Thomas sauville (born on June 30th, 1930) is an American economist, sociologist and historian. He is currently a senior researcher at the Hoover Institution. He is the successor and guardian of Chicago School, a firm economic tradition, and may also be the most powerful defender of capitalist free market economy after Hayek and Friedman. He wrote a lot in his life, and his theory and independent intellectual personality became the banner of American academic and social research, even those who disagreed with his academic and theoretical views were impressed. His controversial and rigorous views are particularly precious in the societies where western countries are generally left-leaning, collectivism and political correctness prevail, and become the basis of their self-repair and error correction ability. This article is compiled from the speeches of Jason Riley, a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal magazine and an editorial writer. His latest book, maverick: The Biography of Thomas sauville, was published in May, 20021. As a black man, Mr Riley holds the same view as sauville on the principles of race and social justice. He considers himself a friend of sauville. His early books, please stop helping us! It is a thorough reflection on the welfare and social distribution policy based on race in American society, and holds that racial quotas and social practices based on equal rights have brought greater harm to black society. He advocated a return to the economic and social policy advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King, that is, everyone is equal, based on personality rather than skin color.
I did a lot of research to write a biography of economist Thomas sauville. In this process, I kept seeing sauville's own descriptions of the scholars he admired, and I was often shocked that these descriptions were completely applicable to sauville himself.
For example, george stigler, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, is one of the thesis tutors of sauville of the University of Chicago. After the death of Professor stigler at 199 1, sauville wrote:
In a world full of self-promoting scholars, they create catchwords and make themselves on the side of pop angels. george stigler is the epitome of rare integrity and rare wisdom. He never wavered in the academic camp, never waved a flag for a cause, and never created a cult of personality. He is both a scholar and a teacher-both excellent-and he thinks that's enough. If you want to learn, and most importantly, if you want to learn how to think-how to avoid vague words, vague ideas or pessimism that blinds reality-then stigler is your man.
The following is sauville's description of another Chicago professor, milton friedman:
[He] is one of the few intellectuals with both genius and common sense. He can express his highest analytical level to his fellow economists in academic journals, and at the same time, he can also write popular books ... so that people who know nothing about economics can understand them.
It is hard for me to think of a better way to describe Thomas sauville himself. When I think of his academic research, I think of: the integrity of knowledge, the rigor of analysis, the respect for evidence, the suspicion of fashionable thinking that comes and goes in a hurry, and then the clarity of thinking. One column after another, one book after another, written to the public in plain English.
Education and charter schools
In 2020, at the age of 90, sauville published his 36th book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. I certainly don't want him to write these, but if he does, it's hard to find a book more suitable for his publishing career spanning 60 years. Editor's note: Charter schools are an attempt to reform public education in the United States. Charter schools are still supported by government funds, but they are completely independent in school management and operation.
Sauville's first two books are academic. But his third book, Semi-autobiographical Black Education: Myth and Tragedy, was published in 1972 and was written for the general public. This book originated from a long article he wrote for The New York Times magazine in 1970 about the college admission criteria for black students. It begins by describing his own education-first at the segregated school in North Carolina where he was born, and later at the racially integrated school in Harlem, new york, where he grew up.
For decades, sauville has repeatedly returned to the topic of education. In the preface to The Charter School and Its Enemies, he described a conversation with irving kristol, editor of Public Interest magazine, in the early 1970s. Crystal asked sauville how to create high-quality schools for blacks. Sauville replied that such schools have existed for several generations.
Crystal asked sauville to write articles about these schools. In 1974, public interest magazine published sauville's article about the history of Dunbar Middle School for all-black children in Washington, D.C.. This school not only performed better than the local white schools, but also met or exceeded the national standards many times in the standardized tests in the first half of the 20th century. Sauville wrote that from 1870 to 1955, "most of Dunbar's graduates went to college, although most Americans, whether white or black, didn't." Two years later, in the same publication, he wrote an article about successful black primary and secondary schools all over the country.
In a sense, today's public charter schools are mainly composed of low-income black and Hispanic students, who are the inheritors of the excellent black schools studied by sauville more than 40 years ago. As he pointed out, these charter schools not only do better than traditional public schools with the same population group, but in many cases, the students of charter schools in cities perform better than their peers in the richest and whitest suburban school districts in the country. For example, in new york, the "Success College" system as a charter school (operating 47 schools in new york with 65,438+07,000 students) effectively narrowed the academic achievement gap between black and white students.
Sauville wrote in the book:
The success of these charter schools in education has broken the assertion of genetic determinism, claiming that there is cultural prejudice in the examination, and asserting that racial "integration" is a necessary condition for blacks to achieve educational equality, or that income difference is one of the "fundamental reasons" for educational differences.
Sauville went on to say that the last sentence about poverty, "has been used for decades to exempt traditional public schools from any responsibility for the failure of community education for low-income minorities."
However, at present, the enemies of opposition and excitement to charter schools are not because they don't work, but precisely because they work. Therefore, they pose a threat to the present situation of education. They threaten the current balance of power, which makes the interests of adults in charge of public education higher than the most beneficial interests of students. Bad schools continue to exist with government funding because they still provide good jobs for adults. Whether the children are studying is at best a secondary issue.
As sauville wrote:
Schools exist to educate children, not to provide iron rice bowls for teachers, not to provide billions of dollars in membership fees for teachers' unions, not to provide monopoly for educational bureaucracies, not to provide a guaranteed market for [graduates] of normal colleges, nor to provide a group of captive audiences for ideological indoctrinators.
Unfortunately, opponents of charter schools have made progress in recent years. They limit the number and location of charter schools. Both Bill Clinton and barack obama support charter schools, but the Democratic Party leans sharply to the left on the issue of education, and the Biden administration is even more skeptical about charter schools. All these make sauville's book as timely and important as any book he has ever written.
Racial and social justice
One of the reasons why I want to write this biography is that many academic achievements of sauville are still related to our policy debate today. We are still discussing economic inequality, affirmative action, social justice, critical racial theory, slavery compensation, the effectiveness of the minimum wage law, and the advantages and disadvantages of immigration, all of which are involved in sauville's works. Frankly speaking, I found that so many people today know the names of Ta-Nehisi Coates (black writer, claiming that American society is full of white supremacy), Ibram Kendi (Boston University professor, anti-racist) and Nikole Hannah-Jones (The New York Times reporter, the initiator of 16 19 project), but they don't know Thomas sauville, which makes me. To tell the truth, sauville's academic research dwarfs these people. This is not only the number of his works, but also the scope, depth and rigor of his analysis. He foresaw and refuted many of their arguments decades ago, in some cases, before the people who put forward these arguments today were born.
As far as sauville's popularity is concerned, it mainly benefits from his works on racial disputes. But most of his books are not about race. Even though sauville has never written a word about race, he will stand out as a first-class scholar who studies race.
Sauville said that in his own book, his favorite is Conflict of Vision, in which he tried to explain what drove our ideological controversy about freedom, equality and justice. He traced these different "visions", or views on human nature, back at least two centuries ago, from thinkers such as william godwin, Emmanuel Kant and Jean Jacques Russo to advocates of so-called "social justice" in john rawls and today.
The conflicting views described in his book include binding or tragic views on human nature, as well as unconstrained or utopian views. People who have more restrictive views on the human condition think that human beings have incurable defects. They saw the inherent limitations of human progress. They say that we may want to end war, poverty or racism, but this may not happen. Therefore, our focus should be on establishing systems and procedures to help society deal with problems that we can never eradicate or foresee.
On the other hand, you have an unconstrained or utopian view of human nature, which refuses to accept the view that what human beings can achieve is limited. This is a belief that nothing is impossible and there is no need to weigh it. According to this view, by using appropriate rationality and willpower, human beings can not only manage the problems such as war, poverty, racism or epidemics, but also solve them completely.
According to their accepted views, sauville explained why two well-informed and well-intentioned people reached opposite conclusions on a series of issues, including taxation, rent control, school choice, military expenditure, government power and judicial activism.
When Kant said that "nothing is made of wood bent by human beings", he showed a limited view. When Rousseau said that "people are born free, but there are shackles everywhere", he expressed a kind of unconstrained view. When Oliver Wendell Holmes (186 1- 1865, Justice of the United States Supreme Court) said that his job as a judge was to ensure that the game was played according to the rules, whether he liked the rules or not, it was a constrained view. When earl warren (1953- 1969, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court) said that his job as a judge was to do what he thought was right, regardless of the law, it was an unconstrained view. This is the philosophical framework of sauville's works that explains almost all the themes.
racial conflict
Since 1970s, sauville began to pay attention to racial disputes. He said that he did it out of a sense of responsibility. There are some things that need to be said, and too few people are willing to say it. Sauville's criticism of the direction of the civil rights movement at that time eventually led to his "cancellation". In today's popular language, he became a victim of the cancellation of culture. Black elites especially don't want to deal with him because he opposes affirmative action. They persuade others in the mainstream media not to take his views seriously and don't ask him about his black views on the issues at that time.
Sauville has always believed that the problems faced by blacks today go far beyond what whites did to them in the past. It is not difficult to understand why black activists should pay attention to white racism. This helps them raise funds and remain relevant. It's no mystery that politicians use the same strategy-it helps them win votes. However, sauville thinks that it is not obvious that paying attention to white racism will help the black underclass. You can spend a whole day every day pointing out the moral defects of other people, groups, institutions and the whole society. The question is whether this can help those who need help most.
Today, all kinds of social activists believe that the only real problem facing the black underclass is white racism. A good example of this is the recent concern about the security of black communities. Do racist police exist? Of course there is. Are some policemen abusing their power? Of course there is. But is the poor black community so violent because of the bad police? Can reducing police resources improve this situation? According to the Chicago Sun, there were 492 murders in Chicago in 20 19, of which only three involved the police. So, if the use of lethal force by the police is Chicago's problem, it is obviously a secondary problem. Young black people in Chicago or Baltimore or St. Louis may really worry about getting shot when they leave home every morning, but not by the police.
Last year, in Minneapolis (where Freud was killed by four policemen), a policy proposal was submitted to voters, which would cancel police funding and completely reform police law enforcement. However, this measure was not only rejected, but also strongly opposed by black residents in high crime areas. The black residents of Minneapolis are no different. They are typical. In a Gallup poll published in 2020, 865,438+0% of blacks in the country said they hoped that the police presence in their communities would remain unchanged or increase. Another Gallup poll released a year ago specifically asked black and Hispanic residents in low-income communities about public security. 59% of black and Hispanic respondents said that they want the police to spend more time in their communities. In a public opinion poll after michael brown was shot dead by the police in Ferguson, Missouri on 20 15, most black respondents said that the police treated them fairly, and that they hoped that the police would have more presence in the local community, with a ratio of two to one.
This is not a recent phenomenon. In the Gallup poll of 1993, 82% of black respondents said that the criminal justice system is not strict enough to deal with criminals, 75% of black people want more police to take to the streets, and 68% said that we should build more prisons so that we can be sentenced to longer sentences. Activists and liberal elites claiming to represent low-income ethnic minorities are fighting for funds for the police. But most of them are speaking for themselves. This is a problem that sauville pointed out long ago.
Sauville is often asked how he feels about running counter to so many other black people. He is bound to correct the premise of this problem. "You didn't say I ran counter to most black people," he replied. "You mean I am contrary to most black intellectuals and most black elites. But black intellectuals do not represent most blacks, just as white intellectuals do not represent most whites. "
This is still the case today. For example, most blacks support the voter ID card law and school choice, while most black elites-scholars, NAACP, and "black life is expensive" activists-are firmly opposed to these ideas. On the contrary, most blacks oppose racial preference in college enrollment (that is, lowering the standards of black candidates). As mentioned above, the opposition to funding the police is endorsed by the black elite. Sauville pointed out these differences decades ago, and they will only get bigger and bigger since then. His works on the history of intellectuals have repeatedly emphasized that intellectuals are a special interest group. They have their own self-help agenda and their own priorities, which should be understood as such.
Liberal elites generally control the media and Hollywood. They control the academic world. They are in charge of the foundation that awards intellectual awards and bonuses. Sauville refused to deal with them and soften his position. This made him lose his prestige and reputation. He paid the price, which is one of the reasons why he is not as famous as those people I mentioned earlier. I often tell people that if you think that Ta-Nessie Coates and Nicole Hannah-Jones represent the views of most black people, you need to know more about black people.
Critical racial theory
Sauville is now 9 1 year old. The book he published last year is his 36th book and his 5th book after he was 80 years old. Not too bad for a black orphan from the south of Jim Crowe (referring to a series of apartheid laws in the19th century, mainly in the southern United States). He was born in an extremely poor environment during the Great Depression, and didn't finish high school until he was 28 years old, until he got a university degree (sauville didn't finish high school, joined the Marine Corps during the Korean War, returned to the United States after the war, and after working in Washington for a while, he went to night school at Howard University. Because of his outstanding performance and excellent results in standardized tests, he was able to enter Harvard University. 1958, he got a bachelor's degree in economics with the highest honors, and a master's degree in economics from Columbia University the following year. Since his tutor stigler had decided to transfer to the University of Chicago, he immediately followed his tutor to the University of Chicago. His other doctoral thesis tutor was Professor milton friedman, and he didn't start writing until he was 40 years old. But even beyond this impressive personal experience, sauville is a rare species. He is an honest intellectual. He is a man who has been seeking truth, whether it will make him popular or not. He is always willing to follow facts and evidence, no matter where they point, even if they lead to politically incorrect results in the mainstream view. These qualities are not what make you an outstanding scholar, but they are becoming more and more important in the current academic and mainstream society.
Think about our current debate about criticizing racial theory. These views have surfaced in some minority seminars in universities. Now they are entering our workplace through "diversity training". They are entering our elementary school through the new york Times 16 19 project, which tries to put slavery at the center of the founding of the United States. This is ridiculous. Long before the founding of the United States, slavery had existed in societies all over the world for thousands of years. More African slaves were sent to the Islamic world than to the United States. Today, slavery still exists in Sudan and Nigeria.
What makes America unique is not slavery. But liberation, this is the speed at which we went from slavery to Martin Luther King and then to the black president. The economic and social progress made by African Americans in just a few generations is unparalleled in history.
As sauville pointed out, the argument that the United States became prosperous because of slavery is also groundless. Of course, individual slave owners are prosperous, but this is different from saying that the country benefits. In fact, no matter during or after slavery, the areas with slavery in the country are the poorest areas. Similarly, in Brazil, there are many more slaves imported than in the United States, and the areas where slavery is concentrated are the poorest areas during and after slavery. Let's give another example. Slavery in eastern Europe lasted much longer than in western Europe-but western Europe has always been relatively rich. Millions of African slaves were sent to North Africa and the Middle East, not to the West. If slave labor can produce economic prosperity, why are these areas so poor for a long time? Later, when the Middle East really began to become richer, it was not because of slavery, but because of the discovery of oil.
In another article about Project 16 19, the author wrote: "In most cases, African Americans resist alone." This shocking ignorance only erased the role of Quakers and other organizations in the18th century, the role of abolitionists and the newly established Peace Party in the civil war and reconstruction period, and the role of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People established by whites and blacks in the early 20th century. It also ignores the role of non-blacks in the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, which was promoted by the alliance of whites, Jews, Catholics and others who opposed racial discrimination.
But it is almost irrelevant to oppose the project 16 19 for these reasons. The whole purpose of the plan is to regard slavery as a universal explanation of racial inequality today. The argument is that because of slavery and the existence of Jim Crowe, black people fall behind in their academic performance. Because of slavery and racial discrimination, they fall behind in employment. Because of this terrible history, their income, house ownership and all other aspects are behind. This is part of the political left's constant attempt to blame the current problems of blacks on the past behavior of whites. In the final analysis, this is an attempt to downplay the role of culture and personal responsibility in promoting social inequality. Black people are innocent and white people are evil. White people who oppose this statement are labeled as racists. Black people who refuse this statement are denounced as fools or opportunists.
The truth about slavery is well known among serious historians. But where are these serious historians now? Several people came forward, such as Gordon Wood (historian, professor of Brown University, born in 1933) and James mcpherson (historian, retired professor of Princeton University, born in 1936). But why so little? Why don't the directors of the history departments of major universities counter the nonsense of this 16 19 plan? The top scholars in this country should stand up and criticize such a "theory" without hesitation and fanfare. Why do so many people keep silent? Serious scholars have written countless books about the founding of our country, and none of these books was written by Nicole Hannah Jones. Why are serious historians so afraid to face a reporter who has never written a book or even any academic paper-let alone the history of slavery?
They are so afraid because it is politically incorrect to argue with her. They will be called racists and sexists. This may damage their academic career. This is the kind of intellectual cowardice that we have seen too much. It is they that make sauville's life and work so different: courage. Sauville is not afraid. This kind of thing should be commonplace among scholars and intellectuals, as well as among journalists, but it is obviously not the case now. In his career, sauville always put truth above prestige or political correctness. We need a hundred people like him!