getting it.

Something has to be done to show it.

- All right, affirmative action.

This is you writing in 2012.

I'm quoting you.

"Anyone who follows public policy issues can easily think of policies that help one group at the expense of some other group.

What is rarer is a policy that on balance harms all groups concerned even if in very different ways.

Affirmative action policies in the academic world can claim that rare distinction." Explain that.

- Well, there's a lot of talk about how whites and Asians lose when they have affirmative actions for Blacks and Hispanics and that, and that's true, but I think that the Blacks and the Hispanics and, and other such groups lose far bigger.

This came to me back in the 1960s when I was teaching at Cornell, and they decided they would bring in Black students without having to meet the same standards as the other students.

And very soon, it turns out that most.

half the Black students were on academic probation because they weren't of there, that they, they weren't meeting the standards of the work that they, they were facing.

And so I went over to the administration building to get look up the SATs of all these students who were being admitted.

And I found that the average Black student admitted to Cornell University scored at the 75th percentile nationwide.

- Which is good?

- Yes.

But of course the average Liberal arts student at Cornell scored at the 99th percentile.

And so instead of being in another good college someplace where the other people were, were scoring at the 75th percentile where they would've been fine, they were brought to Cornell to fail.

And, and, and, and, and of course their failure created a lot of internal bitterness.

And, and of course there were always some people there to tell them that this is all because the professors are, are racist and so on, and.

- So, so, so Cornell selected good students, good Black kid, good students.

Black kids to bring to Cornell.

- So they could fail at Cornell rather than succeed somewhere else.

- To teach, to spend four years teaching them to feel inadequate.

- And, and, and I strongly suspect most of them never graduated.

- Oh, really?

- There are data from other places that I've looked at, and it's not uncommon, certainly in the, in the University of California system where, where great numbers were led into UCLA and UC Berkeley and the, it, it was the norm for the majority not to graduate.

And so you come and spend years of your life in vain, and then and, and then drop out.

- All right, the 2023 Supreme Court case Students For Fair Admissions versus Harvard, the court overruled the 1978 Bakke and the 2003 Grutter decisions, which held admissions based on race for reasons of campus diversity to be constitutional.

Now in 2023, 2 years ago, the court says otherwise.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts, "Universities have concluded wrongly that the touchstone of an individual's identity is not challenges based, skills built or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.

Our constitutional history does not tolerate that choice." Is it finally over?

- No.

And I say that without having read all the opinions, but I was brought, I asked one of my assistants to simply go through the majority opinion and see if there's some place in that opinion where they leave opening for not carrying out the thing.

And sure enough, it came back and there it was.

But the, it's the, the Bakke decision was wonderful reading.

It was wonderful reading until you got to the point where they, they essentially said you cannot have racial quotas if you call them racial quotas.

But you, but, but you can have them if you don't call them racial quotas because they're saying you can take into account this and that, that if, if someone has an, an essay that they submit and, and refer to the fact that they grew up in a ghetto or barrier or whatever, that that's there.

And that's in the Chief Justice's opinion, and so.

- In the, in this two, two one- - Yes, that's right.

In the most recent decision.

And so we'll find out how, how many people are they gonna let in through that loophole?

But I thought it was strange that Harvard with his, with his $50 billion endowment, could not hire their own lawyers to think of how you can get around this.

But, and to have the Chief Justice of the United States offer a helpful, helpful hint.

And so we'll see how, how, how well concrete courses that get to the Supreme Court are either accepted or rejected.

- Tom, why is it so hard?

We fight a civil war over this.

Then we have the 14th Amendment, then we have the Civil rights Acts and the civil rights movements.

And here we are with a Supreme Court decision two years ago, and Tom Sowell says, "Oh, they're still leaving a loophole.

They're still winking, nodding, nudging, nudging that universities may still make distinctions based on race." Why can't we just end it?

Why has it been so hard?

- Because so many people have so much invested in, in their vision of the world.

In their vision of the world, they are the saviors of, of low income minority people.

And that the, that minority progress has been due to them and, and, and, and, and, and now to come along and have it say that it's not so, and that the remaining problem are all due to racism.

Now, the one, the one that gets me is when they say that due to slavery, a Black family was not established.

And then therefore you have all these Black families where, where, where there's no father present.

- Right, so Tom, here's the argument still in the air.

And the argument is that the Black family is under pressure.

There's so many homes in which fathers are not present.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote, it's 50 years, more than 50 years now since Moynihan wrote his, what, what was it called?

Report on the Negro families.

- Yeah.

- Which was the word in those days.

- Yeah.

- He was very concerned about the, now we call it the out of wedlock rate.

In those days, it was the illegitimacy rate of 25%.

Now it's up over 60%.

Okay.

And the argument is this is a legacy of slavery because Black families were broken up to be sold off and so forth during slavery.

And Tom Sowell responds to that one how?

- There is a definitive study of the Blacks, called "The Black Family" by Herbert Gutman.

Herbert Gutman, I spent more than a decade on it.

I can remember telling him, "I hope I would live to see his finally finishing it." And he showed that it was utter nonsense, - Utter nonsense?

- Utter nonsense.

That certainly by the 1920s, most, most, most Blacks were raised by two parent families.

As of 1940, 17% of Black children were raised by one parent families.

- Over 80% in two parent families.

- That's in 1940.

This is before all the wonderful things that people take credit for in the 1960s.

And after the 1960s and later on in that century, the 68% of Black children were raised in one parent families.

Four times as many.

And if you look at other things, you find the same things when you, you compare the rhetoric with the hard data, you find that they're opposite.

You find that outside the racial area as well.

For example, sex education was brought into the public schools on a grand scale in the 1960s.

The idea was that this would prevent teenage pregnancy.

It would, it would prevent venereal diseases.

It so happens that, and then, and then the word crisis is used a lot.

It so happens that syphilis and gonorrhea in 1960 were far lower than it were in 1950.

It's, it so happens that- - Well, I think you may have misspoken there or I misunderstood.

They were in 1960, they were lower than they were had been a decade earlier.

- That's right.

- Oh, oh?

- So now, instead of there being this, this crisis that's of a rising.

- I see, I see.

- Rising venereal disease and, and teenage pregnancy.

There was a falling rate of venereal disease and a falling rate of teenage pregnancy until they brought in the sex education.

- I see.

- And more generally that as the schools began to become places where they took on tasks such as teaching kids to have different sexual ideas and so forth, and all those sorts of things, which they're liberating the children from the, from their parents and so on.

I have some data here that in 1915, the rate of suicides among children 15 to 19 years old was 3.5.

I don't know.

Well, that's percent, that's not, it can't be that.

But the, but the rate was whatever, whatever the, the other other number was.

But it was 17.9 in 2020.

And so all the things that were going right until they came in with their solutions started going wrong.

And that was true in, in this, this other area.

It's true that among Blacks in 19, the homicide rate of Black males in, in the 1940s declined by 18%.

And then declined again by 22% in the 1950s.

And in the 1960s, we had this great revolution in the Supreme Court where all sorts of new rights for, for criminals were found in the constitution, which no one had found before.

And from mid 1960 to mid 1970, the homicide rate doubled after having gone down every decade for three consecutive decades.

So, and one of the great tragedies is that people who, who are devoted to a particular set of ideas, don't want any other ideas in.

They're not about to want a debate because it's a debate they're gonna lose.

- Tom, let me, let me give you two quotations if I may.

Here's Lyndon Johnson in 1965 at the very beginning of the civil rights legislation, the civil right movement and so forth.

Lyndon Johnson, President Johnson, "You do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'You are free to compete with all the others.' It is not enough." Well, there you have a statement of the sort of goodwill involved in affirmative action and all these various programs.

We need to give African Americans a head start.

You can't just bring them up to the starting line.

Now, here, one century earlier is Frederick Douglass speaking, "Everybody has asked the question, 'What shall we do with the Negro?'" That was the word in those days.

"I have had but one answer from the beginning.

Do nothing with us.

If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall.

I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way.

And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also." That sounds, to modern ears that sounds very, very harsh.

If you had to choose between Lyndon Johnson and Frederick Douglass, what would you choose?

- It would be, it would be Frederick Douglass all the way.

Frederick Douglass, as you probably know, was born a slave.

- Yes.

- He escaped.

He educated himself and, and made his living writing, including books, as well as new newspapers and so forth.

And it, it's, it's hard to, to see how, well, one of the things, there's one of his books, for example, was recently reprinted, in recent years.

And the irony in it was that there are all sorts of footnotes added to it.

You see, because he, the, the, the language he uses, this man who probably never spent a day in school in his life, the language that he uses and mastered, it has to be explained to our expensively undereducated student of the day so they'll know what he's referring to.

It is such a painful irony.

- All right, Tom, I've heard from several people whom you know and mostly admire.

I think a few of these people you've tangled with over the years, but that's you.

There are few, very few people you haven't tangled with over the years, I, myself try to stay on your good side.

I worked very hard at that.

But I've got a few questions for you from other people.

George Will, "In your 95 years, you have seen many end of time apocalypses come and go.

From, 'Automation will produce chronic unemployment.' To, 'Resource depletion will impoverish the future.' Now we hear the claim that artificial intelligence will make human beings obsolete.

How should we think about AI?

Am I, George Will, a dunce because I think the locution 'artificial intelligence' is an oxymoron." - Wow.

There are a lot of things that I have, I've, my own experience with artificial intelligence has been somewhat negative.

- Really?

- Yes.

There are people who go on YouTube and they have simulated my voice and they have had me, my, the simulated voice saying things that I never said, things that are the opposite of what I've ever said.

And, and I, I gather that one of them, one of these things originates as far away as England.

Fortunately I have an attorney in New York who has taken up the matter and we've had about half a dozen of them removed from YouTube, but this is the kind of things.

Anybody can be imitated and the imitation sounds plausible.

- All right.

Charles Murray.

- All right?

"America in 1789 was unique, geographically, in the characteristics of its self-selected population, and in its position at the apogee of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Hypothesis." This is the, this is Charles reading.

"Hypothesis, the creation of a limited government was a one-time event, never to be repeated.

What we have seen over the last 60 years is not a setback from which the American Experiment can recover, but a downward spiral that was inevitable after the Supreme Court decisions of 1937 to 1942." Charles asks this question, "Are we doomed?" - Wow.

I hope to be the definitive.

I take some consolation that all of us are fallible.

- Even Charles?

- (laughs) All, all of us are fallible.

And so, I offer my opinion with that caveat.

I do think that there is a very serious chance that we are doomed, because we have institutions who went for people and pursuing their interests are, are destroying the larger interest of the whole society.

These people who are coming around shooting people, and calling them fascists and so on.

These people are so ignorant that they don't even know what the, what the fascists were, are doing.

But Charles Kirk goes around, went around talking to people, trying to convince them, fascists don't do that.

Fascists shoot people.

- What is your definition of socialism?

- Well, in the theoretical, the abstract, or the practical?

- Take your pick.

- So socialism as written by Marx, is when the workers own the means of production.

- Exactly.

- In the actual practical, it's when a small group of very powerful pernicious people are able to control the rest of the population under the guise of helping the many, when in reality it helps the few and you get dictatorship, murder, and slaughter, and the revolution never actually comes.

- And, and, and so it is the, it's the peace person who kill, who kills him thinking that he's a fascist who is himself a fascist and, and the, and the opposite of the man, of the man he's murdering.

I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't think it's coincidence.

Supposedly this is, this was a scholarship student, but you have, you have a, an intolerant, intolerant universities are the norms.

People who go around trying to give talks on universities.

Not, and there are many others.

And, and they're, they're kept from doing so by, by mobs.

Professors who have spent a lifetime studying some subject in great depth, like Stephan Thernstrom at Harvard, who was the Editor of the American Ethnic Group Encyclopedia.

He had to stop teaching because people would, would, would, were making it impossible for him.

And so, and, and so, and if you look at the history of what these people have been doing, and I, and I, some of that history is in, in my, in my book from 30 years ago, "Inside American Education." It's horrifying.

- Tom, may I take a stab at cheering you up a little?

- It's a monumental task, but go ahead.

- (laughs) All right, so we have, we've already talked about the Trump administration, makes me a little queasy because it feels to me as though they're going out of some of these universities with a sledgehammer.

Your view is, let him do it.

But the DEI infrastructure has been very substantially dismantled?

- Or renamed.

- Well, all right.

But at least there's some kind of visible attempt to- - How, what percentage of the people who are in that are no longer in that?

No longer have a job.

- Well, I know at the University of Texas, the course, the short answer is I don't know.

And I'm sure that university administrators, their impulse is to reshuffle around people around and, but I know at the University of Texas, the Texas legislature made DEI illegal and required the university to fire these people and then held hearings to make sure that university administrators were doing so.

So there's at least one case where the legislature, which is in charge of a great public institution, said, "Enough of this." And seems to have done so with real rigor.

So there's one case.

- And I think Florida as well.

- Florida as well.

Florida as well, correct.

And here on charter schools, I looked this up.

Since you published "Charter Schools and Their Enemies" five years ago, more than 500 new charter schools have opened around the country, and the number of states with school choice legislation, which makes it easier for parents to choose, charter schools, private schools and so forth, has risen in these five years from 18 states to 30.

Hopeful?

- I'm all for hope.

- Okay, you're full of hope.

Are you feeling, have I cheered you up?

- Well, that's I ask for miracles.

But, but.

- All right.

- But, but I, I think I, in New York, fortunately we had Mayor Bloomberg.

- Yes.

- Who, who, who, who was favorable to the charter schools and he allowed them to, to move into vacant buildings.

And he was followed immediately by Mayor, by Bill de Blasio.

- Yes.

- Who was totally against, he did everything he could against, against, against the charter schools.

And in California, there's, there's a law which states that charter schools cannot suspend or expel a student for, for creating problems in, in the school.

Now, that, that, that, that law can't even offer a pretense of doing something that is educationally worthwhile.

It is doing something that is worthwhile to keep the charter schools from, from attracting more people out of, out of the teacher's unions, which are paying millions of dollars to politicians' campaigns.

- All right.

- And so we have, we have the, we have an institutional situation in which teachers unions collect billions of dollars in, in dues, and then invest millions of dollars around the country to politicians who will protect the teacher's unions from, from competition.

- It is a straightforward racket.

- Yes, that's right, it is, it is not a, it is not a, not a, not a, I mean schools.

We think of them as noble places.

Their, their goals are noble.

But there, it's amazing how many people will sell that down the river.

- Right.

Tom, a question from someone you won't know, a young man called Ariel Vondee.

Let me tell you about him.

A number of years ago, I received a letter out of the blue postmarked Ghana, and it was from Ariel Vondee, and he told me how much your work meant to him.

So I got together about a dozen, I'm now your assistant helped me get together about a dozen of your books.

And I shipped them off to him in Africa.

And Ariel Vondee has a question for you.

"A deep-seated discontent for political leadership across Africa has resulted in a wave of coup d'etat in recent years, particularly in West Africa.

People are even open to the Chinese style of government under communism.

I do not think either coups or communism can happen without bloodshed.

What would your council of wisdom be for political leaders and young people in West Africa?

How can we turn our nations to prosperity while keeping them democratic and free?" - Wow, that's a very, very tough one.

I'm not sure how confident I am that western European nations, which have been democratic and free for some time, are gonna remain so in the next generation or two.

So I, I really cannot, honestly, offer him an answer.

I can help him when and when I can throw and hope that there'll be people who will fight.

But one of the reasons I've recommended this, the old book of mine, is that it makes- - Which one?

"Inside Higher Education." Which book?

- "Inside American Education." - American education.

Yes.

- Because it shows how hard it is for people to even know what is going on inside educational institutions.

And that goes not only for the public schools, but also for the universities.

I, it's wonderful to hear all these people talk about diversity is so wonderful in the schools.

Yes, but diversity to them means white leftists, Black leftists, female leftists, and Hispanic leftists.

You know, and that's a somewhat limited notion of diversity.

When people say, you know, that we want, we want, there needs to be more diversity.

And I ask them, "How many Republicans are there in your sociology department?" Often it is, I don't think I've ever heard an answer as, as large as 10.

- Right.

Two more questions.

Condoleezza Rice.

"Tom, you've devoted much of your work to our failings, especially to the failings of our education system.

But like you, I Condi, I'm an academic, and I know that you have to possess a certain basic optimism to remain productive.

And no one has been more productive than you.

What gets you up in the morning?

What are you optimistic about?" - I am optimistic about the fact that I am, although I, I'm, my office is located on a university campus.

I am not part of the university outside the Hoover Institution.

And that I think the Hoover Institution, which some years ago was voted the top think tank in, in, in the, in the world.

That those are places where you do have the right to, to think how you think and, and not, and not be harassed over it.

And I think that if, if the Ivy League and other, other universities lost some of the, some of their members, that a lot of the research would go on outside of the university.

The university is trying to hide behind the fact that, yes, they're doing some serious medical research and that research can go on without the unit, without the university.

And I think it will be wonderful if that fact is brought home by one or two Ivy League institutions shutting down when they, when they lose their automatic access to the taxpayer's money to do whatever they want with that money, regardless of what, what, what the money was allegedly given to them.

I still remember a case, I haven't been, been a recipient of a huge amount of that money, but when I was at Cornell, I can remember I owe some grant that I had.

And, and in the late spring I've got a call from one of the administrators and he said, "Sowell, you haven't touched that, that, the remainder of that grant since last October.

When are you gonna spend it?" And I said, "I actually, I plan to spend it in the next couple of weeks." He said, "Good." And he hung up.

He didn't care what I spent it for.

- Just spend it.

- Spend it.

Because if you don't spend it, it will look like you didn't need it.

And that will make it harder for him to get, get more money next time.

And so this is, this is, I'm not sure that that, that whatever I was spending it on was something urgently needed by the taxpayers.

- All right, Tom, last question.

This question comes from Mr.

Justice Clarence Thomas.

Now I wanna repeat that.

This is a question from the Senior Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court.

So I myself feel the impulse to swear you in on this one.

Here's Justice Thomas's question, "Thomas Sowell, were you ever tempted, ever, to temper or change your opinion because of actual or anticipated hostile reactions?" - No.

And there's a reason for that.

It required no courage whatsoever.

It so happened that even though I wanted to be an academic, I wanted to, I wanted to teach.

I really hadn't thought about writing books or anything like that.

But unfortunately, unfortunately, as I thought at the time, but I think in retrospect, fortunately, I was unable to get, get a, get a spot that I wanted.

And so I became a, an economist in the federal government.

And then after about a year or so, I got an offer to, for an academic post.

And I, I, I took it even though that represented a 20% reduction in my income, which I could ill afford at the time.

But I did.

And then I went, went on to another academic post, and I got, and I was then offered a job at, AT&T, which at that time was the world's largest corporation.

And I took it at double what I was being paid in the academic world.

And when I later decided I would go back to the academic world and finish my PhD, I was told, "Listen, anytime you want to come back, you are welcome." And so I, I had I got into, you'd be surprised to learn that I, I was controversial at Cornell.

And I was told by one of the, one of the other Assistant Professors, I was there, I was an Assistant Professor on a three year contract, that my contract was not gonna be renewed 'cause I had really rubbed some people the wrong way, you see?

And I let them know that.

And I said, "Well, since." In fact, in fact this, it was, it was, it said to me before, by one of the people who was had power that you know that these are the people who are gonna be voting on whether your contract gets renewed.

And I said, "Well, since I make my decisions as I see fit, I assume they'll make their decisions they see fit." And I got up and walked out.

And so I told this to my wife and she says, "What if you get fired?" I said, "I'll go back to the phone company.

We can use the money." And she, and, and she said, "In that case, give them hell." (Peter laughing) So it was, it was, it took no courage because I knew that I could always make more money doing what, doing something outside of the academic world because I, I had already had it.

And, and, and, and, and so, and you, the, the threat of a higher income is not a very effective threat.

- And you've been giving them a hell ever since.

- I hope so.

- Tom, couple last questions.

I noticed, as best I counted, after turning 80, you wrote seven books.

Now that's seven books and you also revised edition of earlier books.

I know it's a bad manners to ask a writer what he's working on, but what are you working on now?

- (laughs) A new book that I'm, that I'm, that I'm writing and, and a revision of my economics, "Basic Economics Textbook." - All right.

Tom, would you bring our conversation to an end by reading a passage from your book "A Personal Odyssey?" - Let me, let me read.

Okay.

If I find something in here that I've changed my mind for on.

I'll change it as we go.

"What, if anything, will endure from what I have written is of course something that I will never know, nor is what I have said and done, enhanced, or been enhanced or reduced by my personal life.

However fashionable amateur psychology has become.

What has been done, stands or falls on its own merits or applicability.

The whole point of looking back on my life, aside from the pleasure of sharing reminiscences, is to hope that others will find something useful in their own lives.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said it best, "If I could think that I had sent a spark to those who come after, I should be ready to say goodbye." - Tom Sowell, by the way, I can't help thinking Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes may be ready to say goodbye, but Justice Clarence Thomas is not.

- I, I hope not, because he's a lot more valuable.

- Tom Sowell, thank you.

- Thank you.

- For this special edition of "Uncommon Knowledge," the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.

(upbeat music)