Thomas Sowell

Quotes From

Knowledge and Decisions (1980)

• The merits or demerits of such a change in any specific case are simply bypassed by metaphors which proceed as if “society” is doing this now and ought to do that instead – when in fact one set of decision-making units is operating under one structure of incentives now and the advantages and disadvantages of an alternative decision-making unit and the alternative set of incentives is precisely what needs to be explicitly analyzed, not covered up by metaphors about “society”.#
• One of the peculiarities of the American Revolution was that its leaders pinned their hopes on the organization of decision-making units, the structuring of their incentives, and the counterbalancing of the units against one another, rather than on the more usual (and more exciting) principle of substituting “the good guys” for “the bad guys” – i.e. substituting “the people” for “the oppressors,” the faithful for the heathens, the Jews for the gentiles, the gentiles for the Jews, and other such substitutions based on differences of history, physiognomy, or mannerisms.#
• No expert can say from 100 miles away, and signet unseen, what this year’s grape crop is good, or even that last week’s good grapes are still good this week. By contrast, an expert on the manufacture of steel can specify the exact quality of steel that will be produced by given combinations of iron ore and coal at given temperatures. For these reasons, steel production has been successfully centrally planned and controlled in various countries, whereas agricultural production has had such chronic problems and periodic disasters in centrally planned economic systems that even the most centralized communist governments have had to make major exceptions in agriculture, allowing decentralized decision-making of various sorts.#
• The most basic of all decisions is who shall decide. This is easily lost sight of in discussions that proceed directly to the merits of particular issues, as if they could be judged from a unitary, or God’s eye, viewpoint.#
• The advantages of market institutions over government institutions are not so much in their particular characteristics as institutions but in the fact that people can usually make a better choice out of numerous options than by following a single prescribed process.#
• The logic of transcendent values drives even the humane toward the use of force.#
• It is not merely the enormous amount of data that exceeds the capacity of the human mind. Conceivably, this data might be stored in a computer with sufficient capacity. The real problem is that the knowledge needed is a knowledge of subjective patterns of trade-off that are nowhere articulated, not even to the individual himself. . . . There is no way for such information to be fed into a computer, when no one has such information in the first place.#Quoted in George Selgin, The Theory of Free Banking (1988)
• By definition, the initial insurgents began under a different set of incentives from those which they seek to create. Once they achieve their goal, the new incentive structure tends to attract and select successors with different characteristics, as well as perhaps modifying the characteristics of some of the original insurgents. . . . People who chose to be Christians under the persecution of the Roman Empire were not the same as people who chose to be Christians after Christianity had become the state religion.#

Basic Economics (2004)

• How much of any given natural resource is known to exist depends on how much it costs to know.#Quoted in Jay Richards, Money, Greed, and God (2010)