Introduction
You live in a world shaped by people who think for a living. These writers, professors, and media figures produce ideas that alter laws, schools, and economies. Yet you often notice a strange paradox. The most brilliant minds frequently champion policies that produce catastrophic real-world failures.
Thomas Sowell investigates this disconnect in Intellectuals and Society. The central problem is that intellectuals wield enormous social and political influence while remaining uniquely immune to the real-world consequences of their erroneous theories.
You will discover how the occupational category of intellectuals differs from people with high IQs or practical experts. The book examines the concentration of knowledge, the tragic versus unconstrained visions of humanity, and the disastrous track record of public intellectuals in law, war, and race relations.
The structure of the book takes you through the mechanics of social visions, economic realities, and historical miscalculations. You will see how abstract notions replace systemic knowledge and why statistical disparities lead to endless crusades.
Consider these questions as you read:
- Why do highly educated people support disastrous social policies?
- How does the intelligentsia maintain influence after repeated failures?
- What distinguishes systemic coordination from central planning?
- Why do legal and economic doctrines shift away from empirical reality?
1. Intellect and Intellectuals
High intellect does not guarantee wisdom or correct conclusions, as brilliant minds often omit vital real-world factors. You might assume that exceptional brainpower prevents catastrophic errors. Yet intellect alone can construct elaborate theories leading to dangerous actions.
Intelligence Versus Intellect
Intelligence combines intellect with judgment, care in selecting explanatory factors, and empirical testing. Intellect divorced from practical realities leads astray.
Karl Marx produced an intellectually masterful work in Capital based on the fundamental misconception that physical labor is the sole source of wealth.
Defining Intellectuals
Intellectuals are defined strictly as an occupational category of people whose work begins and ends with ideas, rather than the personal application of those ideas. You see this distinction in how professions operate.
Unlike engineers who apply science to physical structures or physicians who treat human beings, intellectuals produce ideas carried out by others such as bureaucrats, politicians, or social workers. Brilliance in finance, medicine, or technology does not make someone an intellectual.
Jonas Salk developed a vaccine and Bill Gates created an operating system, but neither is considered an intellectual because their work involved physical implementation.
Verifiability and Accountability
Unlike engineers, financiers, or athletes whose ideas are judged by external and empirical results, intellectuals are often judged by internal peer criteria that can become entirely circular. External criteria provide unavoidable feedback from reality, such as a collapsed building or a bankrupt business. In contrast, academic or theoretical ideas are judged by whether peers find them complex, nuanced, or innovative.
Vince Lombardi was judged strictly by what happened on the football field, whereas deconstructionists are judged by whether other deconstructionists find their ideas interesting or original.
Public intellectuals enjoy a unique immunity from reputational damage, allowing them to make demonstrably wrong and reckless predictions without losing professional standing. Unlike practical professions where failure brings immediate ruin, the principle of unaccountability protects intellectuals.
High intellect does not guarantee wisdom, and intellectuals enjoy a unique immunity from accountability.
Paul Ehrlich predicted in 1968 that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s due to global famines, yet he continued to receive academic grants and popular acclaim.
2. Knowledge and Notions
A fatal misstep of prominent intellectuals is assuming that superior expertise within a narrow specialty confers superior wisdom across all other unrelated subjects. Public intellectuals frequently issue sweeping pronouncements on public policy or foreign affairs based on minimal reading.
Elites substitute abstract theories for the dispersed mundane knowledge of ordinary people.
Bertrand Russell advocated unilateral disarmament for Britain and the disbanding of its armed forces in the 1930s while Hitler was actively re-arming Germany.
Concentration and Dispersion of Knowledge
Elites often mistakenly believe their high per capita special knowledge makes them superior guides for society. They overlook the vastly larger aggregate amount of mundane knowledge scattered among the population.
No single individual or central planning board possesses even a fraction of the total knowledge available in society. Mundane knowledge is dispersed in millions of small fragments among ordinary people and coordinated through systemic processes like free markets.
Economic central planning failed repeatedly because central planners attempted to set millions of prices without possessing the dispersed mundane knowledge held by market participants. In the Soviet Union, central planners had to set 24 million prices, demonstrating the absurdity of top-down economic planning.
Intellectuals frequently dismiss first-hand, mundane experience as mere prejudice or stereotypes, favoring abstract generalities formulated by remote elites. When three Duke lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape in 2006, members of the women's lacrosse team who knew the men personally defended their character. Remote media intellectuals denounced and ridiculed these students.
Experts
Experts are frequently called on not to provide dispassionate analysis, but to supply political cover and justify decisions that have already been made politically. A planning expert was ordered by a politician to revise rail ridership estimates upward and costs downward to secure a transit system. This led to a public scandal over revenue shortfalls.
The Role of Reason
Intellectuals demand that complex institutional and real-world actions justify themselves before the bar of reason without possessing the necessary specialized knowledge. Because no one possesses more than a tiny fraction of total knowledge, this demand allows credentialed ignorance to overrule specialized expertise.
Intellectuals express outrage at the number of shots fired by police officers in dangerous confrontations without ever seeking information on the accuracy of pistols fired under stress. A New York City Police Department study found that at a range of 6 feet, just over half the shots fired missed completely. At a distance of 16 to 25 yards, only 14 percent of police shots hit targets.
3. Economic Systems and Visions
Market economies operate through systemic coordination and incentives rather than volitional villainy.
Because human desires exceed available resources, any economic system must have mechanisms to ration goods and convey scarcity. Renowned thinkers who blame market institutions for maintaining artificial scarcity fail to recognize that scarcity exists independently of economic systems.
Philosopher John Dewey and economist George Bernard Shaw criticized market economies for restricting output and maintaining artificial scarcity for personal profit, without ever demonstrating that alternative institutions produced greater abundance.
Systemic Versus Volitional Causation
Intellectuals frequently misattribute economic outcomes to deliberate individual intentions or villainy, ignoring systemic interactions that operate independently of human volition. While economists for centuries have analyzed markets through systemic interactions, intellectuals often rely on volitional causation. This leads you to view market outcomes as moral melodramas driven by greed or compassion rather than responses to underlying supply, demand, and resource scarcity.
Karl Marx explained that market competition and economic downturns occur wholly independently of the will of the capitalist. He showed that market forces force even a capitalist who wishes otherwise to lower prices or suffer losses.
Zero-Sum Economics
Treating the economy as a zero-sum game ignores the fact that voluntary transactions occur only when both parties expect to benefit. Critics like Harold Laski assume there is a fixed sum to divide between capital and labor, making their interests fundamentally irreconcilable.
In European countries with generous minimum wage laws, inexperienced younger workers often face high unemployment rates of 20 percent or more because they are priced out of entry-level jobs.
Business and Power
The intelligentsia frequently redefines consumer preference for lower prices or better products as corporate power or control over the market. When a large percentage of consumers voluntarily purchase a company's products because they are cheaper or of higher quality, third-party observers label this commercial success as market control.
Smith Corona held over half of the typewriter and word processor market in the United States in 1989. Six years later, Smith Corona filed for bankruptcy as personal computers displaced its products.
4. A Conflict of Visions
Social debates stem from a fundamental clash between the unconstrained vision of the anointed and the constrained tragic vision.
Social debates stem from a fundamental clash between the unconstrained vision of the anointed and the constrained tragic vision.
The Vision of the Anointed
Contemporary intellectuals possess a vision of the anointed, seeing themselves as a mission-driven elite uniquely equipped to solve society's problems caused by defective institutions. Intellectuals believe that oppression, poverty, and war stem from social arrangements rather than inherent human flaws. Because they lack vested economic interests, they view themselves as qualified to redesign institutions and ideas.
John Stuart Mill viewed the most cultivated intellects as guides to a better world. Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared that man is born free but is everywhere in chains.
The Tragic Vision
The tragic vision regards civilization as a fragile structure that requires constant effort and experience to maintain against inherent human limitations and potential chaos. In contrast to seeking grand solutions, the constrained or tragic vision focuses on tolerable imperfections and painful trade-offs. Civilization is seen as a thin crust over a volcano, requiring reliance on systemic processes and traditions rather than untried intellectual theories.
Oliver Wendell Holmes questioned Felix Frankfurter about reform initiatives, asking how he could tell whether lifting society in one place was not pulling it down more in another.
Youth, Age, and Abstract People
Adherents of the vision of the anointed place great hope in the youth due to a belief that knowledge is formally acquired and updated, whereas the tragic vision values the accumulated experience of age. When knowledge is viewed as academic learning, the young hold an advantage because their brain development peaks early and their education is modern. Conversely, the tragic vision holds that consequential wisdom is mundane and distilled from long real-world experience.
William Godwin described children as raw material and white paper oppressed by parental bondage, viewing the young as agents to liberate society from historical prejudices.
Intellectuals frequently analyze society using abstract people and statistical aggregates, ignoring the concrete individual characteristics and behavioral differences found in the real world. Treating people as interchangeable abstract units allows researchers to attribute all outcome disparities solely to external societal arrangements and prejudices, dismissing objective differences in group behaviors, crime rates, or cultural patterns.
Nineteenth-century Irish immigrants experienced severe community social pathologies and outbreaks of cholera upon arriving in American cities, making neighborhood avoidance a matter of concrete safety rather than mere prejudice.
5. Disparities and Arguments
Statistical outcome disparities are universal norms rather than automatic proof of discrimination.
Disparities and Their Causes
The widespread grand social dogma that statistical disparities in outcomes between social groups are presumptive evidence of discrimination lacks empirical support. Courts often assume that any unequal representation of groups in various fields is proof of bias by employers or lenders. History demonstrates that grossly uneven distributions of groups across industries and achievements are a universal and long-standing norm.
In Malaysia during the 1960s, Chinese minority students earned more than 400 engineering degrees, while the Malay majority earned just four. Geographic determinism and cultural fragmentation created profound disparities long before modern institutions took shape. Sub-Saharan Africa and the Western Hemisphere faced severe geographic restrictions that impeded communications, trade, and the use of heavy-duty draft animals like horses and oxen.
Intertemporal Abstractions
Treating historical groups as intertemporal abstractions allows modern intellectuals to manufacture grievances and assign collective guilt to living descendants for past wrongs. By speaking of groups like whites and blacks as permanent entities spanning centuries, commentators treat current generations as the embodiment of historical actors. This framework promotes ongoing internal strife and leads to unjust policies such as territorial irredentism and moral irredentism.
After the Second World War, millions of ethnic Germans living for centuries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans were expelled to Germany, a country many had never laid eyes on. Empirical evidence shows that real human populations have never achieved equality in developed capabilities, skills, and median ages. Residual differences in outcomes are automatically blamed on discrimination without accounting for relevant non-racial variables such as credit scores or work experience.
Asian Americans had higher average credit scores than whites, who in turn had higher scores than blacks, affecting mortgage loan approval rates independently of lender bias.
Arguments Without Arguments
Labeling opposing views as simplistic serves as a rhetorical device used by intellectuals to dismiss counter-evidence without engaging in substantive debate. Princeton economist Orley Ashenfelter predicted wine vintage prices accurately using only growing-season weather statistics, bypassing wine experts who dismissed his statistical method as self-evident silliness.
Intellectuals holding the vision of the anointed frequently attribute moral failings and lack of compassion to their ideological opponents. Those with the tragic vision typically view adversaries as simply mistaken rather than morally compromised. Winston Churchill consistently praised the personal rectitude, sincerity, and good intentions of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, even while condemning his appeasement policies toward Nazi Germany as tragic misjudgments.
6. Patterns of the Anointed
Intellectuals advance ideological crusades through selective framing and unagreed abstract rights.
Trickle-Down Caricatures
6. Patterns of the Anointed
Intellectuals advance ideological crusades through selective framing and unagreed abstract rights.
Trickle-Down Caricatures
Opponents of tax rate cuts invent and attack a nonexistent trickle-down theory rather than engaging with actual economic arguments. Proponents argue that high marginal tax rates drive capital into unproductive tax shelters. Lowering rates creates incentives for productive investments that ultimately increase total output, incomes, and government revenues. Critics dismiss these proposals as tax cuts for the rich designed to benefit those at the top. They ignore empirical evidence and economic mechanisms.
No trace of the trickle-down theory exists in voluminous histories of economic analysis, including J.A. Schumpeter's 1,260-page History of Economic Analysis. Prominent figures and media outlets nevertheless denounce it regularly. In 1921, people making over $100,000 faced a 73 percent tax rate and generated $700 million collected in income taxes. By 1929, the tax rate for that bracket dropped to 24 percent, and over a billion dollars collected in income taxes flowed into public coffers.
The Rhetoric of Rights and Social Justice
Ideological assertions of abstract rights and social responsibilities impose unagreed obligations on third parties without any constitutional, legislative, or contractual foundation. Formal rights derive from explicit agreements, laws, or contracts. Intellectuals frequently assert abstract rights to benefits like a living wage or decent housing. These claims logically create involuntary obligations for others who never consented to provide them.
Captured terrorists have been claimed to possess a right to treatment under the Geneva Convention. This claim applies even though they never agreed to its terms and were not designated as covered by its signers. The pursuit of social justice seeks equality of end results and life chances rather than formal equality of legal processes. This pursuit confuses natural disparities with societal injustices. Believers in the unconstrained vision argue that unequal life outcomes resulting from birth circumstances are injustices requiring systemic rearrangement by surrogate decision-makers. Conversely, those with the tragic vision view formal justice as the attainable ideal. They recognize that human societies lack the omniscience to eliminate inherent natural and cultural disparities.
Peter Sacks argued that colleges perpetuate inequality because the percentage of low-income students earning a bachelor's degree remained stagnant at 6 percent between 1970 and 2002.
Attitudes Versus Principles
The intelligentsia frequently dismiss opponents of their specific policy proposals as defenders of the status quo. They ignore the fact that free-market advocates and classical liberals consistently champion radical structural changes. Labeling critics of progressive policies as defenders of the status quo is a rhetorical device that shuts down rational debate. Figures like Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek all advocated sweeping reforms contrary to existing institutional arrangements.
Adam Smith and Edmund Burke advocated freeing the American colonies instead of fighting them. They also strongly opposed the institution of slavery at a time when it was universally accepted. The work of intellectuals is frequently guided by transient group attitudes and double standards rather than consistent logical principles or empirical evidence. Intellectuals often display selective outrage. They show deep leniency toward certain favored groups or activities while harshly condemning others for identical behaviors. They treat concepts like risk and greed based on emotional moods rather than objective standards.
Intellectuals frequently denounce corporate executives for greed while ignoring the vastly higher incomes of professional athletes or entertainers. They demand the banning of boxing due to health risks while ignoring far more common skiing accidents. Isolating ideas within a sealed ideological bubble protects prevailing orthodoxies from discordant facts. At the same time, it imposes massive historical and social costs. When societies or institutional enclaves cut themselves off from external ideas and dissenting viewpoints, they forfeit technological progress, intellectual agility, and adaptability. This ultimately renders them vulnerable or ineffective.
Imperial China's rulers halted international explorations and made building large ships a capital offense to insulate the country from foreign ideas. This policy reversed its centuries-long technological preeminence over Europe. The largest Chinese treasure ships measured 400 feet long and 160 feet wide, compared to Columbus's Santa Maria at only 85 feet wide. Those massive vessels featured nine staggered masts and twelve square sails of red silk.
7. Filtering Reality
The intelligentsia selectively reports samples and suppresses facts to protect its prevailing narrative.
While intellectuals use compassionate rhetoric regarding the poor and minorities, their behavior shows they invest massive energy into promoting ideological crusades. They invest virtually zero effort into checking the actual, often negative consequences of their policies or examining successes occurring outside their vision. Crusaders for a living wage promote wage controls vigorously. They spend no time reviewing studies on how minimum wage laws create higher and longer unemployment for the least skilled workers.
Crusades of the Anointed
Ideological crusades driven by a preoccupation with self-exaltation often cause catastrophic human costs that are ignored by crusaders unconcerned with real-world harm. When environmental or social campaigns achieve ideological victories, the resulting negative consequences on human lives are dismissed or ignored. Crusaders remain absorbed in the pursuit of feeling morally superior.
Rachel Carson led a successful crusade to ban the insecticide DDT due to its impact on bird reproduction. This ban led to a massive resurgence of lethal malaria that takes millions of human lives in tropical regions. Average malaria cases in Ceylon stood at 40,000 cases annually from 1937 through 1945 before mass DDT use. Cases dropped to under a thousand by 1955 after DDT introduction and reached single digits by 1960.
Selective Samples and Suppressing Facts
The media and intelligentsia filter reality by selectively reporting atypical samples, suppressing discordant data, and demonizing targeted occupations. To preserve their prevailing vision of society, media outlets and publishers routinely highlight rare exceptions as general rules. They censor contrary facts about minority performance, such as Asian Americans, and systematically cast businessmen as villains in fiction and news.
During a 1983 economic recovery when 45 out of 50 states saw falling unemployment, ABC News chose to feature a report solely on one of the five states where joblessness was most severe. Fictional television dramas showed only 37 percent of entrepreneurs playing positive roles in a studied sample. Bad guy businessmen committed 40 percent of murders on prime-time TV. Evening news programs also showed only 6 percent of AIDS sufferers as gay men, compared to 58 percent in real life.
Intellectuals are capable of executing massive filtering and cover-ups of historical atrocities when the truth contradicts their ideological alignment with a political regime. When totalitarian governments commit atrocities that threaten the reputation of favored political systems, prominent intellectuals and journalists suppress facts, vilify whistleblowers, and propagate false denials that persist for decades.
New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty published false dispatches denying the Soviet government-created famine in Ukraine. He dismissed truthful reports by Malcolm Muggeridge as hysterical tirades, helping erase a man-made catastrophe from public awareness. Robert Conquest's study estimated six million people died in the Ukrainian man-made famine over three years. A British diplomat estimated that Walter Duranty privately thought 10 million people died from lack of food in the Soviet Union.
8. Subjective Truth and Verbal Cleansing
Modern intellectuals attempt to undermine the concept of objective empirical truth by declaring all reality to be merely socially constructed.
By asserting that truth is purely subjective, intellectuals dismiss inconvenient empirical facts and validation processes. You see this when elites substitute their own arbitrary peer consensus for objective reality.
When Robert Reich was challenged on factual inaccuracies in his published accounts of videotaped meetings, he defended himself by stating that he claimed no higher truth than his own perceptions.
Fictitious People and Nations
Intellectuals and the media create entirely fictitious personas for public figures to fit their preferred ideological vision. You can observe this disconnect between actual records and public reputations in historical narratives.
Herbert Hoover implemented unprecedented federal interventions and raised top income tax rates to over 60 percent. Yet the intelligentsia cemented his reputation as a do-nothing president who let people suffer. Prior to his tax increase, existing tax rates in top income brackets were 20 to 30 percent. Twenty years elapsed after Hoover left the White House before another Republican president took office.
Similarly, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is portrayed by the media as a bitter recluse. Colleagues and staff describe him instead as exceptionally gregarious and accessible.
Verbal Cleansing
Intellectuals sanitize language through verbal cleansing, systematically stripping away centuries of accumulated experience associated with common terms. This linguistic shift changes public perception and shields favored policies from criticism based on actual past failures.
Activists replaced old descriptive words with cleansed, neutral-sounding terms:
- bums became the homeless;
- swamps became wetlands;
- prostitutes became sex workers.
This verbal virtuosity eliminates negative connotations like unpleasant smells, disease, and danger.
The Localization of Evil
The agenda of comprehensive social change requires intellectuals to localize evil within specific institutions or classes, particularly their own society. Because human shortcomings are universal, sweeping utopian changes require a designated villain to blame for societal ills.
Intellectuals disproportionately focus historical criticism on Western imperialism while ignoring the universal history of conquest and oppression practiced by all human races and civilizations. The Ottoman Empire forcibly removed approximately 200,000 young Christian boys from their families over centuries to serve as elite slave soldiers. This system endured through five centuries of rule in the Balkans. This historical reality is often overshadowed by the lyricism of Third World mythology.
9. Intellectuals and the Law
Judicial activism replaces established legal rules with ad hoc moral notions and surrogate decision-making.
When judges abandon established legal rules to impose their personal conceptions of fairness, compassion, or social justice, they create retroactive laws. You could not have known these rules in advance. This undermines the legal framework and expands litigation.
Judges awarding palimony have retroactively forced the responsibilities of marriage on individuals who deliberately chose to live together without assuming those legal obligations.
Legal philosophers like Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that the life of the law is experience and tradition. Progressive thinkers like Roscoe Pound, Ronald Dworkin, and Woodrow Wilson viewed the law as an instrument to be deliberately shaped by an enlightened caste to fit the spirit of the times. Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt both treated the Constitution as an advisory document. Roosevelt seized a coal mine while telling a general to pay no heed to judicial writs.
Judicial Activism
Judicial activism stretches legal text and constitutional boundaries to achieve preferred social results, nullifying the principle of checks and balances.
By interpreting laws and the Constitution based on the presumed necessities of the times rather than original meaning or statutory text, activist judges arrogate policy-making powers that belong to the legislative branch.
In Wickard v. Filburn, the Supreme Court ruled that a farmer growing wheat solely for his own consumption on his own farm was subject to federal control under the interstate commerce clause. The Court reasoned that home-grown wheat indirectly affected market prices. The farmer grew 12 acres more than the Department of Agriculture permitted.
Judicial Restraint and Original Intent
Judicial restraint focuses on applying the plain, original meaning of written laws as explicit instructions rather than attempting to divine the subjective motivations of legislators. Proponents argue that judges should interpret statutes based on the publicly known meaning of the text at the time of enactment. This avoids the arbitrary expansion of judicial power under the guise of meeting contemporary needs.
The pursuit of results-oriented legal outcomes has led courts to shift the traditional burden of proof from plaintiffs to defendants in specific classes of cases. Anglo-American law historically placed the burden of proof on the prosecution or plaintiff. Results-oriented rulings in antitrust and civil rights allowed a statistical prima facie case of disparate impact to force employers or businesses to prove they did not discriminate.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought a sex discrimination case against Sears based solely on statistics without a single complaining witness. The litigation dragged on for 15 years and cost Sears 20 million dollars before the Seventh Circuit ruled in its favor.
10. The World Wars and Intelligentsia
During peaceful eras, you often see intellectuals view conflicts through an abstract lens. They treat foreign adventures as noble moral crusades and useful tools to instill social cohesion.
Interwar pacifism and elite miscalculations severely weakened democratic nations against totalitarian aggression.
In the mid-1890s, German university professors supported the Kaiser's expensive navy building plans. In the United States, Progressive figures like Herbert Croly, John Dewey, and Theodore Roosevelt strongly supported the Spanish-American War and subsequent imperial interventions in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Woodrow Wilson justified American entry into World War I using moralistic rhetoric against autocratic regimes. He made US loans to Russia conditional on the provisional government continuing a disastrous war against Germany. This condition paved the way for the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet totalitarianism. Czars had executed fewer political prisoners in 92 years than the Soviets executed in a single year.
Intellectuals Between the World Wars
The unprecedented devastation of the First World War drove the Western intelligentsia into an uncritical, widespread pacifism. Intellectuals treated war itself, rather than aggressive foreign nations, as the ultimate enemy. They demanded moral disarmament and signed pacts publicly renouncing war.
Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front sold 72,000 copies in France in ten days. It reached 450,000 copies in France by Christmas and 300,000 copies in Britain in six months. A total of 1,400,000 French lives had been lost in the First World War. British university students took the Oxford pledge not to fight for their country under any circumstances.
Responses to International Crises
Democratic political leaders bowed to pacifist public opinion fostered by the intelligentsia. They hid clear evidence of foreign rearmament to avoid losing elections.
British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin candidly admitted in the House of Commons that he did not warn the public about German rearmament in 1933 because a pacifist democracy would not have rallied to the call. Winston Churchill charged the British government with one-sided disarmament in 1936.
Western inaction during early aggressive moves convinced dictatorships that democracies lacked the will to fight. Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 was a massive military risk because French forces vastly outnumbered the German army. Interpreter Paul Schmidt heard Hitler admit that the 48 hours after marching into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking of his life. Inadequate German resources would have forced a humiliating withdrawal if France had intervened.
11. Race, Intelligence, and Disparities
During the Progressive era in early twentieth-century America, prominent intellectuals and scientists widely attributed group differences in crime, disease, and test scores to innate heredity rather than environment. Leading academics and public figures used early mental testing data and pseudoscientific theories to argue that certain racial and ethnic groups were incapable of mastering abstractions or performing on par with whites. These beliefs were used to drive political agendas such as immigration restriction and eugenics.
Group disparities stem from geographic and historical factors rather than innate biological inferiority or modern racism.
Carl Brigham, creator of the SAT, used Army mental test results to argue against Jewish intelligence, while H.H. Goddard and L.M. Terman claimed that certain minorities and immigrants could not master abstractions. There were 376 college courses devoted to eugenics as late as 1928. In Sweden, programs supported by Gunnar Myrdal resulted in 60,000 people sterilized from 1941 through 1975. A 1911 Dillingham commission report showed that 30 percent of native-born white children were denied elementary promotion compared to 61 percent of black children and 67 percent of Polish Jewish children. On World War I Army mental tests, 67 percent of English soldiers exceeded national norms, compared to 12 percent of Poles.
Heredity and Environment
While Progressive-era intellectuals blamed heredity for group disparities, late twentieth-century liberals blamed environment and discrimination, yet both groups retained the same interventionist political vision. Despite the complete reversal in intellectual explanations for racial disparities from heredity to environment, the overarching political vision of the anointed elite remained identical. Both groups believed in expanding government powers and using activist judges to reinterpret constitutions for top-down social engineering. Progressive reformers like Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt advocated for increased state intervention, mirroring the later policy preferences of twentieth-century liberals.
The apparent permanence of black American IQ test scores over generations is an artifact of test renorming, masking substantial absolute gains. James R. Flynn showed that average raw scores on IQ tests have risen significantly over time globally. This means current black scores would translate to much higher IQs under historical norms. James R. Flynn's discovery that raw test score increases across generations were concealed because tests are continually renormed to keep the average at 100 demonstrates this effect. If measured by 1947-1948 norms, black Americans would have an average IQ of 104 in 2002, contrasting sharply with the traditional median IQ of 85.
Liberalism and Multiculturalism
Attributing racial disparities automatically to modern racism ignores the fact that adverse conditions were often worse during periods of history when racism was undeniably more severe. While racism is often invoked as a default causal explanation for lower black labor participation and higher unemployment, historical data shows that black labor force participation and employment rates compared to whites were actually more favorable in earlier eras such as 1890 and 1930. A New York Times editorial blamed lingering racism for high black unemployment and low labor force participation, ignoring the historical reality that 1890 was the year black unemployment rates were last lower than those of whites. Furthermore, 1930 marked the final year before federal minimum wage laws when black unemployment was still lower than white unemployment.
Residential segregation in Northern US cities was historically low at the end of the nineteenth century and increased significantly only after mass migrations from the South in the twentieth century. Census data and historical accounts show that urban blacks in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit experienced high levels of residential integration and economic mobility in the 1890s, which deteriorated only after millions of rural Southerners migrated northward. W.E.B. Du Bois documented a growing liberal spirit toward blacks in 1890s Philadelphia. Census data showed that the period of 1890-1910 showed a lower rate of urban residential segregation of blacks nationwide than in later twentieth-century decades.
12. The Influence of Intellectuals
Specialists in technical fields gain fame through tangible creations and breakthroughs. Intellectuals whose products are ideas face strong incentives to become public intellectuals to secure broader public influence and recognition. This drive often yields an inverse relationship between media celebrity and scholarly renown.
A self-contained cognitive elite exercises pervasive societal influence while remaining completely insulated from real-world consequences.
Richard A. Posner studied public intellectuals and found that only 18 out of the 100 intellectuals mentioned most often in the media were among the 100 most cited in scholarly literature.
A Cognitive Elite
The modern shift toward merit-based access to higher education has created a self-contained cognitive elite isolated from the daily realities of the general population. Elite universities selected students strictly by academic and mental abilities rather than wealth. Successful graduates became socially segregated into encapsulated environments, making it difficult for them to grasp mundane real-world experiences.
In 1952, two-thirds of applicants to Harvard were still admitted. By the end of the 1950s, Harvard admissions underwent a dramatic shift where most applicants were rejected. Average SAT scores rose by nearly a hundred points, and public school students outnumbered private school students.
Social Cohesion and Implications
Intellectuals systematically weaken the foundational bonds of a society by replacing organic social ties with imposed categories like class and gender. By continuously framing statistical disparities as moral injustices, you see how intellectuals foster permanent group grievances and paint their own country negatively while romanticizing foreign alternatives. Figures like George Kennan expressed deep reluctance to support national defense until domestic flaws were completely eradicated.
Academic intellectuals enjoy complete institutional protection and unaccountability to the external world under the principle of academic freedom. Professors select their own colleagues and successors and cannot be fired for advocating campus and societal policies that turn out to be economically or educationally disastrous.
Conclusion
Intellectuals wield enormous social and political influence while remaining uniquely immune to the real-world consequences of their erroneous theories. When you evaluate public policy, you must look past noble intentions and examine concrete historical outcomes. The unconstrained vision of the anointed consistently ignores systemic economic realities, the limits of human knowledge, and the necessity of tradeoffs.
To protect your autonomy and navigate social debates effectively, you can apply several practical rules.
- Distinguish between specialized technical expertise and generalized social wisdom, remembering that high intelligence does not guarantee good judgment.
- Examine the systemic incentives and trade-offs of any proposed policy rather than accepting its stated goals at face value.
- Value the dispersed, mundane knowledge of ordinary people over the abstract theories of academic elites.
- Question statistical disparities by investigating underlying geographic, cultural, and historical factors rather than assuming immediate discrimination or institutional failure.
- Reject verbal cleansing and subjective redefinitions of language that obscure objective empirical reality.
- Hold public decision-makers accountable for the actual results of their programs instead of praising their initial intentions.
10 Key Ideas
- High intellect does not guarantee wisdom, and intellectuals enjoy a unique immunity from accountability when their abstract theories fail in the real world.
- Elites substitute abstract theories for the dispersed mundane knowledge of ordinary people and systemic coordination.
- Social debates stem from a fundamental clash between the unconstrained vision of the anointed and the constrained tragic vision of human limitations.
- Treating the economy as a zero-sum game ignores the systemic interactions of voluntary transactions and resource scarcity.
- Statistical outcome disparities are universal norms driven by geographic and historical factors rather than automatic proof of discrimination.
- Intellectuals advance ideological crusades through selective framing, unagreed abstract rights, and verbal cleansing.
- The intelligentsia selectively reports samples, suppresses facts, and promotes subjective truth to protect its prevailing narrative.
- Judicial activism replaces established legal rules with ad hoc moral notions and surrogate decision-making.
- Interwar pacifism and elite miscalculations severely weakened democratic nations against totalitarian aggression.
- A self-contained cognitive elite exercises pervasive societal influence while remaining completely insulated from real-world consequences.