The Main Flaw in Thomas Sowell's Books - The Avid Reader
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ธ.ค. 2024
- In previous videos I have mainly been positive towards Thomas Sowell's books. Today, however, I'm going to talk about my main gripe with them.
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He does this for a reason. He talked about it in an interview once. He said someone told him "Never assume any of your readers reads all of your books."
Or something to that effect. I am proud of you for reading 12 of his books. I have read 11 of them, but we are outliers.
Good. I hope he keeps reiterating the same points, because too many people aren't listening.
Thomas Sowell is my favorite nonfiction writer as well.
I've never been disappointed by re-reading rehashed material and Thomas Sowell's books because I have always appreciated being reminded of something by him, and overall, the ideas with which I had been previously unacquainted all by themselves always made the book worth reading.
In the end, you are really just experiencing something that happens when you read a lot of books by the same author.
Repetition is the key to learning.
Repetition is the key to learning.
Repetition is the key to learning.
Repetition is the key to learning.
He does repeat the same for us. It’s been 50 years of him being in the same drum, but mainstream academia, and culture still suffers from the same fallacies.
amen
What one man calls repetitive, another calls consistency. I see the same thing from Jorden Peterson. In both cases, consistency, "it's a good thing."
No. It’s a publisher scam to milk more money from the consumer. Also Sowell has peaked. He is a good economist but falls short quite often in his analysis of history and sociology
That's exactly the same of what I was thinking. Guess the main reason of Sowell for rehashing so much of his previous writtings was actually to keep up with time pasing. The more books you writte ,even they are repetitive,with the passing of time ,you can be remarked. It't not a fair strategy to gain popularity,but it works.
Yeah, new releases tend to be overrepresented in bookstores in contrast to older works. Something I've seen in Barnes & Nobles bookstores is that you will find one of Sowell's newer books there (Discrimination and Disparities) but nothing that he wrote back in the eighties or nineties like the Culture Trilogy.
I disagree, he likely rehashes because it is relevant to many of his different topics in many different books.
People are more likely to read new books as opposed to old, unless they are established classics of literature. Publishing a new book gets the ideas in front of new readers. Let's be honest, his insights are desperately needed, now more than ever.
If that was the issue then he would be justified in releasing new or revised editions, like he has done with Basic Economics. That's fine. What's wrong is passing off a new release as a new original book when 90% of the ideas are just reiterations of previous books. Or he could at a bare minimum put disclaimers at the beginning of his more recent books that these are basically abridged versions of his earlier works. Either one of those solutions would be more honest and waste less time of people who are actually interested in exploring his many (good) insights.
I think A Conflict of Visions (so relevant today though it was written in 1987) and its follow-up, Vision of the Anointed, are also must reads and cover different ideas than the others.
Yeah, A Conflict of Visions is definitely a must read and one of the foundational books by Thomas Sowell.
What do you say about '' a conflict of vision''? Can it be considered some sort of a philosophy book?
It is philosophical in the sense that it provides an intellectual framing of how to look at modern political debates of left versus right. However it could also be considered intellectual history as Sowell is tracing the origins of both the constrained and unconstrained visions.
He considers this one of his best books and is proud of the original research.
Yeah, it offers great clarity of why the left feels contempt for the right.
It has to repeatedly told again and again if its not get into the people's mind.
So has to repeat. If someone made decisions behalf of people there has to be Hammer it down..
Now there are lot of things dr sowell differ from the others.
That his database analysis.
I appreciate your thoughts..He is a national treasure. I bought 1st editions of his culture trilogy. I believe the Vision of the Anointed was one that Mr Sowell was proud of.
Yeah, he is my favourite non-fiction author. He has successfully debunked so many modern day myths about things such as inequality, regulation and price controls.
I agree.
I wish he'd talk about monetary theory; he could do something original there. Mises and the Austrians cover this theoretically at great length, so it would be interesting to hear Sowell's take. If he's at all interested in the subject.
Yeah, Mises wrote a lot of books like Sowell but at least they covered varying topics. I don't understand the purpose of Thomas Sowell being in his nineties and then writing a condensed clone of a previous book. Maybe it's because he writes for laymen that he has not covered monetary theory but that is not an excuse. Murray Rothbard managed to write a fairly intelligible book on the gold standard back in the sixties.
Thomas Sowell it's a wanna be sociologist while he is a hardcore economist. Most of his work is content you are studing in a sociology class (race,inequalities,disparities,colonization and social criticism) even he is in a disagreement with many points of view from the field. And he is not an exception, Max Weber was also an economist before he became to be called today a sociologist,same thing with Karl Marx. Even we do not like to call it a ''sociologist'' and we will rather call him a Social Critic, we have to agree that he spent most of his life studying social issues and social phenomena.
Yeah, the book Intellectuals and Society is even classed as sociology. And at my university the cultural history books he has written are classed under the section of anthropology. Something that some people maybe don't realize is that a lot of the things talked about in Thomas Sowell's "Culture" Trilogy are actually briefly mentioned in regular history courses at university. For example, last year in contemporary history we did briefly cover the mass migrations of Overseas Chinese and Indians that took place in the late nineteenth century along with how the British contributed to abolishing slavery (although they emphasized that Britain did this for "selfish" reasons).
Maybe you can help me, I can't seem to find your books, (its' David Ruder, right?} What are some of your titles?
When I read YOUR books--the many that you must have written over the last several decades--I sure hope I find that YOU have never repeated yourself.
I'm with ya, man - no one should ever say anything critical about a book unless they have written as many or more than the author of said book. We need more uncritical reading and less discussion!
@@hilariousname6826 My suggestion was NOT that he shouldn't be critical unless and until he has written as many books as the work he's criticizing--it was that, if he had written as many books as Sowell, he'd learn that it's pretty damned near impossible not to repeat yourself. If he'd had said, 'Don't read Monkey's in Pants, because it's pretty much just a re-hash of Pantless Monks, I'd have no quibble--and that would be helpful to HIS readership.
Most of his books are compilations of essays he has written over his lifetime.
His book on Marxism is unique with no overlap with his other works.
If you read all of Sowell’s books at one sitting, you would experience repetition of his main themes and you might find that annoying. But each book has to stand alone, and the main themes have to be restated in each book for it to make sense to the reader of that book. Each book can be considered as an application of his basic themes to a different social phenomenon. That his themes have such broad application demonstrates their profundity. If you were reading about different medical phenomena (say diabetes and childbirth and arthritis), then the themes of respiration and blood circulation and metabolism would figure in the description of them all and might seem repetitious. But that’s by necessity. And it’s a small price to pay for the value of his ideas.
Have you met Americans we definitely need to be yelled at repetitively to fix our shit lol but I totally understand for people that get it right away that it's annoying to come across that over and over
You should get them at the library. That way you’re not spending money. All the books of his I either borrowed from the library or listened to the audiobook on TH-cam. I’ve yet to buy one.
Most of his books are not at my university library but I did borrow "Migrations and Cultures" and "Conquests and Cultures" from there.
I’m not a fan of Thomas Sowell-even though he’s brilliant-and it’s hard to find an objective fan of his. It was cathartic and reassuring to hear your analysis, because I thought the same thing after reading his voluminous catalogue: he says the same thing over and over.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of his but it gets annoying when he reiterates the same points about race and IQ for pages on end in different books.
Thank you, this helps me. Keep it up (y) BM
Thanks, I will.
I guess people have never watched his interviews. He talks about and is asked about all kinds of stuff
Go to libgen then that's where i get my books. I'm in South Africa , the books i want are not readily available in bookstores ( e.g Charles Murray ) since we are a far left country. Also buying from amazon is expensive for me bcoz of shipment plus customs so i had to take advantage of the internet.
Yeah, I also get most of my right-of-Centre books off the internet. Writers like Mises or Sowell are usually nowhere to be found in bookstores in continental Europe.
Yeah. He just drones on and on and on. Tiresome.
I thought I was going to hate this video, but I agree. It's obvious they're using him because he thinks differently than most of the black community but he is extremely intelligent, why not allow him to elaborate on another subject? (
Yeah, he is most famous for his opinions on racial issues like inequality, discrimination and affirmative action but I find his essays on economics and history far more interesting. I wish he would have gone more in depth on post-colonial African economic history, covering more countries than only parts of East and West Africa. I appreciated a lot him comparing economic development in the Ivory Coast and Ghana.
Sorry, it was a Conflict of Visions.
So he has reiterated some important information over the years, probably because not enough people hear his ideas.
And I just lost count of how many times you repeated the fact that TS repeats himself in his books.
I also think part of it is because the other side keeps saying stupid s*** and he's like has to keep repeating himself but I should let everyone know here that I've only listen to a couple of his books. So my opinion doesn't really count
Bro if you're poor you can just pirate his old works. If you can support him and aren't poor then buy em.
I don't mind buying books. But what I expect of them at the very least is that they broaden my horizons on a knowledge level, not repeat stuff that I in large part already know from having read previous books by the same author.
I wonder to what degree he is aware of this .. and to what end would it be to knowing have such repeated information in multiple books with different titles. It's plausible that his process of writing a book is more of a culprit than any thnmg else . I say plausible because i don't know his process and if you had a habit of on the fly editing while writing by adding additional; information from memory to support a topic in your current book, because its a habit, the more books your write the morfe pronounced the habit would be . and he is THomas sowell .. idk telling Beethoven your shit is starting to sound the same would be a frightful endeavor for some oner back in those days. If he's not aware of it .. the odds are pretty good nobody is gong to mention to him, But if we assume he is well aware of this fact and we assumer he is not inclined to laziness is it a matter of nrt b scared of solid Data. Because he personally has acquired his data he can use it with the confidence of it validity. The quality of the evidence one use to make a case is directly related to the strength of that case., so maybe thats it .. but Thomas Sowell is the most under appreciated Ecumenist in the history of modern economics ... I've watched round tables with him that l;aprocn freedman l;ol fro the 70's 80's even early 90's .. what ius surprising is how identical the cases every one was m aking back than .. for which ever side even there verbiage early similar .. if we look art the Condition's they lived in .. taker that as the base line and take each sides prediction about if what policy's are enacted .. Thomas Sowell must be a god time traveler.. because 30 years later his prediction's as they relate to economics and left wing policy's are tegh most accurate predications you'll ever found about anything little lown something as complicated as united states economics.. You live n a world that is going to shit because a certain class of the population is doing what they've always done . But your pretty sure that there are principles about the nature of man , fo society, and of government .. that you have been handed down to you, further discovered by you that if yo could only get society to listen, would at the very least forestall the obvious coming collapse. Maybe he's trying rtoi get it through to people there aer some fundinfo principles we could adopt a a nation that insures a level of prosperity while avoiding our own destruction.. and the only he do is out line them over and over again as simply but effective as he can through the writing of books in hopes that the repetitions gets through
You make a good point (however, you repeat yourself so much in this video, soooo... glass houses, no?). His latest book is kind of a brief overview of a large part of the corpus of his works. As a distillation, it is valuable, especially to someone who is not familiar with his works. Unfortunately, however concise and erudite it is (as well as readable), I think it will never find the audience who really needs to hear it, because those very people are the closed minded, particularly of the Left, who think they already know everything relevant, and would never sully themselves with Sowell because he is their nemesis.
As I, too, have read many of his books, I concur that he does cover similar territories over so many of them. However, I don't think this is a failing, especially in an educator, as he is coming at issues from various angles. Thomas Sowell could be an entire college curriculum, and the world would be a better place.
Sowell is a good economist but falls short on many of his interpretations of history and sociology. Those are not his field and there are many historians and sociologists that are way better than him.
Yeah, he sometimes speaks in a self-assured way about foreign policy and social issues that is unjustified. Ironically his analysis of intellectuals failing when they leave their specialized field kinda applies to him on some issues. He has a pathological fear of Iran (thinking that they are going to nuke the US into subservience and the Iran nuclear deal was a disaster). And he claims that education about birth control at school has caused an increase in teen pregnancies while the opposite long-term trend is actually true.
Okay, so Thomas Sowell is an economist and you readily acknowledge that the economic content of his books is not repeated. But Sowell as a person who is not only concerned about economics. He is concerned about understanding history and culture and he has a perfectly legitimate view of the fallacies promoted by the left. Of course, he presents his views on these matter in all of his books. Why shouldn’t he? The popular narrative of the left is constantly being aired by the left and, as a consequence, he probably feels that he needs to get over his minority point of view at every opportunity.
By the way, you make the same point about six times in this single presentation. Sowell makes similar points in all of his books but I doubt whether he repeats them in the same book, lol.
If you want to critique someone like Thomas Sowell, you’re going to have to do better than sit in front of a plain colored wall. I can’t look at this and take this guy seriously.
What a silly thing to say.
I am a huge fan of Mr.Sowell and I agree with his assertion.
Would his points ring truer to you if he was sitting in front of some elaborate decor?
Thomas Sowell is not helpful.