Sowell said he was a marxist in his youth. It wasn't until he got his first research job in grad school (after a year in the military) that he realized how corrupt government industries were.
He was in a research program at the Dept of Labor and his job was to research the impact of increasing the minimum wage in Puerto Rico compared to wealth inequality. His colleagues were writing comparable papers about how much better off the workers were, but he noticed that there was a lot more unemployment. When he asked about it, no one would give a straight answer and claimed that it was because hurricane season damages the crops and reduces the number of people needed. Rather than take that at face value, he made an inquiry into the Department of Agriculture for the Puerto Rico records of employment for that particular crop over the past X years. After much stonewalling, he finally got the records and proved definitively that there was a significant drop in that year versus years with comparable crops and comparable hurricanes.
He thought his colleagues would be excited about his research only to find that everyone in his group now hated him. You see, many of these professional academics had made a career out of studying the impacts of minimum wage and Sowell was undermining them by trying to "oversimplify it", i.e. find an answer. He said that's when he realized that no government program could ever be as effective as the private sector and he vowed to pursue research into debunking these government funded conspiracies.
"Thomas Sowell on the Myths of Economic Inequality" - Uncommon Knowledge Podcast (available on spotify and youtube)
Sowell said he was a marxist in his youth. It wasn't until he got his first research job in grad school (after a year in the military) that he realized how corrupt government industries were.
He was in a research program at the Dept of Labor and his job was to research the impact of increasing the minimum wage in Puerto Rico compared to wealth inequality. His colleagues were writing comparable papers about how much better off the workers were, but he noticed that there was a lot more unemployment. When he asked about it, no one would give a straight answer and claimed that it was because hurricane season damages the crops and reduces the number of people needed. Rather than take that at face value, he made an inquiry into the Department of Agriculture for the Puerto Rico records of employment for that particular crop over the past X years. After much stonewalling, he finally got the records and proved definitively that there was a significant drop in that year versus years with comparable crops and comparable hurricanes.
He thought his colleagues would be excited about his research only to find that everyone in his group now hated him. You see, many of these professional academics had made a career out of studying the impacts of minimum wage and Sowell was undermining them by trying to "oversimplify it", i.e. find an answer. He said that's when he realized that no government program could ever be as effective as the private sector and he vowed to pursue research into debunking these government funded conspiracies.
"Thomas Sowell on the Myths of Economic Inequality" - Uncommon Knowledge Podcast (available on spotify and youtube)
Thomas Sowell and Larry Elder red pilled the shit out of me