Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell discusses inequality and how it is part of the human condition. Sowell notes that political and ideological struggles have led to a dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture. What is important is not inequality but human capital; once human capital is unleashed it creates an enormous amount of wealth for people of all classes. In addition there needs to be a sense of humility and gratitude for the generations that have gone before us for the prosperity we have today.
One of the key implicit assumptions of our time is that many economic and social outcomes would tend to be either even or random, if left to the natural course of events, so that the strikingly uneven or non-random outcomes so often observed in the real world imply some adverse human intervention.
This literally describes a pretty strong ideological difference between liberals and conservatives.
53% of American households are going to be in the top 10% at some point in their lives. ... Most Americans do not stay in the same 20% bracket for a decade, and certainly not for life. ... And there's nothing mysterious about that.
A classic example. In the 1970s, Uganda decided that the Gujarati's from India were just too wealthy and controlled too much of the economy, so they sent them out and they wouldn't let them take their wealth with them. And so the Gujarati's arrive mostly in England, destitute. And the Ugandan government has taken over all of this material stuff. Over a period of a relatively few years, the Gujarati's were prosperous in England and the Ugandan economy collapsed. Because they didn't have people who knew what the Gujarati's were doing, and so they didn't have the production. It's also one of the problems with trying to finance things by confiscating the wealth of the wealthy. All you can confiscate is the material wealth. You cannot confiscate human capital.
It's not just the welfare state, it's true among nations. Spain for example, during its heyday in the 16th and 17th century, it received gold and silver literally by the ton, something like 200 tons of gold. And so Spain didn't have to develop its human capital, and it didn't. It bought whatever it wanted because it had all of this. But when all of that money was spent, and when the colonies broke free, Spain had nothing. And so Spain is today one of the poorest countries in western Europe. And that's happening in Saudi Arabia. Here nature has given Saudi Arabia all this wealth. Great. Over half the people in Saudi Arabia are foreigners in the Saudi Arabian workforce. They don't have to develop human capital.
I've never seen a youtube video at 48 frames/sec. Much less an interview.
Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell discusses poverty around the world and in the United States. Poverty in America, he says, compared to the rest of the world, is not severe. Many poor people in poverty in the United States have one or two cars, central heating, and cell phones. The real problem for the poor is the destruction of the family, which Sowell argues dramatically increased once welfare policies were introduced in the 1960s.