First of all, I think one of the most valuable Soul books is not,
you know, there are some sold books that everybody sort of
knows the titles up, but one of the Forgotten Soul books is his
little book from the mid-1980s called civil rights rhetoric or
reality. And if you go to Amazon, you
will actually see that I have a review of that book from many
years ago that I'm very happy with the proud of that book.
What I love about it is that every single, Single page is
smashing some myth. And so for example, people think
well, discrimination causes poverty, or the differences in
income or educational outcomes or whatever.
Between all kinds of groups, not just racial ones are caused are
explainable by discrimination and he just he says that is just
such a easy convenient comic book style argument, but it just
doesn't hold when you hold all the different groups constant.
And you look at people, The same geographical area, you know, you
look at people in the same age range with the same level of
work experience, and on, and on, then all these these, these
variations actually disappear which is very interesting or if
you see some people will say, oh, there must be discrimination
because White phds earn more than black phds.
He says, well let's disaggregate the data and see what are they
have? The phds in because it turns out
that Asian phds, Au turn white phds because they have phds
generally in things like engineering.
Whereas at least half of black phds are in education and we all
know that education is not a highly remunerative field.
So in other words, he would look at the conventional wisdom but
under the microscope of data, he would look at these big
Aggregates and he would say the answer to whether this is true
or not comes from breaking it down and disaggregating it so
things like that. But what I also learned frankly
it was a moral lesson and that is about his courage in And
saying the things he did because that meant academic isolation,
it meant being called names. But honestly what is impressive
about him is that none of that seemed to matter?
Honestly, you would see him on television and he just would be
like a hot knife through butter. He didn't care what he said.
Could you briefly explain the difference between the
constrained and unconstrained worldview?
Is that? Yes, this is a, this is in his
book, a conflict of visions. And the the unconstrained vision
is a way of looking at the world is the because I guess what he
was trying to explain, although I don't think he quite put it
this way is, why is it that people who think the economy can
be Planned and who think, you know, the minimum wage should be
X dollars an hour and who think we should be locked in our
homes. Because of covid, and who, like,
all these sorts of disparate different things, all seem to
reside in the same mind. And people who disagree all had.
It's very rare for people to have one of those opinions and
not every single one of the others.
Now, why should that be? And what he, what he decided was
there are certain there are two primary visions of people.
I have the world. The unconstrained vision is one
in which and I don't mean a character, but if we can think
it, we can create, if we could dream it, it can be made to
happen that there's no sense of the tragic.
Fallen aspect of human nature that we can remake ourselves.
If we need to to create the world that we want, we can use
our, our brains to plan and create an economy of abundance
and so on. And on, whereas the constrained
vision is more pessimistic. Mystic about what can be
accomplished through reason, and through planning, and through
human effort. That in fact, it's actually not
possible to plan an economy for a variety of reasons.
And our temptation is to think that because I plan my life, I
can plan an economy, but these things that these are entirely
different. So he's saying that the
constrained vision is one that understands that human nature is
what it is. And isn't going to be changed.
And so we shouldn't Try to talat Aryan programs to change it in
order to bring about our amazing vision of what the world can be.
Because what instead will wind up doing is creating some
horrific totalitarian Nightmare and not exactly have a wonderful
Society to show for it will break a lot of eggs, but we'll
never get the omelette.