Thomas Sowell is an economist who writes with refreshing depth and breadth of thought. Far from the dull and dry economists who obsessively apply all reality to narrow economic theory, Sowell is a veritable man of ideas. In addition to economic musings, Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, has contributed scholarship such as “Late-Talking Children.” When his son did not speak before the age of four, Sowell researched extensively and created a resource that still aids parents 35 years later.
Some of his comments are relevant to our current situation, which is one dominated by sky-high fantasies with little attention to reality. On the subject of trade-offs, Sowell is pithy and memorable. He has stated, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”
In an interview, Sowell elaborated that there is a faulty premise many people fall into, following the thought of men like Rousseau, believing that man is inherently good and suffering exists only because our institutions are flawed. You see it often: Somehow, as the comfortable, middle-class socialist will tell you, Communism “just hasn’t been implemented well.” If we set up government to help people and put enough money into the schools, our problems would disappear. If the government rolled out a vast apparatus to deal with whatever issues arise in a natural disaster or public health crisis, no one would be unduly burdened.
Sowell explains why this is simply not the case. A more accurate vision of man is that he is “flawed from Day 1,” and however we might try to mitigate one of our failings, we unintentionally cause other problems. Instead of trying to “solve” whatever difficulty, injustice, and strife exist in our lives through bigger systems, Sowell suggests finding the trade-offs that provide the best possible outcome, understanding that no outcome will be perfect.
The danger of assuming that we are capable of solutions is that it prevents us from seeing the world with humor. Instead of understanding the unavoidable challenges of living, we assume that we have not made the sacrifices necessary to fix ourselves and our lives. We have not demanded enough change from the people and institutions around us to feel safe and satisfied in every moment. This kind of thinking can lead to foolhardy sacrifices that are in fact, very imprudent tradeoffs.
In his “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles,” Sowell writes, “A solution is achieved when it is no longer necessary to make a trade-off, even if the development of that solution entailed costs now past. The goal of achieving a solution is in fact what justifies the initial sacrifices or transitional conditions which might otherwise be considered unacceptable.”
By assuming, falsely, that we can achieve a solution to our struggles, we will consider monumental overhauls of our peace and security grasping at what is illusory. In reality, pragmatically protecting what little liberty and prosperity we have will ensure future happiness to the extent that anyone can reasonably expect to be happy in this life. Of course, such pragmatism should be paired with moral and ethical frameworks to guard against unbridled selfishness. But pragmatism is, nonetheless, a necessary ingredient.
Watching grown people fawn over the latest wunderkind of the environmental movement is bewildering. Is it really that we are all so blockheaded and oil-hungry that it never occurred to us to “solve the climate crisis.” Is there really incontrovertible proof that the world is ending in 12 years necessitating the radical sacrifice of freedom and some of the activities that infuse life with meaning and enjoyment, both existential and practical (welcoming children, eating meat, sitting around a fire, driving where you want to go).
It is the refuge of the immature or traumatized mind to believe that there are problems in world only because others are too selfish and shortsighted to solve them. While, yes, each person’s selfishness is a major obstacle to making the world a more beautiful and just place, no one is more likely to surrender all selfishness than we, which, if considered honestly, is practically impossible.
Sowell proposes three questions to disarm the utopian fantasies of solution-pushers: “Compared to what?” “At what cost?” and “What hard evidence do you have?” Few are the impractical fancies of small-minded ideologues that will stand up to all three questions.
There is the veneer of nobility in desiring a perfect world, but the substance of true nobility is more meaningful. Many of us suffer the delusion that “someone somewhere should be doing something” about whatever problems we find in the world, and we fail to notice that this is illogical. Even more remarkable than the fact that other people somewhere out there will not successfully reorder our institutions to make our lives better is the fact that many institutions have protected aspects of our life and liberty successfully. In the mire of our disordered world, we should pay attention to that miraculous success and seek to buttress those small, life-giving miracles. Bloody revolutions—and revolutions have a terrible tendency to turn bloody—will not protect or sustain, only destroy.
As we considered previously with regard to the electrical grid and the plight of morticians:
We can build sophisticated systems and backup plans and oversight committees. The nature of reality is disturbingly dynamic, unpredictable, and prone to disaster. In the face of catastrophe, there will not be a system to save us. In volatility, we discover how little we have to rely on and how much the close-knit, meaningful bonds of family protect us from lone exposure.
There is no escape from our dysfunction, collective and personal, but there are superior means of managing the downsides and maximizing the best of ourselves. There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
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