Latest / Gil I Am / Common Sense in a Senseless World...Thomas Sowell

Transcript

Common Sense in a Senseless World...Thomas Sowell · Gil I Am

0:03
Speaker 1: This whole notion that the black family has always been disintegrating,
0:06
Speaker 1: that that is nonsense, That his studies go up to
0:08
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty five, the great bulk of black families were
0:11
Speaker 1: intact two parent families up through nineteen twenty five, and going.
0:14
Speaker 2: All the way back through the era of slavery.
0:16
Speaker 3: So it is now only within our own time that we.
0:19
Speaker 1: Suddenly see this inevitable tragedy which the welfare system says
0:22
Speaker 1: is going to rush into solve.
0:24
Speaker 2: It's been forty years since the show aired, and Thomas
0:27
Speaker 2: Soul's writings continue to illuminate. Whether the topic is race, crime, immigration,
0:33
Speaker 2: are so many other subjects, his scholarship remains as relevant
0:37
Speaker 2: as ever.
0:37
Speaker 1: Racists may prefer one race to another, where they prefer
0:40
Speaker 1: themselves to everybody else.
0:41
Speaker 4: Thomas sol is a trained economist. He's a sociologist who
0:45
Speaker 4: has written books about virtually every culture that's ever existed.
0:49
Speaker 3: He is a photographer.
0:50
Speaker 4: He is America's greatest contemporary living philosopher.
0:55
Speaker 2: I'm Jason Riley. I'm a journalist and author. For more
0:59
Speaker 2: than two decades, I have closely studied the life and
1:01
Speaker 2: work of Thomas Soul. His story is both fascinating and illuminating.
1:07
Speaker 5: Tom makes a very very good point that general principles
1:11
Speaker 5: in affect everybody, whether they're black, brown, or purple.
1:14
Speaker 6: Tom is fearless not just in advancing unpopular opinions, but
1:19
Speaker 6: in venturing into areas of scholarship that had been untrodden.
1:23
Speaker 2: Tom sol is known for his views on economics, history, race,
1:27
Speaker 2: and politics, but I've also discovered some lesser known aspects
1:32
Speaker 2: of his life, his research and his writings about late
1:35
Speaker 2: talking children, and the fact that he is a highly
1:38
Speaker 2: regarded world traveling photographer. Over the next hour, we'll examine
1:44
Speaker 2: the life and career of doctor Thomas soul how he
1:47
Speaker 2: rose from humble beginnings to attend and teach at some
1:50
Speaker 2: of the nation's leading institutions and became one of our
1:54
Speaker 2: foremost social commentators.
1:56
Speaker 7: You were a Marxist at one time in your life?
1:59
Speaker 3: What was your life? Wake up to? What was wrong
2:01
Speaker 3: with that line of thinking? Facts?
2:04
Speaker 2: You're about to meet one of the greatest minds of
2:06
Speaker 2: the past half century.
2:19
Speaker 8: Funding for this program has been provided by L. E.
2:22
Speaker 8: Phillips Family Foundation, Robert and Marion Ouster, the Lyne In
2:26
Speaker 8: Harry Bradley Foundation Incorporated, dk T Liberty Project, The Charles
2:31
Speaker 8: and Ann Johnson Foundation, Chris and Melody Rufer.
2:37
Speaker 1: Well, because I was a Marxist at the time, and
2:40
Speaker 1: oh they were, they were, they were, Paul and I said,
2:42
Speaker 1: you know that they have very high intellectual standards, and
2:45
Speaker 1: I'm not going to find ideological soul mates.
2:49
Speaker 3: I was still a Marxist.
2:52
Speaker 1: I took a summer job in the government that intern
2:55
Speaker 1: in economics, and it was seeing the government from the
2:58
Speaker 1: inside that turned me around the vision of the left,
3:02
Speaker 1: and I think many conservatives underestimate this. There's really a
3:05
Speaker 1: more attractive vision in itself. The only reason for not
3:10
Speaker 1: believing in it is that it doesn't work. You don't,
3:13
Speaker 1: but you don't see that at the outset. If all
3:16
Speaker 1: you're looking at is just a theory, if the world
3:18
Speaker 1: or the way the left conceives it to be, it
3:20
Speaker 1: would be a better world than the way the right
3:22
Speaker 1: conceives it to be.
3:23
Speaker 3: It's just happens that the world is not that way
3:26
Speaker 3: for me.
3:27
Speaker 2: Thomas Soul is that rarest of species and honest intellectual.
3:32
Speaker 2: He's spent a career putting truth above popularity. He's explored
3:37
Speaker 2: the answers to questions others were afraid to even ask.
3:41
Speaker 2: He's followed the facts where they lead and accepted the findings,
3:45
Speaker 2: however unpopular or politically incorrect. Thomas Soul fervently stands by
3:51
Speaker 2: his well researched beliefs, and he does not hesitate to
3:55
Speaker 2: let someone know if he thinks they're wrong. I've spent
3:59
Speaker 2: dozen of hours interviewing Tom, and hundreds more selecting stories
4:04
Speaker 2: he's told over the years to others to help us
4:07
Speaker 2: understand what makes Thomas Soul unique. Soul's body of work
4:15
Speaker 2: is quite vast. It's covered everything from economics and history
4:20
Speaker 2: to culture, migration, and racial inequality.
4:23
Speaker 4: The main thing that he's done, in my opinion, is
4:26
Speaker 4: to cause people to rethink their assumptions about all sorts
4:28
Speaker 4: of things, not just economics, but about race, about politics,
4:35
Speaker 4: how we get along.
4:37
Speaker 6: Tom is absolutely fearless. I mean, he's forceful in his opinions.
4:40
Speaker 6: He will not compromise any of his opinions for the
4:43
Speaker 6: sake of social politeness.
4:47
Speaker 2: How do you take the measure of a man, especially
4:50
Speaker 2: if he's someone who's impacted our thinking about politics and
4:54
Speaker 2: economics for more than half a century. Do you do
4:57
Speaker 2: it through his deeds or influence or by what he
5:02
Speaker 2: says or writes. Perhaps doctor Martin Luther King Junior said
5:07
Speaker 2: it best. The ultimate measure of a man is not
5:11
Speaker 2: where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but
5:16
Speaker 2: where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
5:20
Speaker 5: The media, the television and the print media, they've wised up.
5:25
Speaker 5: You can't argue with Tom, so you might as well
5:28
Speaker 5: hide what he's doing.
5:30
Speaker 3: And that's what they're doing.
5:31
Speaker 5: They're just ignoring what he's written because they there's no
5:36
Speaker 5: way that they can argue with Tom Sole.
5:41
Speaker 2: What distinguishes Thomas Soul's scholarship, First intellectual honesty, asking the
5:47
Speaker 2: right questions, gathering the relevant data, and following the facts
5:50
Speaker 2: to their logical conclusion, even at that conclusion turns out
5:53
Speaker 2: to be unpopular. Second, the importance of incentives and the
5:59
Speaker 2: reality of trade and addressing our social problems. Third, the
6:03
Speaker 2: belief that a group's upward mobility derives primarily from its
6:07
Speaker 2: development of human capital. And finally, Soul has an abiding
6:11
Speaker 2: respect for social processes and existing institutions and the role
6:16
Speaker 2: they play in decision making. So where did Tom Soule's
6:19
Speaker 2: ideas come from? What formed the foundation of a man
6:23
Speaker 2: who had gone to become one of the country's foremost
6:25
Speaker 2: public intellectuals. That story began six hundred miles to the
6:29
Speaker 2: south of the town Manhattan, more than eight decades ago.
6:39
Speaker 2: Thomas Soul was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, on June thirtieth,
6:43
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty. The Great Depression was just getting underway, and
6:51
Speaker 2: like many blacks in the South at the time, his
6:53
Speaker 2: family had no electricity, no central heating, and no hot
6:59
Speaker 2: run water. Soul's father died before Tom was born, and
7:07
Speaker 2: his mother, a maid, died in childbirth just a few
7:10
Speaker 2: years later.
7:13
Speaker 4: He was adopted by his great aunt and raised by
7:17
Speaker 4: her and her two daughters, So he was raised by
7:20
Speaker 4: three women.
7:21
Speaker 9: My whole career would not have been possible without particular
7:25
Speaker 9: family in which I was raised, which was not composed
7:28
Speaker 9: to educated people. I mean, nobody in that family had
7:31
Speaker 9: ever graduated from high school, and most did not graduated
7:34
Speaker 9: from grade school. But they were interested in education and
7:37
Speaker 9: they were interested in me.
7:41
Speaker 2: Tom was raised by a great aunt and her adult children.
7:46
Speaker 2: The family moved to New York City's Harlem neighborhood, a
7:50
Speaker 2: migration that exposed him to better schools and more opportunities
7:54
Speaker 2: than were available to blacks in the segregated South.
8:00
Speaker 10: Fear is that a black child growing up in Harlem
8:02
Speaker 10: today will not have as good a chance to rise
8:05
Speaker 10: as people of my generation did, simply because they will
8:08
Speaker 10: not receive as solid an education in an era when
8:12
Speaker 10: such an education is even more important.
8:27
Speaker 2: When Thomas Soul was eight years old, his family moved
8:30
Speaker 2: from North Carolina to New York City and settled here
8:33
Speaker 2: at seven twenty St. Nicholas Avenue in the neighborhood of Haarlem.
8:40
Speaker 2: The building looks pretty much the same as it did
8:43
Speaker 2: more than eighty years ago when the Souls moved in.
8:51
Speaker 2: Young Tommy, as he was called, ventured out into a
8:53
Speaker 2: big city for the very first time. He rode double
8:57
Speaker 2: decker buses and learned across busy streets all by himself.
9:02
Speaker 9: We were much poorer than the people in Harlem, almost
9:05
Speaker 9: other anywhere else today. It was my last year or
9:08
Speaker 9: two at home that we finally had a telephone. We
9:12
Speaker 9: had a radio, we never had a television. But in
9:17
Speaker 9: another sense, in the sense of the things you need
9:19
Speaker 9: to get ahead, I was enormously more fortunate than most
9:23
Speaker 9: black kids today.
9:28
Speaker 2: While coming of agent Harlem, Saul discovered the magic of
9:31
Speaker 2: education thanks to a family friend named Eddie Mapp.
9:40
Speaker 1: And Harlem, there was a kid named Maddie that members
9:42
Speaker 1: of the family had run into before I ever arrived
9:44
Speaker 1: from North Carolina. You came from a highly educated family,
9:52
Speaker 1: and they immediately saw the implications if they they could
9:56
Speaker 1: get him to mentor me.
10:05
Speaker 2: Eddie brought tom here to the Harlem Public Library, taught
10:08
Speaker 2: him how to find books that interested him, taught him
10:10
Speaker 2: how to check them out.
10:12
Speaker 1: And I saw all these books, and I had no
10:14
Speaker 1: idea why we were there when I didn't have any
10:16
Speaker 1: money to buy one book, And so what am I
10:18
Speaker 1: going to do with all these, you know, hundreds of
10:19
Speaker 1: books up on the shelf.
10:25
Speaker 2: Crossing the threshold to this new world was the first
10:28
Speaker 2: step on a path young Tommy might not otherwise have taken.
10:32
Speaker 1: And he very patiently walked me through the whole thing.
10:35
Speaker 1: And again I was very reluctant to take out a library,
10:39
Speaker 1: cause I guid I didn't know what all this is about,
10:41
Speaker 1: but he talked me into it.
10:43
Speaker 3: Then I bought a couple of books.
10:45
Speaker 1: And really, had I not encountered him, the entire rest
10:48
Speaker 1: of the story could not have been the way it was.
10:51
Speaker 1: I mean, at some point I would have learned what
10:52
Speaker 1: a public library it was, but by that point it
10:55
Speaker 1: would be too late. When you start getting in the
10:58
Speaker 1: habit of reading when you're eight years old, that's a
11:02
Speaker 1: different ballgame than if you had to wait till you're
11:04
Speaker 1: a teenager.
11:04
Speaker 3: It's too late now.
11:08
Speaker 2: Thanks to that same friend, Eddie, a young Tom soul
11:12
Speaker 2: was pointed in the right direction regarding his schooling. The
11:16
Speaker 2: grade school he attended in Harlem was a good one,
11:20
Speaker 2: but when it came time for junior high school, the
11:22
Speaker 2: one in Tom's neighborhood was not so great.
11:27
Speaker 1: When I finished elementary school and they assigned me to
11:30
Speaker 1: a junior high school in a very bad neighborhood, and
11:33
Speaker 1: he told me, you can get transferred, and I got
11:37
Speaker 1: transferred to a much better school. Had I gone to
11:40
Speaker 1: that other school again, the story would have been entirely different.
11:46
Speaker 2: He would become a firm believer and allowing parents to
11:49
Speaker 2: choose the best school possible for their children, whether it
11:53
Speaker 2: be private schools, religious schools, or even the option that
11:58
Speaker 2: sparks intense debate among lawmakers and educators today, charter schools.
12:10
Speaker 10: There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young.
12:16
Speaker 1: The abysmal quality of education available in the ghettos today
12:20
Speaker 1: is one that I really don't think the worst possible
12:24
Speaker 1: private school could match.
12:26
Speaker 3: Forty years ago, I received a far better.
12:29
Speaker 1: Education in Harlem than the people who are living in
12:32
Speaker 1: Harlem today have available to them.
12:39
Speaker 2: It's eight am at the Success Academy School at Harlem,
12:42
Speaker 2: New York. This is a charter school, an example of
12:46
Speaker 2: educational choice for people trying to better themselves despite the
12:50
Speaker 2: circumstances they were born into. For Tom, this is education
12:54
Speaker 2: done right.
12:56
Speaker 11: Professor Solwa has been a leader in supporting all forms
13:00
Speaker 11: of school choice, and I very fundamentally agree that we
13:04
Speaker 11: need more choices, not fewer.
13:08
Speaker 4: I think we.
13:08
Speaker 11: Particularly need that for our most vulnerable populations.
13:13
Speaker 3: Back in nineteen seventy eight, when there.
13:15
Speaker 1: Was a push for a Valucher scheme, the New Republic
13:18
Speaker 1: objected and there were was the least educated, the least ambitious,
13:23
Speaker 1: and the least aware would be left in the public schools.
13:28
Speaker 11: Professor Soul grew up in Harlem. I grew up in Harlem,
13:32
Speaker 11: and the schools there have been a disaster for half
13:36
Speaker 11: a century, and so you've generations of kids who have
13:40
Speaker 11: not gotten the education that they deserve and are entitled.
13:46
Speaker 2: To Charter schools are public, tuition free schools that are
13:53
Speaker 2: open to all students and able to operate independently from
13:57
Speaker 2: the traditional school district. They are given the autonomy to
14:02
Speaker 2: design a curriculum tailored to the needs of their students,
14:07
Speaker 2: but they must also meet academic standards set by state
14:11
Speaker 2: and local officials. Unlike traditional public schools, however, charter schools
14:16
Speaker 2: that don't meet these standards can actually be shut down.
14:24
Speaker 5: With respect to education, Tom would say, it doesn't make
14:28
Speaker 5: any difference how much money you put in education, but
14:30
Speaker 5: if they're not some basic factors that you must take
14:33
Speaker 5: into account. That is, in order for a kid to
14:35
Speaker 5: get a good education, somebody must make him go to
14:38
Speaker 5: bed on time. Somebody must make him do his homework,
14:42
Speaker 5: somebody must make him mind the teacher. Somebody has to
14:45
Speaker 5: get him up in the morning. And if those things
14:47
Speaker 5: are not done, I don't care how much money you
14:49
Speaker 5: put into education, you're not going to get very good results.
14:54
Speaker 5: And that is precisely what we see.
14:57
Speaker 2: For decades, SEUL has been a strong support order of
15:00
Speaker 2: charters and other education options for families trapped in underperforming schools.
15:05
Speaker 12: There are, as you said, many blacks today who are
15:09
Speaker 12: still being given totally inadequate education can't be expected to
15:13
Speaker 12: get very far for that reason, What would be your
15:16
Speaker 12: remedy for that?
15:17
Speaker 1: I would allow their parents to have a choice of
15:20
Speaker 1: where to send them to school, whether that choice is
15:22
Speaker 1: called a voucher scheme, open enrollment, tuition, tax, creditor, any
15:25
Speaker 1: kind of scheme of that sort.
15:27
Speaker 3: That would put that power in.
15:28
Speaker 1: The hands of their parents, mainly because that would mean
15:31
Speaker 1: that the schools would have to be responsive to them.
15:33
Speaker 1: As it is now, the school is a monopoly. They
15:36
Speaker 1: need not be responsive. It is hard for me to
15:38
Speaker 1: understand what harm is going to be done by allowing
15:42
Speaker 1: parents to have a choice, as compared to having self
15:45
Speaker 1: interested bureaucrats have a monopoly.
15:48
Speaker 10: The things that they thought were going to help did
15:51
Speaker 10: not help and in many cases made things much worse.
15:58
Speaker 2: Thomas Soul is a very private person, despite having so
16:04
Speaker 2: much of his work put before the public. He's reluctant
16:08
Speaker 2: to give interviews and has been known to make journalists
16:11
Speaker 2: wait years before sitting down to talk about his life
16:14
Speaker 2: and work. But a colleague of mine took the time
16:17
Speaker 2: to get Tom to appear on his show.
16:19
Speaker 7: I'm Dave Rubin I'm the host of the Ruben Report.
16:22
Speaker 7: Sets right back behind me here in my home. I
16:25
Speaker 7: do a long form interview show. Everybody was saying, you've
16:30
Speaker 7: got to talk to Thomas All, You've got to talk
16:31
Speaker 7: to Samasol, And we tried for about three or four
16:34
Speaker 7: years to hunt him down, and finally we were able
16:38
Speaker 7: to interview him. One of the things that I found
16:40
Speaker 7: out that was sort of amazing about your history.
16:42
Speaker 3: You briefly mentioned it right before we started.
16:44
Speaker 7: You were a Marxist at one time in your life.
16:48
Speaker 7: Most people will find this hard to believe, but it
16:51
Speaker 7: is true.
16:51
Speaker 3: But it's not that unusual.
16:54
Speaker 1: Most of the leading conservative thinkings about time did nut
17:00
Speaker 1: office conservator. You got a couple like Bill Buckley and
17:03
Speaker 1: George will But I mean Milton Friedman was a liberal
17:06
Speaker 1: and a Kaynesian royaland Reagan was so far left at
17:10
Speaker 1: one point the FBI was following him.
17:12
Speaker 7: Do you remember sort of what you were thinking, what
17:14
Speaker 7: appealed to you at that time about Marxism?
17:17
Speaker 1: Yes, I mean there was no alternative being discussed.
17:22
Speaker 7: I treated my interview with him as Thomas soul one
17:25
Speaker 7: oh one. I wanted it to be for the new
17:27
Speaker 7: generation of young people. Who watch YouTube, who listened to podcasts.
17:31
Speaker 1: My first job was as a Western Union messenger, so
17:35
Speaker 1: that would take the Fifth Avenue bus. It would go
17:38
Speaker 1: all the way up Fifth Avenue, pass all these Lord
17:40
Speaker 1: and Taylor and all these fancy places, and then it
17:44
Speaker 1: were across fifty seventh Street down Riverside Drive, and then
17:50
Speaker 1: years I came across this long viaduct that turned into
17:53
Speaker 1: one hundred and thirty fifth Street. Suddenly there were the tenements.
17:59
Speaker 1: I wonder, why is this? It's so different, and nothing
18:07
Speaker 1: in the schools or most of the books seem to
18:11
Speaker 1: deal with that. And Walk's dealt with that.
18:13
Speaker 7: There's an absolutely beautiful moment where I asked him about
18:16
Speaker 7: his own political evolution. So then what was your wake
18:18
Speaker 7: up to?
18:18
Speaker 3: What was wrong with that line of thinking? Facts? I
18:23
Speaker 3: love that moment.
18:24
Speaker 7: I mean I knew the second he did it. I
18:26
Speaker 7: was like, we got our clip. That's as good as
18:29
Speaker 7: it gets. And it gets to what does this man
18:32
Speaker 7: care about most? Does he care about how he feels
18:35
Speaker 7: about things, how he wants the world to be, or
18:38
Speaker 7: how is the world as it is? Because that's what
18:41
Speaker 7: he's saying. I care about facts. The world is a
18:43
Speaker 7: certain way. And now using that as the baseline, we
18:46
Speaker 7: can try to figure out how to make things better.
18:54
Speaker 2: Drafted. In nineteen fifty one, Tom joined the Marines or
18:58
Speaker 2: he taught pistol shooting photographs. In fact, Saul was part
19:11
Speaker 2: of the Marine Corps Combat Camera Division.
19:14
Speaker 13: Combad Camera is responsible for the historical documentation. It may
19:20
Speaker 13: not necessarily make it out to the local paper, but
19:25
Speaker 13: somewhere down the line someone might be able to pull
19:27
Speaker 13: up an image and say, Okay, this happened during this
19:32
Speaker 13: time frame. The imagery is used as good reference to
19:37
Speaker 13: anything we may need in the future or something that's
19:40
Speaker 13: happening right now.
19:48
Speaker 2: Although Thomas Saul left the Marines long ago, his legacy
19:52
Speaker 2: lives on today with some members of the Combat Camera
19:55
Speaker 2: Corps who, as young men, discovered Soul's work.
20:00
Speaker 14: When I was a young person, I used to like
20:02
Speaker 14: to stay home from school occasionally, like to play hooky
20:05
Speaker 14: or pretend I was sick and stay home. But unlike
20:07
Speaker 14: most kids who'd cut class and do whatever, I would
20:09
Speaker 14: watch videos of Thomas sol on Milton Frieman's show Free
20:12
Speaker 14: to Choose, and he would just wipe the floor with
20:14
Speaker 14: people from the other side of the aisle that didn't
20:16
Speaker 14: seem to know what they were talking about. These were
20:17
Speaker 14: very smart people, but Thomas Soul was so much smarter
20:20
Speaker 14: and so much more intelligent, and so much more articulate
20:23
Speaker 14: that he would just make them seem like bumbling idiots.
20:25
Speaker 3: And I just thought that was awesome.
20:26
Speaker 15: When the private sector fails to create jobs at a
20:29
Speaker 15: fast enough rate, you find that people are unemployed and
20:33
Speaker 15: drift into needing help. I think it is overly broad
20:38
Speaker 15: to say that we turn people into helpless children.
20:40
Speaker 1: I don't remember talking to anyone because I had been
20:42
Speaker 1: on a wealthfare who didn't think they were being treated
20:45
Speaker 1: like children while they were on it.
20:51
Speaker 2: The lessons Soul learned in the Marines would stay with
20:53
Speaker 2: him for the rest of his life, especially his leve
20:57
Speaker 2: of photography, which would become tom artistic outlet. While he
21:01
Speaker 2: pursued a life filled with studying facts and.
21:04
Speaker 6: Data, photography did have connections to his vision of reality.
21:18
Speaker 6: Tom Wins commented to me that to be a photographer
21:20
Speaker 6: you have to master trade offs. All of the little
21:24
Speaker 6: adjustments that you fiddle with in the camera never involved
21:28
Speaker 6: making everything better everything worse. It's a matter of trading
21:31
Speaker 6: one thing off for another. Few Close down the diaphragm.
21:35
Speaker 6: Then you get lots and lots of stuff in focus
21:37
Speaker 6: near to far. On the other hand, you're cutting down
21:41
Speaker 6: the amount of light. And a theme in Tom's work
21:44
Speaker 6: on society is that all policies involve trade offs, and
21:48
Speaker 6: Tom often loses patience at people with sweeping visions. Here's
21:52
Speaker 6: how we can improve society. Here's a solution to a problem.
21:55
Speaker 6: And Tom points out in his political writings there are
21:58
Speaker 6: no solutions. We trade us just like photography.
22:15
Speaker 2: The University of Chicago has hallowed ground for Thomas Saul
22:19
Speaker 2: Here's where some of the most influential economic philosophies of
22:23
Speaker 2: modern times were formed. It's called the Chicago School of Economics,
22:27
Speaker 2: and it's where Tom would be mentored by intellectual giants
22:31
Speaker 2: like George Stigler and Milton Friedman, both of whom would
22:35
Speaker 2: go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
22:40
Speaker 16: I was a graduate student here from nineteen sixty to
22:43
Speaker 16: sixty four. The thing I learned as a graduate student
22:48
Speaker 16: was economics is straightforward and simple when you grasp its
22:54
Speaker 16: underlying logic, and secondly, that logic can be applied seriously
22:59
Speaker 16: to understand many different things about the world.
23:06
Speaker 1: In Chicago, if it was true, it was true because
23:08
Speaker 1: you could prove it was true. It was true because
23:10
Speaker 1: you had the evidence, you had the logic, and so forth.
23:13
Speaker 1: They explored the specific ways in which the market does
23:16
Speaker 1: and doesn't work. The idea you know that people are
23:19
Speaker 1: rational on the whole, and that if you allow those
23:23
Speaker 1: people to operate in the marketplace, you will generally get
23:26
Speaker 1: better results.
23:34
Speaker 4: The Chicago School of Economics is where Tom says he
23:37
Speaker 4: understood the importance of discipline and the importance of getting
23:40
Speaker 4: hard data. In fact, he talks more positively about his
23:44
Speaker 4: experience at University Chicago than at Harvard, where he says
23:46
Speaker 4: a lot of people in his opinion and went on
23:48
Speaker 4: in motion. Tom was a Marxist when he took a
23:51
Speaker 4: course with Milton Friedman, and at the end of the
23:54
Speaker 4: course he remained a Marxist. But what he appreciated was
23:57
Speaker 4: that in University of Chicago economics was a full tax
24:00
Speaker 4: sport where you had to defend your position rigorously otherwise
24:04
Speaker 4: you got wasted. And so at least Tom Soul said,
24:07
Speaker 4: he came out understanding the importance of hard data.
24:10
Speaker 1: I was still a marketerste have of taking Milton Friedman's course,
24:15
Speaker 1: but I wanted to, but one summer in the government
24:18
Speaker 1: was enough to let me say, no, this government is
24:21
Speaker 1: really not the answer.
24:22
Speaker 3: I mean that is.
24:24
Speaker 17: Milton Friedman didn't cure you, but the federal government.
24:26
Speaker 1: Did what federal government didn't what was saying, the federal
24:28
Speaker 1: government doesn't do anything. My first professional job, I was saying.
24:36
Speaker 1: Summer intern at the US Department of Labor, one of
24:40
Speaker 1: my biggest concerns was about minimum wages. At first time,
24:43
Speaker 1: I thought this is good because all these people are
24:44
Speaker 1: poor and it'll get a little higher income and so
24:47
Speaker 1: that'll that'll be helpful. And then as I studied economics
24:51
Speaker 1: at again, I say, well, there's a downside.
24:53
Speaker 3: They may lose their jobs completely. So that's that is that.
24:57
Speaker 1: When I was at the Labor Department, I tried to
25:00
Speaker 1: talk about that to them, and eventually I came up
25:02
Speaker 1: with some test of it. When I came up with
25:05
Speaker 1: how we might test this, I was waiting to hear congratulations.
25:07
Speaker 1: You see that I'd had this, and I can see
25:09
Speaker 1: these people were stunned and said, oh this, this idiot
25:12
Speaker 1: has stumbled.
25:12
Speaker 3: On something that would ruin us all.
25:17
Speaker 1: And I realized the US Department of Labor had its owner, gender,
25:20
Speaker 1: and interest, and that did not necessarily mean that poor
25:24
Speaker 1: people lost their jobs from minimum wages or got higher
25:26
Speaker 1: paid was their highest priority.
25:31
Speaker 4: Tom sol looked at the data, and the data found
25:33
Speaker 4: that minimum wage hikes caused people who are unskilled to
25:36
Speaker 4: lose jobs. He found out that people in the government
25:38
Speaker 4: didn't give a rip whether or not it worked or
25:40
Speaker 4: didn't work. They were simply implementing the policy. And that's
25:43
Speaker 4: what shocked him and caused him to begin to rethink
25:46
Speaker 4: lots of his assumption. So it wasn't academia that caused
25:49
Speaker 4: him to become more conservative. It was real life working
25:51
Speaker 4: for the government.
25:54
Speaker 1: I was now beginning to understand things I hadn't understood before.
26:00
Speaker 18: Tom And they said got his PhD here in nineteen
26:03
Speaker 18: sixty eight. He actually taught in the years leading up
26:08
Speaker 18: to that at Cornell, which feeds back also to this
26:12
Speaker 18: just tumultuous times in the nineteen sixties in the country.
26:16
Speaker 18: Huge demonstrations at Cornell actually shut down the university for
26:20
Speaker 18: some time.
26:24
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty five, Thomas Soul took a teaching position
26:27
Speaker 2: at Cornell. Like many other colleges, it became a focal
26:33
Speaker 2: point for anti war and anti discrimination protests and demonstrations.
26:39
Speaker 2: When armed black students took over a building on campus,
26:43
Speaker 2: Seul had little sympathy for school administrators. Blacks had been
26:48
Speaker 2: recruited to Cornell under lower standards to diversify the student body,
26:53
Speaker 2: and Seul observed that many of these same students were
26:56
Speaker 2: now causing trouble and feeding racial divisions. For Seul, it
27:00
Speaker 2: was an example of the unintended consequences of affirmative action.
27:05
Speaker 2: Tom's tenure at Cornell had a very profound impact on him,
27:10
Speaker 2: particularly surrounding the campus protests. I think it left a
27:14
Speaker 2: very very bitter taste in his mouth.
27:17
Speaker 3: Yes, I think it did.
27:20
Speaker 5: He discovered that many black students at Cornell, their SAT
27:25
Speaker 5: scores were above the average, but they are having problems
27:28
Speaker 5: at Cornell, and that's when he first came up with
27:31
Speaker 5: the idea of people being mismatched.
27:34
Speaker 3: That is, black students who would.
27:36
Speaker 5: Do very well at other schools but were recruited in
27:41
Speaker 5: the name of affirmative action to schools where they were
27:44
Speaker 5: in over their heads.
27:46
Speaker 3: The average black student at MIT.
27:49
Speaker 1: Is in the bottom ten percent of MIT students in Mayo,
27:52
Speaker 1: but he is in the top ninety percent of all
27:54
Speaker 1: American students in Maya. It's looking like one fourth of
27:57
Speaker 1: all the black students going to MIT graduate. You're talking
28:01
Speaker 1: about a pool of people whom you were artificially turning
28:04
Speaker 1: into failures by mismatching them with the school.
28:10
Speaker 16: Tom had moved to UCLA to escape the turmoil at
28:14
Speaker 16: Coronel and then jumped into the turmoil at UCLA. I
28:20
Speaker 16: was sitting in my office at UCLA one day when
28:24
Speaker 16: the Black Student Association delegation marched into his office. I
28:29
Speaker 16: heard all of this, and one of them said, well,
28:34
Speaker 16: how you doing, brother Tom? Just a minute. I am
28:41
Speaker 16: not your brother. I am mister soul, and you will
28:46
Speaker 16: address me that way. Boy, was that a shock to
28:52
Speaker 16: those folks. Here was their natural ally laying down the
28:58
Speaker 16: law to treat me the way. I'm going to treat
29:02
Speaker 16: you as another human being, face to face, and if
29:07
Speaker 16: you don't like that, you can leave.
29:11
Speaker 5: I first met Tom in nineteen sixty nine when I
29:14
Speaker 5: was a student at UCLA. I just walked in his
29:17
Speaker 5: office one day and I said that I understand that
29:20
Speaker 5: you and I have similar ideas on matters of economics,
29:25
Speaker 5: and we started talking from there.
29:28
Speaker 2: You and Sole used to joke about how few black
29:30
Speaker 2: conservatives there were in the country back in the seventies
29:33
Speaker 2: and eighties. As much changed since then, and what was
29:36
Speaker 2: it like back then?
29:37
Speaker 5: There were relatively few blacks that we knew of that
29:41
Speaker 5: were kind of free market.
29:42
Speaker 3: Limited government.
29:44
Speaker 5: It was Bill Buckley who made the suggestion that the
29:47
Speaker 5: EPA does not allow Tom Sole and I to fly
29:51
Speaker 5: on one plane together because we're endangered species.
29:58
Speaker 2: Tom's done something in his career that one of his mentors,
30:02
Speaker 2: Milton Friedman, felt was important to do also, and that
30:05
Speaker 2: is share his knowledge of economics with non economists, with
30:09
Speaker 2: non intellectuals.
30:11
Speaker 5: The true test of whether someone understands the subject, The
30:14
Speaker 5: true test comes when he can explain it.
30:16
Speaker 3: To someone who does not know a darn thing about it.
30:20
Speaker 5: And Tom has the gift of being able to do that,
30:23
Speaker 5: to be able to explain potentially complex ideas and economics
30:29
Speaker 5: to the ordinary person.
30:31
Speaker 1: I've been able to find a single country in the
30:33
Speaker 1: world where the policies are being advocated for blocks in
30:36
Speaker 1: the United States have lifted any people out of poverty.
30:39
Speaker 1: I've seen many examples around the world of people who
30:41
Speaker 1: began in poverty and Indian affluence. Not one of them
30:44
Speaker 1: has followed any pattern at all, Like what is being
30:48
Speaker 1: advocated for blocks in the United States, many groups have
30:51
Speaker 1: remained in poverty for a very long time trying to
30:54
Speaker 1: follow those patterns.
30:57
Speaker 5: At one time, black Americans did not have the constitutional
31:00
Speaker 5: guarantees as everybody else.
31:02
Speaker 3: Now we do.
31:03
Speaker 5: But because the Civil rights struggle, it's over in one
31:06
Speaker 5: and we're not facing the kind of racial discrimination of
31:10
Speaker 5: the past.
31:10
Speaker 3: Does not mean that they're not major problems.
31:13
Speaker 5: I'm very sure that Tom would say that the seventy
31:17
Speaker 5: five percent rate of illegitimacy among Blacks is a devastating problem,
31:23
Speaker 5: but it's not a racial problem.
31:25
Speaker 3: It's not a.
31:26
Speaker 5: Legacy of slavery, the crime that I believe Tom would
31:30
Speaker 5: say as well, that the crime we see in many
31:32
Speaker 5: black communities is a devastating problem, but it has nothing
31:36
Speaker 5: to do with racial discrimination.
31:38
Speaker 10: If you have always believed that everyone should play by
31:41
Speaker 10: the same rules and be judged by the same standards,
31:44
Speaker 10: that would have gotten you labeled a radical fifty years ago,
31:46
Speaker 10: a liberal twenty five years ago, and a racist today.
31:53
Speaker 2: Thomas Soul may be an intellectual, but it would be
31:57
Speaker 2: a mistake to believe that only Akada's an economist believe
32:01
Speaker 2: in what Tom has to say.
32:03
Speaker 3: I've never heard of a damage.
32:05
Speaker 2: I most certainly hand this single in a small recording
32:08
Speaker 2: studio just outside of downtown Dallas, a young rapper hones
32:13
Speaker 2: his craft.
32:14
Speaker 19: It feels good to be back in his boot and
32:16
Speaker 19: shout out to you, you back in meeting you, back
32:19
Speaker 19: in the truth you actually knew, and I ain't have
32:21
Speaker 19: to tell you, so sit back, let it soothe the
32:23
Speaker 19: iaculate dude.
32:25
Speaker 2: Eric July is a man on a mission.
32:28
Speaker 19: He hand this singlely top tier, meaning you not.
32:31
Speaker 2: Eric is out to make great music and to educate
32:34
Speaker 2: people like himself about his hero.
32:37
Speaker 19: And I'm something like a great house anywhere Thomas Soul is.
32:40
Speaker 19: He's the smartest person in the room. I would most
32:46
Speaker 19: definitely just tell him that he's been my biggest inspiration,
32:50
Speaker 19: hands down.
32:56
Speaker 2: Eric fronts the rap metal band backwards and uses his
33:00
Speaker 2: music to get a message across with politically charged lyrics,
33:04
Speaker 2: many of them inspired by Thomas Soul. He has emerged
33:08
Speaker 2: as an influential young voice who has outspoken in his
33:12
Speaker 2: support for individual freedom and less government intervention.
33:18
Speaker 19: You see somebody like Soul who has been doing what
33:20
Speaker 19: he has been doing, getting out there and speaking what
33:22
Speaker 19: he has been speaking. Overcoming the eyes that he had
33:25
Speaker 19: to certainly overcoming his and his growth, and you also
33:30
Speaker 19: feel like you can conquer the world.
33:34
Speaker 3: It just goes to show you, from a.
33:35
Speaker 19: Generational standpoint, how he's been able to influence somebody, you know,
33:40
Speaker 19: like me. People probably tired of hearing me talk about
33:45
Speaker 19: it because I'm always reverencing Thomas seul A. People ask me, well,
33:49
Speaker 19: you used to be this what happened? I'm like, well,
33:52
Speaker 19: that Enlightenment period, it had to do with Thomas soul.
33:57
Speaker 1: Most people have not recognized the fact that if you
34:00
Speaker 1: go back into the twenties, you find that a married couple,
34:06
Speaker 1: families were much more prevalent among blacks than than today.
34:12
Speaker 1: As late as nineteen thirty, blacks had lower unemployment race
34:15
Speaker 1: in whites. So all these things that we complain about
34:18
Speaker 1: and a tribute to the eero of slavery, those things
34:21
Speaker 1: should have been worse in the past than in the present,
34:24
Speaker 1: But in fact they're worse than the president than in
34:25
Speaker 1: the past. And I think if you want to look
34:27
Speaker 1: for a turning point, it would be since the nineteen.
34:29
Speaker 17: Sixties, and what happened in the nineteen sixties.
34:37
Speaker 1: You began to have not only the welfare state. You
34:39
Speaker 1: began to have the mindset that goes with the welfare state,
34:43
Speaker 1: so that there was no stigma any longer attached, for example,
34:46
Speaker 1: to being on relief or welfare.
34:50
Speaker 19: Those types of welfare ism and how they have affected
34:54
Speaker 19: black communities and black families.
34:57
Speaker 3: It's tough. It's a hard peal to swallow.
35:01
Speaker 19: Just how welfare ism doesn't centervise people to feel it's
35:05
Speaker 19: the state saying that. So as long as you fail,
35:08
Speaker 19: you know, you'll get this money. You'll get this money,
35:12
Speaker 19: will take care of your housing, whatever you need. But
35:14
Speaker 19: the minutes you get above this line, you know, the
35:16
Speaker 19: minute you get you see this amount of success, we're
35:19
Speaker 19: going to strip it all away from you.
35:37
Speaker 2: In nineteen eighty, Thomas Soul came here the Hoover Institution
35:41
Speaker 2: at Stanford University. Upon accepting the offer, his teaching days
35:45
Speaker 2: were over. Thousands of students would miss out on having
35:50
Speaker 2: Professor Sohl as a teacher, but millions of intellectually curious
35:55
Speaker 2: readers would benefit from Thomas Soul's work here.
36:00
Speaker 4: I don't think Tom Sole ever really liked being a teacher.
36:04
Speaker 4: I don't think he ever likes standing in front of
36:05
Speaker 4: people and being a professor. When Hoover offered him the
36:10
Speaker 4: opportunity to basically pay him to be Tom Sole. He
36:14
Speaker 4: took it, and he can write what he wants to write,
36:16
Speaker 4: when he wants to write, as much or as little.
36:19
Speaker 4: But he's always been very, very productive, and I think
36:21
Speaker 4: the independence and the freedom is what he liked.
36:26
Speaker 2: So you're good friends with Tomasaul have been for a while.
36:29
Speaker 2: How would you describe Tom as someone who's never met
36:31
Speaker 2: him before?
36:33
Speaker 20: I'd say Tom as an empiricist, and by that I
36:35
Speaker 20: mean Tom looks at evidence and then he makes a diagnosis,
36:42
Speaker 20: and then he offers a therapy for the perceived problem.
36:46
Speaker 20: And then he offers a prognosis. And he's not interested
36:49
Speaker 20: as much, if at all, on how people interpret that
36:54
Speaker 20: or what are the ramifications in contemporary political terms of
36:58
Speaker 20: his argument.
36:59
Speaker 21: You out that depending on where you come from in
37:02
Speaker 21: a foreign country also makes it considered different because you
37:05
Speaker 21: carry your ethos on your back, don't you.
37:07
Speaker 3: Yeah.
37:07
Speaker 1: So if you look at the Chinese who came to
37:09
Speaker 1: the United States, let's say before World War Two, a
37:13
Speaker 1: very large percentage of those came from one district and
37:16
Speaker 1: one province in southern China. The people who've come in
37:19
Speaker 1: since World War two have largely not come from that
37:21
Speaker 1: same area. They've come in with a different set of
37:24
Speaker 1: experiences and backgrounds and values. Many of them are the
37:27
Speaker 1: poverty strict in Chinese that you see in the China
37:29
Speaker 1: tallengs of New York and San Francisco, working the very
37:32
Speaker 1: long hours, getting the very low paid living in the slums,
37:35
Speaker 1: packed into the rooms, several people to a room, and
37:38
Speaker 1: so on again. It would be hard to make the
37:40
Speaker 1: argument that this is simply a matter of the way
37:42
Speaker 1: the American employer sees it. The American employer is probably
37:44
Speaker 1: totally unaware that there are two different kinds of Chinese.
37:47
Speaker 1: It's only the people who work with the data who
37:49
Speaker 1: make those separations.
37:51
Speaker 10: It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of
37:55
Speaker 10: your own ignorance.
38:00
Speaker 2: Thomas Soule may be an academic by training, but he
38:03
Speaker 2: is not one to rely solely on books to gather
38:07
Speaker 2: material for his extensive writings on culture and migrations. For example,
38:12
Speaker 2: he became a boots on the ground researcher who traveled
38:15
Speaker 2: the world as an amateur photographer. He often documented these
38:19
Speaker 2: trips through the lens of his camera. His purpose was
38:30
Speaker 2: to try and understand the role of cultural differences, both
38:33
Speaker 2: within nations and between them, and not only today but
38:37
Speaker 2: throughout history. Soul's travels led to pioneering studies and several
38:45
Speaker 2: books that detail the cultural patterns and development of different
38:50
Speaker 2: groups around the world.
38:52
Speaker 4: He went around the world and analyzed virtually every culture,
38:55
Speaker 4: present and past to find out their strengths and weaknesses,
38:58
Speaker 4: why some survived some perished.
39:01
Speaker 6: One of Tom's discoveries was that much about the fate
39:04
Speaker 6: of different human civilizations and cultures can be explained ultimately
39:09
Speaker 6: by their geography.
39:12
Speaker 1: Too often, the influence of geography on wealth is thought
39:14
Speaker 1: of narrowly in terms of natural resources that translate directly
39:19
Speaker 1: into wealth, such as oil in the Middle East or
39:21
Speaker 1: gold in South Africa. What important as such differences are
39:25
Speaker 1: geography influences even more profound cultural differences among the peoples themselves.
39:32
Speaker 6: Why did Europe conquer Africa instead of vice versa Well,
39:36
Speaker 6: there are a number of ways in which civilizations become complex,
39:40
Speaker 6: primarily through the aggregation.
39:43
Speaker 3: And exchange of ideas.
39:47
Speaker 6: Sophistinated cultures are ones that sit in the middle of
39:49
Speaker 6: a catchment area where innovations from other cultures can be
39:53
Speaker 6: aggregated in kind of greatest hits collections, and so geography
39:57
Speaker 6: that allows movement of people and ideas with rivers with highways,
40:03
Speaker 6: intersections of highways, port cities tend to become more culturally sophisticated.
40:09
Speaker 2: A lot of his research, as you mentioned, has focused
40:12
Speaker 2: on why some groups excel and others do not, but
40:16
Speaker 2: that curiosity is not necessarily appreciated by by a lot
40:21
Speaker 2: of people who seem to approach it from the standpoint
40:26
Speaker 2: that if a culture isn't rising, it's someone else's fault,
40:31
Speaker 2: someone else is keeping them down, or you know, if
40:35
Speaker 2: America is up here, it is at the expense of
40:37
Speaker 2: this group or this country or this region. He doesn't
40:42
Speaker 2: take that approach.
40:43
Speaker 20: What Tom did when he talked about comparative cultures.
40:46
Speaker 3: He went to this quite.
40:49
Speaker 20: Narrow and unheralded group of scholars that talked about economics,
40:53
Speaker 20: and then he took that data superimposed it onto history questions.
40:58
Speaker 20: So when people who were critical Tom would say, well,
41:01
Speaker 20: he hasn't read this particular historical work, or he wasn't
41:04
Speaker 20: quite appreciative of this great novel or this great history,
41:08
Speaker 20: or they didn't understand that what he lost as being
41:12
Speaker 20: an economic historian, he gained in really trying to explain
41:17
Speaker 20: how cultures were successful or how much dominance they had
41:21
Speaker 20: in trade by actually looking at economics. And most historians,
41:24
Speaker 20: you know, they think that economics of the dismal science,
41:27
Speaker 20: and they're not trained to do that.
41:29
Speaker 10: The first lesson of economics is scarcity. There is never
41:33
Speaker 10: enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it.
41:38
Speaker 10: The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first
41:42
Speaker 10: lesson of economics.
41:50
Speaker 2: I wanted to explore how Soul's concepts on free markets
41:54
Speaker 2: have influenced business leaders today. A perfect example can be
41:59
Speaker 2: found in Salt Lake City, Utah, at overstock dot com,
42:03
Speaker 2: one of the most successful online retailers in the world.
42:11
Speaker 2: Aaron Huntsaker, an Overstock employee, has been heavily influenced by
42:16
Speaker 2: Thomas Sole's ideas. He credits much of its success to
42:22
Speaker 2: the free market economic principles championed by Thomas Sol.
42:27
Speaker 22: I discovered Thomas Sole, like every good thinker discovers things
42:32
Speaker 22: in the modern day on YouTube. I was watching a
42:38
Speaker 22: Milton Friedman video and I see Thomas Sole speaking with
42:41
Speaker 22: Milton Friedman, and I.
42:44
Speaker 3: Was like, Wow, this guy is really.
42:47
Speaker 23: Really smart, and he gave a real rigorous, as rigorous
42:53
Speaker 23: as you could be on TV, but a real rigorous
42:55
Speaker 23: answer to a question.
42:57
Speaker 3: I really appreciated that.
42:58
Speaker 22: And I just kind of went down the YouTube wormhole
43:01
Speaker 22: with Thomas Soul and then I saw that he'd written, like,
43:04
Speaker 22: you know, ten or one thousand books or something like
43:06
Speaker 22: that is tons of books, and I just started to
43:10
Speaker 22: explore him. And the more I explore Thomas's soul, he
43:15
Speaker 22: talked a lot about incentives in institutions, government institutions. I
43:27
Speaker 22: come from kind of a punk rock hardcore background, and
43:30
Speaker 22: I had an incentive to be more left and angry
43:33
Speaker 22: because it makes better music. You don't hear a whole
43:39
Speaker 22: lot of music about oh well, if I work really
43:41
Speaker 22: hard and we based it off meritocracy, things will be great.
43:45
Speaker 22: But upon kind of digging into Thomas Soul's thought process,
43:52
Speaker 22: I realized that it's far more punk rock to base
43:57
Speaker 22: things off of individual freedoms thought. I see him is
44:02
Speaker 22: someone who has constantly strived to be consistent. And to
44:07
Speaker 22: those that want to be consistent, you have to study geography.
44:11
Speaker 22: You have to study history, you have to study political philosophy,
44:15
Speaker 22: you have to study journalism. You have to study all
44:19
Speaker 22: of these subjects. As a whole and see how you
44:23
Speaker 22: can put together a view that makes them consistent.
44:28
Speaker 3: With each other.
44:29
Speaker 22: That's why I think Thomas Soule is so well versed
44:32
Speaker 22: in such a renaissance man.
44:37
Speaker 3: I grew up in an era when.
44:38
Speaker 1: People but they only blocks, were a lot forwer than today,
44:41
Speaker 1: faced a lot more discrimination than today, and in which
44:45
Speaker 1: the teenage pregnancy rate was a lot lower than today.
44:48
Speaker 1: I don't believe there is a predestined amount of teenage pregnancy,
44:52
Speaker 1: a predestined amount of husband desertion. Gutman has done a
44:55
Speaker 1: study of the black family showing that this whole notion
44:57
Speaker 1: that this is the black family, has always been disintegrating.
45:01
Speaker 10: Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true, but
45:06
Speaker 10: many other things are believed simply because they have been
45:09
Speaker 10: asserted repeatedly.
45:12
Speaker 2: In the nineteen nineties, Soul took up a new area
45:15
Speaker 2: of research, the phenomenon of late talking children. For Tom,
45:20
Speaker 2: it was personal.
45:21
Speaker 6: I met Tom Sowel through language. I am a cognitive scientist,
45:26
Speaker 6: I study language. I wrote a book on language, and
45:28
Speaker 6: I got a letter out of the blue from Professor Sowell.
45:31
Speaker 6: His son was a late talker. But contrary to some
45:34
Speaker 6: of the diagnoses that he got from so called experts.
45:38
Speaker 6: He didn't believe that his son was retarded or autistic,
45:43
Speaker 6: just that his.
45:44
Speaker 3: Language was late in developing. He just did not talk.
45:47
Speaker 6: This meshed with my own understanding of the relationship between
45:50
Speaker 6: language and thought, namely, they're not the same thing. So
45:54
Speaker 6: I wrote to Tom, saying, your intuition about your son
45:58
Speaker 6: is consistent with my understanding.
46:00
Speaker 2: Tom Soll sought out answers. Eventually, his son John not
46:05
Speaker 2: only began to speak, but to excel. Sol wrote about
46:10
Speaker 2: this remarkable journey in his landmark book Late Talking Children.
46:16
Speaker 6: Tom discovered that there was a syndrome that many famous scientists, engineers,
46:21
Speaker 6: mathematicians would also have acute spatial ability and numerical ability,
46:27
Speaker 6: but were late in developing the ability to speak.
46:31
Speaker 2: One of those impacted was Los Angeles based writer Jennifer
46:36
Speaker 2: Van Lahar, whose own young son Sam wasn't talking at all.
46:41
Speaker 24: When Sam was about eighteen months old. He wasn't really talking,
46:46
Speaker 24: just babbling no word that we could make out to
46:49
Speaker 24: be an English word. So I started looking online and
46:53
Speaker 24: saw Late Talking Children and then doctor Thomas Sowell and said, oh,
46:58
Speaker 24: I definitely want to read what he has to say.
47:00
Speaker 24: Because I respect him as an intellectual. I had already
47:06
Speaker 24: noticed in Sam that he would build different block towers
47:10
Speaker 24: with different patterns, repeating.
47:12
Speaker 9: Over and over.
47:13
Speaker 24: He would have movies that he just loved watching over
47:17
Speaker 24: and over, and one of them was Charlotte's Web, another
47:20
Speaker 24: one was Shrek, and so I would come and find
47:23
Speaker 24: ABC blocks on the floor or on the refrigerator spelling
47:27
Speaker 24: out and he even write out lucasfilm, which is pretty
47:33
Speaker 24: big for a three year old to be able to do.
47:36
Speaker 24: So the fact that Soul's book talked about bright children,
47:40
Speaker 24: I thought, I don't think it's dumb. Let's look into this.
47:44
Speaker 24: So went to go see doctor Camarado to get an evaluation,
47:50
Speaker 24: and they gave us a full plan of what we
47:52
Speaker 24: could do to help him to be able to acquire
47:55
Speaker 24: language and be successful in school. When Sam started piano,
47:59
Speaker 24: and and he had been so advanced in that first year,
48:03
Speaker 24: at the end of the year they had a recital
48:05
Speaker 24: and he still wasn't talking in more than one sentence,
48:09
Speaker 24: maybe two, but he got up and he introduced his piece,
48:13
Speaker 24: and it was Twinkle, Twinkle.
48:14
Speaker 3: Little Star.
48:19
Speaker 24: It made me cry. I sent the video of that
48:26
Speaker 24: to the Camarados and said how proud I was of
48:29
Speaker 24: him and thanked them for the help they had given us,
48:32
Speaker 24: And they asked if they could send it to.
48:33
Speaker 2: Doctor Sowell.
48:37
Speaker 24: Said go ahead, and then they emailed back and said
48:40
Speaker 24: that Sewel had really loved watching the video of Sam.
48:51
Speaker 24: Just the fact that he would care about this five
48:53
Speaker 24: year old said a lot to me about who he
48:56
Speaker 24: sees himself, as.
48:59
Speaker 10: The course of history is determined by what people do
49:02
Speaker 10: with their opportunities.
49:06
Speaker 2: Soul has written a great deal about the importance of
49:09
Speaker 2: human capital and a group's advancement, the development of skills
49:13
Speaker 2: and habits and attitudes, and advancing a group economically, and
49:17
Speaker 2: a good example of what he's talking about can be
49:19
Speaker 2: found on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. At the Steinway Piano Company,
49:33
Speaker 2: President and CEO Ron Loseby explains how the history of
49:38
Speaker 2: Steinwey aligns with Thomas Sohl's theories.
49:42
Speaker 25: We still follow the tenet that Heinrich Ingelhard Steinweg started
49:48
Speaker 25: with the company with, and that is to build the
49:50
Speaker 25: best piano possible. They were living in Zeisen in the
49:54
Speaker 25: Hearts Mountain area of northern Germany.
49:57
Speaker 2: At that time. There was a lot of political upheaval
49:59
Speaker 2: in German and.
50:00
Speaker 25: They had the guild system I think you would call
50:03
Speaker 25: it the apprentice system today, and it had really strict rules.
50:07
Speaker 25: And Heinrich was just so full of ideas on how
50:11
Speaker 25: to build the best piano that he possibly could that
50:13
Speaker 25: he was impatient and he didn't want to wait until
50:17
Speaker 25: he graduated from this system.
50:21
Speaker 2: On his own. Heinrich created a few pianos, and while
50:25
Speaker 2: they were favorably received, the economic restrictions in Germany at
50:30
Speaker 2: the time made him realize that if he was to succeed,
50:33
Speaker 2: he would have to take his skills elsewhere.
50:39
Speaker 25: What it gave him the impetus to come to the
50:42
Speaker 25: New World, New York City, where there was less restriction,
50:45
Speaker 25: there was less regulation.
50:49
Speaker 2: Heinrich changed the family's last name to the more American
50:53
Speaker 2: sounding Steinwe.
50:56
Speaker 25: They created an instrument that within ten years they became
51:00
Speaker 25: came the most successful, most profitable, the best piano company
51:03
Speaker 25: built in America.
51:06
Speaker 1: Very often people talk as if some group has taken
51:09
Speaker 1: control of some industry and they wonder how did that happen?
51:14
Speaker 1: And in most cases they created the industry. The industry
51:17
Speaker 1: didn't exist before they got there. That's how they took
51:21
Speaker 1: control of it.
51:26
Speaker 2: Heinrich's decision to relocate to America is a good example
51:31
Speaker 2: of one of Thomas Soul's core beliefs, that individuals carry
51:36
Speaker 2: with them their skills no matter where they go, and
51:40
Speaker 2: can succeed if permitted to do so without cumbersome government regulations.
51:48
Speaker 10: It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread
51:51
Speaker 10: among a multitude of hypocrites.
51:57
Speaker 17: Listen to this list The Thomas Soul Reader twenty eleven,
52:02
Speaker 17: Intellectuals and Race twenty thirteen, a new edition of your
52:07
Speaker 17: classic work Basic Economics in twenty fourteen, Wealth, Poverty and
52:12
Speaker 17: Politics twenty fifteen, and now twenty eighteen, Discrimination and Disparities.
52:19
Speaker 3: And do you know what I just did?
52:20
Speaker 17: I just listed the books you've published Since turning eighty.
52:32
Speaker 2: Thomas Soule's essays and weekly columns have appeared in more
52:35
Speaker 2: than three hundred newspapers in periodicals including The New York Times,
52:40
Speaker 2: The Law Street Journal, Forbes, and Fortune magazines. While many
52:44
Speaker 2: found souls empirically based arguments insightful, oftentimes they created a backlash,
52:50
Speaker 2: especially among those in academia. You once told me that
52:55
Speaker 2: Tom's not interested in making people happy or angry. He's
52:59
Speaker 2: interested in telling people what the data show.
53:02
Speaker 20: What the data shows, and he is counter He can
53:06
Speaker 20: be a contrarian in the sense that often areas that
53:10
Speaker 20: are unpopular are they're plagued with false knowledge or misconceptions.
53:15
Speaker 20: He gravitates towards those because that intrigues him to see
53:18
Speaker 20: if that's actually the popular opinion is actually true, and
53:21
Speaker 20: often it's not. He finds it's not, and then the
53:24
Speaker 20: results tend to bother people that he's so dispassionate about it.
53:30
Speaker 20: And then, as an African American intellectual, he's supposed to
53:33
Speaker 20: fit a preconceived intellectual, academic ideological position. And it's not
53:38
Speaker 20: that he doesn't. He's just uninterested in it. He doesn't
53:41
Speaker 20: make friends or enemies based on tribal considerations or popular consensus.
53:48
Speaker 2: On December twenty seventh, twenty sixteen, Thomas Soul published his
53:52
Speaker 2: weekly newspaper column. I'd read his column for decades and
53:56
Speaker 2: always look forward to it, but this one was different.
54:00
Speaker 2: Saul was saying goodbye. Within minutes, the Internet lit up
54:06
Speaker 2: with thousands of comments about Tom retiring from writing his column.
54:12
Speaker 2: Most of the postings were along the lines of say
54:15
Speaker 2: it isn't so.
54:20
Speaker 1: I did that after spending some time in seventy with
54:22
Speaker 1: a couple of photo buddies, and I realized that in
54:25
Speaker 1: those four days we hadn't watched a single news program,
54:29
Speaker 1: we hadn't seen a single newspaper.
54:31
Speaker 3: I said, this is the life.
54:34
Speaker 1: I don't need to be watching because most of the
54:36
Speaker 1: foolish things that have said on these programs we said
54:39
Speaker 1: twenty and thirty and forty years ago and refuted twenty
54:44
Speaker 1: and thirty and forty years ago.
54:45
Speaker 17: Now you quite often, but you're happier when you're not
54:49
Speaker 17: reading the news, absolutely, But at the same time, you're
54:53
Speaker 17: also happier when you're working on a book.
54:55
Speaker 1: Yes, when I can go out there and get the
54:56
Speaker 1: hard data and find out what's re happening.
55:01
Speaker 2: In dozens of books and numerous television appearances and thousands
55:06
Speaker 2: of columns, Soul has championed his philosophy of free markets
55:11
Speaker 2: and personal responsibility while weathering the storms of challenge and controversy.
55:16
Speaker 2: Soul has spent his adult life proudly sharing his political
55:20
Speaker 2: and economic beliefs. For some, he's a clear thinker full
55:24
Speaker 2: of common sense. Others say he lacks empathy. What no
55:29
Speaker 2: one can doubt is the courage of this Maverick intellectual.
55:34
Speaker 17: If you could offer one sentence of counsel to some
55:37
Speaker 17: sophomore or junior who's watching this today.
55:40
Speaker 1: Is not over till listen over as Yogi Berra said,
55:43
Speaker 1: And I would say to this young person, if we,
55:46
Speaker 1: through some mirac.
55:46
Speaker 3: Would get through this.
55:48
Speaker 1: Please take the heart the lesson of what happens when
55:51
Speaker 1: you vote on the basis of rhetoric and symbolism and
55:56
Speaker 1: instead of using your mind. It doesn't matter how smart
55:59
Speaker 1: you are, you stop and think.
56:04
Speaker 21: In your early days at Harvard, you are either going
56:07
Speaker 21: to make it not going to make it, and you
56:08
Speaker 21: shut yourself up and made yourself make it.
56:10
Speaker 1: Many people in trying to insulate young people from adversity,
56:14
Speaker 1: insulate them from the things that give them strength.
56:17
Speaker 26: Thomas Soul Common Sense in a Senseless World is now
56:20
Speaker 26: available on DVD. For more information or to order a
56:23
Speaker 26: DVD of this program, call one eight hundred eight seven
56:26
Speaker 26: six eight nine three zero or visit www dot free
56:30
Speaker 26: to choose dot net.
56:32
Speaker 8: Funding for this program has been provided by L. E.
56:35
Speaker 8: Phillips Family Foundation, Robert and Marian Ouster, the Lyne In
56:39
Speaker 8: Harry Bradley Foundation Incorporated, DKT Liberty Project, the Charles and
56:44
Speaker 8: Ann Johnson Foundation, Chris and Melody Rufer,