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Summary: Incredible Insight
Review: This book will truely open your eyes to what is happening in America today.
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Summary: If I were "Bill Gates" rich, Every Citizen would have this!
Review: A tremendous analysis of the "Intellectual Elite," in this country. I was especially intrigued with the notion that no one person could possibly create as simple an item as the "pencil." To mine the graphite, then to mill it, to prepare the wood of the pencil, to produce the rubber, to make the paint, to market and distribute such a simple article as the everyday pencil. Who among us could produce such a mundane article. You? Me? Politicans or bureuacrats? I think not. Why then do these same self appointed guardians of the intellectual elite think for one moment that they could manage an economy as vast as the one found here in the United States, or to engineer our society in such a way that would be an improvement over the natural evolution of our society, which was produced over hundreds of years and millions of lives? Add this all together, and throw in the fact that the intellectual elite will not even avail themselves to honest critique, so abundantly found in "failed" social experiments such as welfare, bussing, affirmative action, etc, ad nauseum... Well I could go on and on about this book. Better, if you read it yourself.
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Summary: A laundry list of the Liberal Left's dirty tricks.
Review: Judging by both positive and negative reviews below, I think this book has been largely misunderstood. Yes, Sowell is a libertarian. Yes, he writes with support from a 'right wing' think tank. And Sowell DOES take left liberals to task. The meat of the book, though, is that the author give the reader insights into strategies like rhetoric, inflated 'crisis' arguments and statistical mismatching that left liberals tend to use. (Not that this is exclusive to the left as anyone who has read Ann Coulters 'Slander,' knows) Sowell takes us chapter by chapter through clever ways that the left (he does use them as THE example.) avoid evidence, exagerate claims, and avoid 'trade-off' in favor of 'cosmic' justice. The sections on statistic botching and the 'constrained' vision of justice are certainly the most interesting and informative. I suppose conservatives and libertarians will look also at Sowells brawney arguments against bureaucracy and governments ability to solve other peoples problems. I know I did!! Still, I can't help thinking (despite what most reviewers picked up) that that was the secondary point of the book. The real meat is the information Sowell gives us on how to sight a bad argument. Although I'm a die-hard libertarian, I have to subtract half a star for Sowell's confinement to distortions amongst the left- especially when error in predictions is concerned. Pat Buchanan, Robert Bork, and Rush Limbaugh (if we dare call him and intellectual) have made pretty bogus foresights. And as for the section on inflationary rhetoric, the right can sling empty mud too. I think Ann Coulters book, 'Slander' should be a textbook. The other half point subtracted is because Sowell, while having written a well researched book with good arguments, did not write it well. It flowed and it will likely keep your attention, but he's just not as passionate and conversational as Hayek and Freidman could've been. In closing, if anyone wants to have a good chuckle, check out Bob Berkowitz's review below. I really love the part where Berkowitz takes Mr. Sowell, a black man, to task for not standing 'with his own people.' Rhetoric, anyone?
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Summary: Clarity in Politics
Review: Sowell pentratingly describes two different mindsets, two visions: the "vision of the anointed" and the "tragic vision." You might think of these as being the "left" and the "right" in contemporary politics, generally, except that "left" and "right", like "liberal" and "conservative" are abused and often misunderstood terms in American politics. The Nazis, for instance, were self-proclaimed socialists, but are described as "right-wing", together with Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Go figure. (Of course, as Sowell points out, this twisted nomenclature is a weapon of the anointed, who tar anyone opposed to them by lumping them together with Nazis and the KKK.) So it's the anointed and the tragedians. The anointed believe in their own unlimited ability to change society, in "problems" that have "solutions", in categorical decision-making, and in their own absolution from any unforeseen consequences of their decisions on the basis of their good intentions. To the anointed, those who disagree are evil. The tragedian believes that all human actors have limited power to change society and that specialization is therefore good, that causation is systemic, all outcomes being the result of hundreds or thousands or millions of discrete individual decisions, and that all change comes as the result of trade-offs and that cost and negative consequences must be considered in decisionmaking. To the tragedian, those who disagree are dumb or don't get it. And the anointed have seized the cultural heights. Their place in universities, the media and the judiciary give them power all out of proportion to their numbers. Sowell analyzes not only how the anointed think, but also how they act. He examines the rhetoric that the anointed use to cut short debate, their insistent unaccountability to fact, present or future, their use of "mascot" groups to advance their causes, their vocabulary, their use of an activist judiciary to undermine the rule of law, and ultimately the question of whether the anointed believe in anything that resembles an objective reality. This is a great analytical primer on the thought of the anti-left. It's one of those books that articulates things you know to be true, but that never would have occurred to you to formulate as a conscious statement. "Of course!" You'll want to shout. "Hallelujah! Amen!" It's true. It's revelatory. Buy it now.
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Summary: Sowell scores again
Review: Sowell clearly explains several of the effects of the left wing culture on our society. I especially enjoyed his thoughts on the origins of our justice system's current faults.
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Summary: Brilliant eye opener
Review: This book is simply brilliant. It shatters the myths and propaganda that have done so much damage to this country over the past decades. Other reviewers have labeled Dr. Sowell as a conservative, but don't think that he is that easy to categorize. The facts he presents are critical of many liberal policies, but his criticisms go beyond simple liberal/conservative politics. If you have an open mind and care about what is going on with social policies in this country, this book is for you.
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Summary: An Achievement!
Review: Sowell's "The Vision of the Annointed" is a devasting analysis of the many ways liberals seek to implement their vision of society. Much of this vision ignores economic and social realities and their inherently complex nature for a grand call to action to solve society's ills. Of course, it is much easier to desire change than to implement it, and Sowell shows repeatedly how their vision brings about awful results. Such results occur due to a lack of realistic planning and a view that to every problem there is a "solution" waiting to be discovered. Sowell believes that there are, in fact, no real solutions, but just trade-offs, and those who seek change must at least attempt to minimize the ill consequences of any proposed plan. Instead, when the vision of the "annointed" ends up in failure for a lack of any realism -- whether it is an attempt to eradicate poverty, or reduce crime though gun control -- the blame is placed on assumed government failure, a need for *further* government involvement, and an defect in the personified "society." Sowell exposes such "reasoning" as absurd and often destructive. While "The Vision of the Annointed" is a bit dense here and there, and some topics are not discussed as much as they could have been, it is a fascinating account that will open many eyes to the true thinking of the liberal vision of society.
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Summary: The truth hurts
Review: The thing that drives liberal's nuts is, they recognize themselvs in this book. Dr. Sowell explains how the left uses half truths, hysterics and race-baiting to convince people that a crisis exists for the purpose of advancing their own ideas and how they should spend your money. Dr. Sowell explains quite clearly how the social disasters started by LBJ's "Great Society" have virtually enslaved millions to federal servitude. He puts it best by saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, that those who seek to solve all of our countries problems need only your money to do it, while being unable to manufacture and market something as simple as a pencil. How, therefore can more funding(tax dollars) solve the problem their own policies have created? Answer: They can't, but they're after your money anyway. From reading this book, it's clear to me that the liberal left is absolutly intoxicated by power and thier elixer is the money that someone else's labor produced.
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Summary: Most insightful thinker of our day
Review: Thomas Sowell clearly shows his ability to understand the opposistion's train of thought and how to pick it apart. He takes popular beleifs and reveals their flaws. Sowell's keen insight pulls the blind fold off our eyes. You will be amazed by how devious the intellectual left are and explains the ignorence of the common citizian. The only thing keeping me from giving this book a "5" is, at times, hard to follow and a little dry. Despite that, its a great resource.
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Summary: A good piece of work, but the flaws undercut its argument
Review: Thomas Sowell did some good work in this book. Nowhere, in my opinion, is Sowell better than when he shows that the statistical methods employed by analysts can be manipulated to fit a certain view point. He talks about race and age, and gives examples of how numbers are manipulated to fit a certain view of events. OF course, the idea of statistical manipulation is a common one, but so many statistics that are commonly quoted today are often manipulated. Hopefully, these sections will lead less people to quote statistical figures without ascertaining how the figures were obtained. My favorite example is his analysis of loan default statistics reported along the lines of race. His argument was that the rate of default would be SIGNIFICANTLY lower amongst the race that was discriminated against if unworthy applicants were being granted loans. This argument should also hold if lower standards were being applied to the privileged race. This was not the case and the default levels of all races were quite similar, and probably even higher for the race discriminated against, according to Sowell, showing that the standards for qualification were applied equally to individuals. Now, there are arguments that can be made against this assertion by an appeal to improbable situations, but I leave that to those who want to live in denial about the objectivity of individual merit. However, there are some things that make my recommendation of this book a wary one. 1) Sowell's positivist methodology: Sowell, like all people who sometimes use a positivist methodology, doesn't use it consistently, but whenever some of the effects creep in, the results can be dangerous. Positivist generally assume that facts can be mixed and matched - that all facts are atomic and we associate events together but that few events are really metaphysically linked together. For example, an extreme positivist might argue that there is *nothing* necessary about the sun rising everyday, and that it is not even contigent on other factors - it is a fact on its own divorced from all others. We can only be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow if it does ( a brother of positivism is empiricism). His assertion about the comparisons of the Ptolemiac and Copernican models of astronomy, and the Newtonian and Einsteinian models of mechanics/physics, is one. It is not simply, as he asserts, that Einstein's model is more accurate than Newton's, and that is why Newton's model is used when it is sufficient, or that Copernican models are more complex that Ptolemy. One also needs to remember that the correct elements of both models are QUITE similar, and the corrections proposed by Einstein and Copernicus might or might not be very significant when the accuracy of certain results is in question. His summary gives the effect that Einstein is a totally different model from Newton's, though anyone who has actually worked with the equations in question will see that this is not the case - Einstein's equations have corrective factors that if taken out, reduce his equations to those of Newton. The results for both equations are quite similar within a specific range, and this isn't a magical phenomenon. This argument also applies to the Ptolemaic and Copernican models. This might seem trivial, but it isnt: Sowell's positivist methodology gives the idea that prediction is essentially pragmatic, and that new knowledge totally contradicts old knowledge, which is rarely, if ever, the case - new knowledge usually extends old knowledge, by allowing for a wider context of results to be integrated with the original theory, or for corrections to be made to it. Most of Sowell's best arguments do not rely on this positivist ideology, and would be invalidated by it. 2. Sowell's concession to the morality of the anointed: Sowell seems to concede, at times in a tone akin to sarcasm, but at other times in a tone that seems sincere, that the Vision of the Anointed is a noble one, only that it is not achievable. This concession, that ideals divorced from the facts, which negate what is one of the fundamentals of morality (respect for the TRUTH), can be sometimes noble, is a dangerous concession to make. After all, it might pay to be noble, even if nobility is destructive. If this isn't Sowell's intent, he should qualify his proper view of the morality and actions of the "Anointed". 3. His view about constrained and unconstrained thinkers, which, in my opinion, is sometimes a very unclear basis for separating ideas and thinkers. It seems that even some of the greatest defenders of the free market would fall into the camp of the "Anointed", and some Socialists would be "Benighted" if one was to use his definitions. The economics in this book is quite good. So is the statistical analysis. However, the philosophical arguments do leave a bit to be desired. Making concessions to pragmatism, positivism, and egalitarianism, especially if one understands how DESTRUCTIVE these philosophies are, is not the best thing for a defender of the free market (and truth) to do. This review is more critical that I would have liked. Sowell's citation of facts and copious references make this book very deserving of a read. The clarity of his writing, in addition to the references, also makes it easy to address the arguments that Sowell proposes. However, philosophy sometimes speaks more loudly than facts (which always need a philosophical explanation to have a moral basis) and Sowell makes subtle errors in this arena.
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