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Knowledge and Decisions (Paperback)
by Thomas Sowell
| Category:
Decision-making, Social science, Knowledge, Nonfiction |
| Market price: ¥ 278.00
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¥ 238.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Another must-read from Thomas Sowell, this classic shows us clearly what builds or destroys society. |
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Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books
Pub. in: October, 1996
ISBN: 0465037380
Pages: 448
Measurements: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01086
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0465037384
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- Awards & Credential -
One of the seminal works by Thomas Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals. |
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- MSL Picks -
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.
(From quoting Todd Weiner, USA)
Target readers:
Business and government leaders, entrepreneurs, management consultants, academia and students of social science.
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Thomas Sowell has finally written an autobiography, A Personal Odyssey. Dr. Sowell also talks about his life in a recent syndicated column, "Looking back."
There is also a mini-biography at the Townhall, a conservative web site that carries his syndicated column. Another bio is available at the Creators Syndicate web site and yet another bio is available at the Advocates for Self-Goverment site and, finally, a few words about Thomas Sowell are available at the Hoover Institute web page, where he is currently the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow in Public Policy.
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From Publisher
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 Anointed. 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 our very freedom because actual knowledge gets replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision of 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." "In a wholly original manner [Sowell] succeeds in translating abstract and theoretical argument into a highly concrete and realistic discussion of the central problems of contemporary economic policy." --F. A. Hayek "This is a brilliant book. Sowell illuminates how every society operates. In the process he also shows how the performance of our own society can be improved."
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| View all 7 comments |
F. A. Hayek (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-26 00:00>
This is a brilliant book. Sowell illuminates how every society operates. In the process he also shows how the performance of our own society can be improved.
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Jon Jerome (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-27 00:00>
Every serious reader has his own list of the most influential books in his life. This spectacular, monumental volume is second only to "Atlas Shrugged" on mine. "Knowledge and Decisions" has focused my thinking on human social and economic behavior in a way few works before or since have, giving me a clearer outlook and new insight into how societies and economies function. Closely reasoned and meticulously argued, it still finds room for countless small gems of Sowell's ironic wit, making it entertaining as well as enlightening.
The free-market, libertarian conservative viewpoint has found such an eloquent voice in Thomas Sowell that Steve Forbes would do well to choose Sowell (a Forbes columnist) as his running mate in his next stab at the Presidency.
If you like to think, buy this book.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-27 00:00>
Economists almost never write in a way that can be understood by educated persons at large. This is a major exception, so much so that this is perhaps the best book ever written about what was wrong with the general trend of bureaucratically administered public policy in the 20th century. That public policy requires detailed information about people, businesses, and markets, information of a kind that is impossible to obtain in a free society.
Sowell is a discrete Austrian economist without the jargon. He made accessible to all the fundamental insight that a market economy is a self-organizing phenomenon that economizes on the need for articulated knowledge. He did this some years before the Santa Fe Institute got off the ground.
My only objection is that the 1980 edition contained many errors that should have been caught by a proofreader. Here's hoping the 1996 reprint cleaned these up. An outright second edition would be even more welcome, as there is always water flowing under the bridge that Sowell has built.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-11-27 00:00>
This book changed the way I think and the way I view the world. Though ostensibly about political economics, it is essentially an attempt at explaining many if not most systemic social phenomena with "economic" laws. Much of the price-to-knowledge theory is well borne out in today's Information age, before our very eyes.
The weakness is in the book's form: often meandering from topic to topic and then back again, the reader is never quite sure where Sowell's going with an idea, and indeed an idea introduced one place gets hashed out better many pages later. So, a difficult read, but a highly profitable one!
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