Thomas Sowell

Explains how we got into the current economic disaster that developed out of the economics and politics of the housing boom and bust. The "creative" financing of home mortgages and "creative" marketing of financial securities based on these mortgages to countries around the world, are part of the story of how a financial house of cards was built up--and then collapsed.

In a series of long essays, Black Rednecks and White Liberals presents an in-depth look at many of the long-prevailing assumptions about blacks, about Jews, about Germans, about slavery, and about education. Plainly written, powerfully reasoned, and backed with a startling array of documented facts, Black Rednecks and White Liberals takes on not only the trendy intellectuals of our times but also such historic interpreters of American life as Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted. Black Rednecks and White Liberals deftly challenges dogma and dispels cliches that have long clung to topics involving race, ethnicity and culture.

An eminent authority presents a new perspective on affirmative action in a provocative book that will stir fresh debate about this vitally important issue.

"Two separate studies of children who are exceptionally bright, and at the same time exceptionally late in beginning to speak, provide the background for the dramatic story of these children and their often anguished parents. Although such children have begun to be studied only within the past decade, numerous examples have turned up across the United States and overseas."--BOOK JACKET.

"This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies. Those consequences include the steady and dangerous erosion of fundamental principles of freedom - amounting to a quiet repeal of the American revolution."--BOOK JACKET.

In this latest collection of his always provocative essays, Thomas Sowell once again demonstrates why he is one of the most thoughtful, readable, and controversial thinkers of our time. With his usual unrelenting candor, Sowell cuts through the stereotypes, popular mythology, and "mush" surrounding the critical issues facing our nation today. Combining reason and common sense with actual historical and statistical evidence, he challenges the assumptions of those cultural and political elites he calls "the anointed" - those who are "presuming or pretending to know answers that could be applied through government programs" - and offers a hard-hitting perspective that is uniquely his own.

This book is the culmination of 15 years of research and travels that have taken the author completely around the world twice, as well as on other travels in the Mediterranean, the Baltic and around the Pacific rim. Its purpose has been to try to understand the role of cultural differences within nations and between nations, today and over centuries of history, in shaping the economic and social fates of peoples and of whole civilizations.

Migrations and Cultures shows the persistence of cultural traits in particular racial and ethnic groups and the role these groups' relocations play in redistributing skills, knowledge, and other forms of "human capital" from where they originated to the four corners of the earth. Each ethnic group has carried forth a particular set of skills, attitudes, and lifestyles, whether settling in Russia, Brazil, Australia, or the United States. What are the effects of disseminating these patterns - both for the immigrants and for the host countries, in social as well as economic terms? Migrations and Cultures places the sagas of particular immigrant groups within the larger history of the nations sending and receiving these groups. The book also tells the story of the resentments engendered by the achievements of immigrant groups, even though these achievements have played a major role in the advancement of the human race in general. Whether considering the Germans, Japanese, Italians, Chinese, Indians, or Jews, Thomas Sowell brings context, insight, and reason to an inflamed debate that threatens to dissolve the social fabric of our country.

This critique of failed social policies of the past 30 years sees what has happened not as isolated mistakes, but as the consequence of the tainted vision of the "anointed", leading to crises in education, crime, and family dynamics, and to other social pathologies.

Contains previously published essays.

Our educational establishment -- a vast tax-supported empire existing quasi-independently within American society -- is morally and intellectually bankrupt, charges distinguished economist and social critic Thomas Sowell. And in this top-to-bottom tour of the mismanaged institutions, cynical leadership, and tendentious programs of American education, Sowell exposes the numerous "deceptions and dogmas" that have concealed or sought to justify the steep and very dangerous decline in our educational standards and practices across the board. Among the more serious ills of American education are the technically sophisticated brainwashing techniques now being applied to children and teenagers in so-called "affective education" programs; the special "peace" and "nuclear" education programs that actively promote "politically correct" attitudes; the "values clarification" and sex education curricula that portray parental and religious authority figures as agents of a repressive and unjust social and political orthodoxy; and the racial "mini-establishments" created on college campuses by minority demagogues and complaisant administrators that enshrine a self-serving ideological double standard, thus betraying the real interests of minority students. Sowell's exhaustively researched investigation draws particular attention to the wide array of textbooks and other instructional materials, promoted with astonishing success by a multi-million dollar industry styling itself a "secular humanist" movement, which fosters these ideas -- ideas that are not just anti-American, Sowell maintains, but essentially totalitarian in character. These sinister curricular developments, combined with often cowardly and irresponsible management more concerned about institutional image and ranking than with fiscal integrity or a commitment to educate our youth, will breed disaster unless immediate steps are taken to reform the entire educational system. - Jacket flap.