The Economics and Politics of Race [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio Cassette]

Thomas Sowell (Author), Robert Morris (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1997

Using an international framework to analyze group differences, Thomas Sowell conducts a significant study of how much of racial groups' economic fate has been determined by society and how much by internal patterns identified in the same group worldwide. 7 cassettes.

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks (August 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786100729
• ISBN-13: 978-0786100729
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,642,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #95 in Books > Books on Cassette > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > General
  • #100 in Books > Books on Cassette > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Sociology

More About the Author

Thomas Sowell has taught economics at Cornell, UCLA, Amherst and other academic institutions, and his Basic Economics has been translated into six languages. He is currently a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has published in both academic journals in such popular media as the Wall Street Journal, Forbes magazine and Fortune, and writes a syndicated column that appears in newspapers across the country.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cultural relativism under attack, January 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Economics and Politics of Race (Paperback)

The message of Thomas Sowell's "The Economics and Politics of Race" is simple and easy to understand: human cultures are not equal and some of them are better than others, their patterns of values having a more decisive role in the social perfomance of their respective members than any alleged, or even real and appaling, discrimination.

Sowell demonstrates that ethnic groups perform differently, even when they are subjected to a similar hostile social condition, like the chinese, the jews or the blacks in the USA, in the beginning of the 20th century.

The reason? A strong commitment, or not, to such values as hardworking, stable family ties and a firm will of improving their own social fate rather than blaming third ones by that same fate.

Similarly, when the pretense source of damage disappears - for example, in societies where certain ethnic groups are largely the majority and "bias" against them is inexistent -, not only their poor social behavior does not vanish, but, contrarily, worsens in a terrible way...

Concluding, culture really matters!

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Eye opening, October 18, 2001

By 

"kbond007" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Economics and Politics of Race (Paperback)

A wonderfully written comparision of the successes and failures of various races and cultures. Sowell has no problem pointing out how some races have more "human capital" than others and therefore are historically more successful.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Many Unpleasant truths for both Blacks and Whites, October 9, 2008

By 

Herbert L Calhoun "paulocal" (Falls Church, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Economics and Politics of Race (Paperback)

This book is probably the fullest expression of Professor Sowell's economic philosophy of how race impacts American culture at both ends of the class spectrum, and across both sides of the racial divide. One does not have to agree with him to acknowledge that most of what he says carries weight, and although not entirely unencumbered by ideological concerns, his views are always transparent so that a reader is free to examine them and then accept or reject them as he sees fit.

What is most refreshing about them is that Sowell does not try to rationalize or excuse white racism, or even blacks dependence and other self-destructive behaviors. His argument basically is that a free-market economy and a free-enterprise culture will take care of these excesses on either side of the racial divide if allowed to operate in a normal and unfettered way. Given the sorry state of black cultural orthodoxy in which dependence on pseudo-religion, government programs and personal shortsightedness and irresponsibility are as responsible for the inner city social meltdown as is a culture of white racism, it is little wonder that Sowell does not have a strong following among those of his own race.

Despite this, his work (even when it is not entirely right) is farsighted, relatively academic oriented, and sound economically. Also, it does not hurt that Sowell's work relies on the materialistic and secular rather than the religious and spiritual, which arguably has been overly relied upon and stressed in the black American sub-culture.

Key among his assumptions in this book is the idea that racial progress is not a "given," and is not inevitable. It is a thought so simple as to startle one upon first realizing how much truth there is to it. Given the intangible benefits that accrue to whites as a result of racist practices, the idea that they may willingly "give them up" or that the practice may wither away soon is as much "pie-in-the-sky" fantasy as taking a chariot home to heaven is.

Sowell declares that history gives little support to the thesis that time alone will make relationships between the races automatically better. His view is that the process that will eventually cause racism to disappear is that it is economically foolish and counterproductive.

And in this argument, it is not disrespectful to point out that his reliance on economic theory as the "last resort solution" to problems of race, suffers the same inherent defects as that of the Marxist theorists who also think that inevitably economic imperatives alone will cause white and black working classes to unite against the oligarchs that control the means of production into a final conflagration called the "proletarian revolution." Both theories make sense only "out there" in some "economist's idealized parallel universe." It seems clear even to me (a non-economist) that both theorists are patently aware that American racism can be explained very well in economic terms as "intangible side payments" that more than offset even the most serious of economic arguments.

That aside however, the main thrust of Sowell arguments here (which are repeated in most of his other books) is in the main true: Racism in general is an "economic drag" difficult to account for in purely, and in any objective economic terms. As he notes, slavery and racism eventually ruined the South, even before the Civil War did so.

But Sowell's most telling points are reserved for blacks and their attitudes towards their own survival in a racist society. While admitting that slavery permanently crippled the black race, Sowell does not believe that that is the whole story. Compared to other more successful non-whites who have also had to endure slavery, to him American blacks generally have the rules of survival in a racist culture "bass ackward," or turned upside down: It is not "dependence" but more "independence" coupled with "foresightedness towards the future," that is the "telling" difference between those who succeed under the rigors of racism and those who fail.

Whatever else may be said about Mr. Sowell, it cannot be said that he is not "level-headed."

Five stars