Ethnicity, Nationalism And Conflict In And After The Soviet Union, Vol. 15 Book

Every Sowell book I've had the pleasure of reading is a masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. He reminds me of Mozart or Beethoven. A powerful balance between genius and restraint or perhaps discipline. Christopher Nolan seems to have this quality as well.

I sense a lot of passion and enthusiasm from Sowell but it's indirect. Rather than coming through via emotion and persuasion, it's evident in the amount of research carried out and the countless points and counter-points he acknowledges and addresses. I feel he sincerely covers both sides. This is not a book from a particular point-of-view. It's broad and thorough and focuses on facts, not on the author's personal agenda. It brings up common phrases and rhetoric and breaks them down to see if they are true and/or logical. Falsehoods collapse under the immense weight of the innumerable mundane and benign facts that Sowell points out. It infuriates me that so many people take blanket, strong statements and conclusions for granted without questioning them.

I used to find race a boring topic. I never cared about it. I rarely noticed things to do with race or ethnicity. I only found that various people were funny, smart, lazy, rude, stupid, kind and so on in differing amounts. But Sowell follows ethnic/racial groups over space and time and finds patterns. The shocking truth is revealed that groups have tendencies to be better/worse or more/less interested in various activities and skills at given points in time and carry these attributes with them even as they migrate around the world.

Why in the first place do people expect groups to perform equally well in all endeavours? The actual patterns are fascinating. Irish Americans in the early 20th century were more likely to be alcoholic and progressed economically very slowly but they dominated politics. Jews and the Japanese were much faster to develop economically but showed little interest in politics (perhaps because they didn't need it). The Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia *created* a lot of industries and got discriminated against because of their superior passion for hard work and knowledge of running successful businesses. *Despite* racism, they succeeded economically (and helped the countries they moved to) but were punished for it. These are facts and the only agenda Sowell could be accused of having is putting an end to bullshit and showing people the reality of our world (the actual patterns that exist and the actual effects of various policies).

It's a colourful and interesting place and humans have a seemingly infinite capacity for good and for evil. Free markets are what bring cultures together even in the face of differences and hatreds.

This book is a timeless study of humanity that helps one understand the world much more deeply than convenient, unjustified assumptions ever could. The price of this knowledge is that I'm now even more acutely aware of the level of complete bullshit that pollutes our media and general population today. As I've learned about economics (and free markets in particular), I've found how similar it is to Darwin's theory of evolution. They are both deeply misunderstood and attacked illogically as a result. They both predict the rising of efficient systems in the face of many random changes and very non-random success/failure (life/death) processes. They are also incredibly *tame* in their basic concepts.

The Economics and Politics of Race is unbelievably tame in its conclusions and yet very insightful and powerful. Just as Richard Dawkins ends up spending two thirds of his time explaining why common misconceptions are wrong or misleading, so must Thomas Sowell. If only people would stop jumping, or should I say, teleporting to distant unfounded conclusions, brilliant authors like Sowell could spend more time divulging the incredible beauty and reality of our world and less time on weeding out the rubbish that already clutters so many people's visions of our world.