Here’s a brief review of Sowell’s work. While he can be congratulated for working hard in his younger years his assumptions follow or at least echo the socioeconomic philosophy of William F Buckley Jr and Milton Friedman. And of course there’s quite a bit of Ayn Rand’s objectivism sprinkled into all of this for good measure.
This philosophy has been empirically rebuked. (For those still willing to follow, empirically is defined as: by means of observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. Both in the US through Reaganomics and Alan Greenspan’s policies as Fed chairman (He later admitted he never saw the Great Recession coming
as well as internationally.
Let’s take a few examples. First, an argument that recurs in Sowell’s work is that minimum wages will increase unemployment. He deploys it as a classic tale of do-gooders hurting the very people they’re trying to help by ignoring Facts and Logic. The social justice types think they can help the poor by interfering in the free market, substituting their personal judgments about what people ought to be paid for the market’s judgment. But these meddlers are only making things worse. In Social Justice Fallacies, Sowell writes:
“Minimum wage laws are among the many government policies widely believed to benefit the poor, by preventing them from making decisions for themselves that surrogate decision-makers regard as being not as good as what the surrogates can impose through the power of government. Traditional basic economics, however, says that people tend to purchase less at a higher price. If so, then employers…tend to hire less labor at a higher price, imposed by minimum wage laws, than they would hire at a lower price, based on supply and demand. Here the unsaleable surplus is called unemployment.”
Here we can see why many of Sowell’s fellow economists don’t pay much attention to his work. “Traditional basic economics” may predict that minimum wages will produce unemployment, but a giant mountain of empirical evidence has shown that the simplistic view Sowell advances here is inconsistent with reality. In fact, the predicted negative effects of minimum wage increases have turned out to be minimal. As economist Noah Smith writes, “many [studies] actually conclude that higher minimum wages create jobs.”
The simplistic Sowell view would be that if something costs more, people tend to buy less of it. But there are lots of reasons why raising the minimum wage might not cause employers to purchase less labor overall. Does Sowell consider those reasons? He does not. Does he grapple with any of the empirical literature in his own field that challenges his view? No, he deals with none of it. He simply acts as if none of it exists. And then he has the audacity to grouse about pointy-headed intellectuals ignoring inconvenient facts!
Does Sowell have any discussion of empirical observations on minimum wages and unemployment? Yes, actually. He has a paragraph of observations about the data from different countries:
“Anyone seriously interested in facts about the effects of minimum wage laws on employment can find such facts in innumerable examples from countries around the world, and in different periods of history. Most modern, industrial countries have minimum wage laws, but some do not, so their unemployment levels can be compared to the unemployment levels in other countries. It was news in 2003 when The Economist magazine reported that Switzerland’s unemployment rate ‘neared a five-year high of 3.9% in February.’ Switzerland had no minimum wage law. The city-state of Singapore has also been without a minimum wage law, and its unemployment rate has been as low as 2.1 percent in 2013. Back in 1991, when Hong Kong was still a British colony, it too had no minimum wage law, and its unemployment rate was under 2 percent. The last American administration without a national minimum wage law was the Coolidge administration in the 1920s. In President Coolidge’s last four years in office, the annual unemployment rate ranged from a high of 4.2 percent to a low of 1.8 percent.”
I don’t know if you realize quite how atrocious this paragraph is. Does Sowell give any criteria for why he chose these particular countries? Has he taken a random sample, or just a few anecdotes? How has he controlled for other factors that might affect unemployment rates? How does he know that unemployment was under 2 percent in Hong Kong in 1991 because of its lack of a minimum wage law, and not for other reasons? (Also, as far as I can tell, his statement about when America was last without a “national minimum wage law” is just flat wrong. Minimum wages were introduced under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. After Coolidge left office and Hoover took over, the Great Depression happened, and unemployment rose to about 25 percent, before minimum wages were introduced.1 )
Sowell does give one more example to substantiate his claims about minimum wages. He says that the increase in unemployment for Black teenagers between 1950 and 1970 was clearly the result of the introduction of minimum wage laws, and that we know this because we have eliminated other possible explanations:
“The usual explanations of high unemployment among black teenagers—inexperience, lack of skills, racism—cannot explain their rising unemployment, since all these things were worse during the earlier period when black teenage unemployment was much lower…It was only after a series of minimum wage escalations began that black male teenage unemployment not only skyrocketed, but became more than double the unemployment rates among white male teenagers. (Basic Economics, 159) “
Now, I don’t know much about Black teenage unemployment between 1950 and 1970, but I know how to do basic research, and it didn’t take me long to discover that Sowell had, once again, simply excluded evidence and scholarship that didn’t fit with his conclusions. For instance, a 1991 National Bureau of Economic Research paper (uncited by Sowell) provides evidence that much of the decline in Black teenage labor force participation occurred because (1) agriculture in the South was becoming mechanized, eliminating jobs that Black teens would have had and (2) “each successive generation of Southern Black males was more likely to be in school between the ages of 16 and 19 than out of school and in the labor force.” “The minimum wage,” the authors say, “cannot possibly explain the pre-1930 decline in [labor force] participation because minimum wage legislation was enacted in 1938.” When we look beyond 1950 to 1970, we see other facts that call into question the simple narrative. I don’t cite this to resolve the question of what caused Black teenage labor force participation to decline during a certain historical period (like I said, I’m not an expert, and minimum wages could well have had an effect during the years Sowell cites), but rather to show that Sowell is simply choosing to ignore any evidence that contradicts his theory.
Let us turn to other issues. This dishonesty, burying all the serious academic work that contradicts conclusions favored by free market fundamentalists, presenting only the evidence that supports those conclusions, and then accusing Intellectuals of ignoring the facts, is characteristic of Sowell’s writing.
This kind of dishonest presentation exists throughout Sowell’s recent Charter Schools and Their Enemies. Sowell’s story is that charter schools are obviously better than traditional public schools, that the “enemies” of charter schools have been hiding this fact, and that these “enemies” are self-interested and do not care about what is best for children. The empirical centerpiece of Sowell’s book is a series of comparisons he offers between performance by New York City charter schools versus New York City public schools. Sowell says that to achieve an accurate comparison, he chose charter schools that are housed within the same complex of buildings as their public school counterparts. He describes his method:
“Selecting which charter schools to examine in detail by some principle, as distinguished from arbitrary cherry-picking, can be done in a number of ways. The way chosen here is to examine those particular charter school networks with multiple schools having classes in the largest number of buildings in New York City where they are housed with one or more traditional public schools whose grade levels coincide. Here the sample chosen for detailed study in Chapter 2 are all charter school networks with students in five or more buildings in New York City that they share with traditional public schools having students at the same grade levels.”
He then gives many charts that look like this:
As you can see, he’s showing here that Achievement First charter schools sharing facilities with public schools tend to have superior results on English tests. I don’t doubt that the data he’s presenting here are accurate.
But think about how appalling this is as social science. When we see results like this, we have to ask ourselves a bunch of important questions about factors that could be driving the difference, so that we know we’re coming to accurate conclusions. For instance, are the two populations of students comparable? Sowell says that the racial demographics between the students in the charter schools and the students in the public schools are similar. But are the parents similar? Or do charter schools attract students whose parents are particularly invested in their success? Does the public school have more students with learning disabilities than the charter school? Charter schools are known for trying to attract top-performing students, and we know that “across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.” Could the effects Sowell observes be a product of selection bias?
Astonishingly, Sowell does not take these problems seriously, even though they are known to make it difficult to study the effectiveness of charter schools.2 Instead, having shown only that test results are different, he moves on to the question of why there is so much hostility to charter schools. (You will not be surprised that the self-interest of teachers’ unions is a big part of his story, though he’s uninterested in how the self-interest of charter operators might be a corrupting influence. An economist who is heavily concerned with the self-serving incentives of teachers should also pay equal attention to the bad incentives of those pushing to privatize schools.)
If you’re going to claim that charter schools are better than public schools, there is evidence you can use to make that claim. (Here, for instance, is a 2016 meta-analysis of existing studies, finding that charter schools appear to slightly outperform public schools in math, though not in reading. The reasons for this are contested.) What you cannot do, if you’re going to claim to be doing social science, is ignore basic questions about research design like “How do you know the students in both groups are comparable?” That’s what you do when you’re an idealogue rather than a serious scholar.
I bet it was your neighbor who put up the frence. 
