I have come to treat Thomas Sowell books as a valuable but finite resource. As the Doctor is now eighty-seven, I fear that there aren't many works forthcoming and, so, I've restricted myself to reading one of his insightful volumes per year. You have likely already determined that this review comes from a biased source as this is the fifth Thomas Sowell book that I've read and I consider him to be our greatest living popular Economist. For the layperson, I would always recommend Dr. Sowell to explain economics. His writing is straightforward but sometimes colorful, and he manages to be both insightful but also digestible compared to a Friedman or a Hayek.
All of that said, my Sowell reading selection for 2017 ended up being "Economic Facts and Fallacies".
Sowell starts the book off strongly, and anyone who had only a tepid interest in economics could gain valuable insight by committing to read only the first chapter. In chapter one, "The Power of Fallacies", Sowell starts by unpacking what he considers to be the broadest economic falsehoods which he will then spend the rest of the book dissecting. These are: the "zero sum" fallacy, the "fallacy of composition", the "post hoc fallacy", the "chess-pieces fallacy" and the "open-ended fallacy".
The book limits its scope, with only six real chapters of content following. These will overlap somewhat with the subject matter of Sowell's grand work: "Basic Economics".
I found the most insightful chapters of "Economic Facts and Fallacies" to be "Male-Female Facts and Fallacies", "Academic Facts and Fallacies", and "Third World Facts and Fallacies". One specific takeaway that will stay with me was the brief discussion on the college accreditation process (in the "Academic" chapter); something that I had never contemplated or understood as a distortion of the price mechanism in college costs. I feel that a lot of eyes are probably glazing over as they read that, but for those of us that crave an understanding of economics it was really quite insightful.
I gave this book four stars not because there was anything wrong with it, but because I would probably recommend several of Sowell's other works ahead of it. I view it in no different a light than I do Quentin Tarantino films in my personal taste. I recommend them all, but it loses meaning if I were to give all of them five starts without working to parse further. Well, in the end, every Thomas Sowell book is either four or five stars, and that is the best that I can divide them.
I'll finish my review with my favorite passage from the book, found in its closing pages and deeply insightful:
"Perhaps most dangerous of all is the practice of not subjecting fashionable beliefs to the test of facts, but instead accepting or rejecting beliefs according to how well they fit some pre-existing vision of the world."
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