Recommended: The Vision of the Anointed

Thomas Sowell, sometime economics professor at Cornell, Amherst and UCLA, and now a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, writes clear, penetrating, practical, readable books about economics and society. In a earlier post I recommend his 2008 book Economic Facts and Fallacies, which follows his usual line of testing common public beliefs against real data (common public beliefs usually lose!).

His 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (see book list in sidebar for details) is particularly relevant in todays’ world, when the Washington elite have decided to spend trillions of our taxpayer dollars to solve our problems. Sowell’s argument is that the ruling elite, not only of America, but of Western Europe as well, all share a more-or-less common world view, in which it is the task of the “anointed” leaders to identify “crisis” and enact huge and expensive government programs to solve them. From the stimulus plan to the bank bailouts to the auto bailouts to the health bill, that is what we have just seen from this administration. What is remarkable about this world view is that it is highly resistant to real data about results.

Sowell identifies four typical stages: (1) The “crisis”, wisely discerned by the elite even though the masses (that's us) are clueless, (2) the “solution”, a massive government program of some sort, (3) the result – more often than not leading to all sorts of unintended and detrimental effects, and (4) the response, in which the elite explain to the masses why it is that their wise policy really was right even though the results were disastrous.

One thinks immediately of the stimulus plan, which was sold on the promise that unemployment would peak below 8% and then quickly drop, while in fact it has hovered around 10% for months now. Now of course (stage 4) we are being told that “things would have been worse without it”. Or, perhaps the "No Child Left Behind" act, which has done absolutely nothing to lift America from 27th place (almost last) among developed nations in student scores in basic subjects.

Sowell, as is his custom, tests beliefs against real data. For example, many in Washington like to argue that President Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” cost the government billions in missed tax revenues (an argument being revived today as Congress considers extending the Bush tax cuts). As he points out, in fact government receipts rose from $599 billion in Reagan’s first year of office to $909 billion in his last year of office, the highest they had even been. The anointed, of course, are not deterred from their ideological beliefs by inconvenient data.

He also points out that being wrong – even massively wrong - doesn’t seem to affect the credibility of the elites among their own. Take, for example, The Club of Rome (economic growth will grind to a halt around the world in the latter part of the 20th century), or Paul Erlich (The Population bomb – hundreds of millions will starve in the 1970’s and 1980’s), or John Kenneth Galbraith (The New Industrial State – big corporations are immune from the marketplace and will never become insolvent).

All in all, this is an important book to read at a time when Washington insiders are spending trillions of dollars of (largely borrowed) money to “solve” our problems.