Knowledge And Decisions [Paperback]

Thomas Sowell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 4, 1996

With a new preface by the author, this reissue of Thomas Sowell’s classic study of decision making updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Annointed, Sowell, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making—a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency, but our very freedom because actual knowledge gets replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision f what ought to be.Knowledge and Decisions, a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics Center Prize, was heralded as a ”landmark work” and selected for this prize ”because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government.” In announcing the award, the center acclaimed Sowell, whose ”contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, [his] work goes deeper and becomes even more significant.”

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Thomas Sowell has taught economics at a number of colleges and universities, including Cornell, University of California Los Angeles, and Amherst. He has published both scholarly and popular articles and books on economics, and is currently a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 422 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (October 4, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465037380
• ISBN-13: 978-0465037384
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #379,773 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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

137 of 143 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Another Must-Read From Thomas Sowell, September 2, 2000

By 

Todd Winer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Knowledge And Decisions (Paperback)

Thomas Sowell has called "Knowledge & Decisions" his "most important and comprehensive work." After completing the book, it nearly impossible to disagree. There are two themes in Mr. Sowell's book. First, knowledge is not a "free good." Knowledge has a cost that isn't universally shared. This truth has important implications. In Mr. Sowell's opinion, capitalism uses knowledge more efficiently and directly than other economic systems. Unfortunately, the link between knowledge and capitalism is also a great political vulnerability. The public can get the economic benefits of capitalism without understanding the economic process. Politicians can exploit economic shortcomings into attacks on the economic process. Every perceived problem - whatever its reality - calls for a political "solution." These political "solutions," however, always give power to those who are removed from the knowledge and feedback mechanisms that undergird real "solutions." Not long ago, for example, the First Lady entrusted herself to radically reform the nation's health care industry. The fact she had no medical training or hadn't even run a drugstore didn't keep her efforts from nearly succeeding. Let us now understand Sowell's second conclusion: When making decisions, the question "who makes the decisions?" is just as important as what gets decided. Most discussion of various issues - from education to health care - overlooks the crucial fact that the most basic decision is WHO makes the decision, under what constraints, and subject to what feedback mechanisms. The great strength of the American Constitution is its system of "checks and balances" and "separation of powers." Here, decisions are made by scores of actors who check each others' ambition. This is different from stating that better decisions will be made when we replace "the bad guys" with "the good guys." When citizens choose to leave power in fewer and fewer hands and then have that power wielded by men who are further and further removed from real life, they are paving the road to despotism. Every citizen wants a better school system for their kids and a better health care system for their parents. But who will wield this power? Washington or local school boards? Who has more expertise on life-or-death matters? Bureaucrats or doctors? Constitutional democracy is a new - and indeed, fragile - form of government. As citizens who lived under Hitler's Germany or Peron's Argentina can attest to, it is easy to give up freedom and hard to get it back. In the second half of Mr. Sowell's book, he documents some disturbing trends in law and politics. These trends run contrary to the two points of Mr. Sowell's book. First published in 1980, there has been a lot of good news since then. Voters are starting to understand the costs of knowledge and the limits of political decision-making. But there is always the temptation to go back to the past. Mr. Sowell's book is an excellent lesson in why we must never travel that path again.

102 of 107 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply a Masterpiece -- and Easy to Read, Too!, December 12, 1999

By 

Gary North (West Fork, AR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Knowledge And Decisions (Paperback)

Sowell, an economist by training, assumes the economist's standard definition of a scarce resource: "At zero price, there is greater demand than supply." Nothing special here. Then he applies this axiomatic principle to knowledge and decisions based on knowledge. The fun begins. Page after page, he uses this intellectual insight to shoot sacred cows. I have never read any book that offers a greater number of fascinating insights, page for page, based on a seemingly noncontroversial axiom. Modern social policy and far too much of modern social theory are based on this premise: "Accurate knowledge is, or at least should be, a free good. When it is not, the civil government should coerce people to provide it." It is a false premise, and it produces costly errors -- another implication of his premise that accurate knowledge is not a free resource. Buy this book. Read it. Twice. Maybe more. (As an author, I will say this: Sowell makes brilliant writing look too easy and the rest of us look too lazy.)

62 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Knowledge can be costly..., June 18, 2001

By 

J. Istre (Indianapolis, Indiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Knowledge And Decisions (Paperback)

This is indeed one of Sowell's tomes. Knowledge costs are different for different people. Some knowledge is extremely costly to acquire in both time and money. Articulation may not be an expression of knowledge, but a talent for using words; however, some incorrectly think that if someone has good articulation, then he must know what he is speaking of.

Sometimes the most important decision to be made is WHO is to make a decision. The further away from the knowledge on which the decision must be based the "decider" is, the less informaiton he has and he is more likely to make an incorrect decision. This explains the folly of most regulation: generally speaking, regulators cannot know what it is they are regulating. Shocking as this might be, but it takes sometimes years - maybe decades - for one person to gain knowledge in some areas of patient treatment, but yet people in the FDA regulate the medical industry anyway with the total impossibility of them ever knowing even a fraction of a percentage of what they are regulating! Of course, this is not unique to the medical field, but applies to all fields - regulators are too far away from the correct KNOWLEDGE to make some types of decisions. This fact of knowledge is inescapable, permanent, and nobody can change it.

Sowell also shows the effects of insurgent movements on social policy and how the movements still exist long after they have outlived their usefulness - beyond their point of diminishing returns. He also shows how the courts really screwed up the judicial system by crusading for social causes instead of interpreting the constitution. In the quest for "solving" problems, many social insurgent groups forget that some problems will never be solved and we just have to live with the necessary trade-offs such situations present to us - some of these groups forget that their "solutions" create other problems that they did not forsee. They forgot that life's problems is weighing trade-offs and some "solutions" replace one problem with another.

The theme, for the most part, is coming to terms with a fact of life: we must decide what trade-offs we want to live with. We cannot perfectly manage all of the information out there, and some of the information is too costly to get for some people. We must balance what we know against the chances of what we do not know. Much is left to chance and that is life.