Review of SOCIAL JUSTICE FALLACIES

Poking holes in the narrative of progress

Tl;dr – Thomas Sowell books never disappoint in terms of a good, data-driven read. However, I found this one repetitive with his prior Discrimination and Disparities, which I think was better. If you’re limited on time, I’d read that one instead of this one.

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The ‘great awokening’ might be ending (according to cool work by Musa al-Gharbi), but the progressive left is still very much committed to its mission of social justice. But what if the social justice movement is based on flawed reasoning and assumptions? The consequences could mean the people intended to be the benefactors of such efforts may end up worse off.

In his recent book, Social Justice Fallacies, prolific author Thomas Sowell lays out why he thinks social justice thinking is fundamentally flawed. Instead, he advances a classical argument that people be treated as individuals, with government largely butting out of such concerns.

Sowell organizes this brief book into sections where he lays out his evidence-based arguments against the fallacies: 1) equal chances fallacies, 2) racial fallacies, 3) chess pieces fallacies, and 4) knowledge fallacies.

There’s a lot of specific issues packed into this book, but overall he makes arguments familiar to those who are regular readers of his: we should focus on equal opportunity, not equal outcomes; racial disparities have far less to do with government actions and brute discrimination than assumed by the left; free markets and capitalism are generally good; and the elites don’t hold a special place of knowing what’s best for disadvantaged groups.

I’m a big fan of Sowell’s books having read several at this point. I think he is truly an original, heterodox thinker. As a liberal, I think he makes very strong arguments and always shows his work. If anything, he makes me more nuanced in my thinking on these issues and pushes me to be more moderate as well.

Now, I say all of this because I found this book just OK because it’s highly duplicative of his earlier book Discrimination and Disparities. Because I read that one first, I found reading this one offered little, if anything new. If you’ve never read Sowell before, this is a great book, and I highly recommend it. But if you’ve read a lot of his work before, you won’t miss out on anything new for Sowell in this book.

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Published: September 2023

Publisher: Basic Books

Format: Audio

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If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:

• Discrimination and Disparities (2019) by Thomas Sowell

• Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell (2021) by Jason L. Riley

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