Tag Archives

Archive of posts published in the tag: “Intellectuals and Society”

Categories vs. Flesh and Blood People

“Perhaps the most fertile source of misunderstandings about incomes has been the widespread practice of confusing statistical categories with flesh-and-blood human beings. Many statements have been made in the media and in academia, claiming that the rich are gaining not

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A Tale of Two Market Crashes

From Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society “In short, many things that the Federal Reserve, Congress and the two Presidents did (during the market crash of 1929) were counterproductive.  Given these multiple failures of government policy, it is by no means

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People vs Categories

From Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society “Although such discussions have been phrased in terms of people, the actual empirical evidence cited has been about what has been happening over time to statistical categories – and that turns out to be

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The Other 99 Percent

From Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society “Central planning is just one of a more general class of social decision-making processes dependent on the underlying assumption that people with more per capita knowledge (in the special sense) should be guiding their

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Experts on Tap

“In other words, experts are often called in, not to provide factual information or dispassionate analysis for the purpose of decision-making by responsible officials, but to give political cover for decisions already made and based on other consideration entirely. The

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Power vs. Knowledge

“People on both sides of the ideological fault line may believe that those with the most knowledge should have the most weight in making decisions that impact society, but they have radically different conceptions of just where in society  there

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Intellect, Intelligence and Wisdom

“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that

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