Knowledge and Decisions
KNOWLEDGE
AND
DECISIONS
Thomas Sowell
A Member of The Perseus Books Group
Copyright 1980 by Basic Books, Inc. Preface copyright 1996 by Thomas Sowell. Published by BasicBooks, A Member of The Perseus Books Group All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this hook may he used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address BasicBooks. 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022-5299.
First BasicBooks edition published 1980, reissued 1996. Designed by Vincent Torre The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sowell, Thomas, 1930- Knowlege and decisions. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Decision-making. 2. Reality. 3. Knowlege, Theory of. 4. Civilization, modern. I. Title. FIM 73.S69 301'54 79-7347 ISBN 0-465-03738-3 030201 EB 111098
Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance.
-Walter Lippmann
CONTENTS
ix
XXv
Part ISOCIAL INSTITUTIONSChapter 1: 3Chapter 2: 21Chapter 3: 45Chapter 4: 81Chapter 5: 114Chapter 6: 150Part IITRENDS AND ISSUESChapter 7: 163Chapter 8: 167Chapter 9: 229Chapter 10: 305
PREFACE TO THE
1996 EDITION
As of the time when it was first published in 1980, Knowledge and Decisions was by far my most important and most comprehensive book. None of my subsequent writings has surpassed it, though it has been joined by work of comparable scope in A Conflict of Visions in 1987 and Race and Culture in 1994. The re-publication of Knowledge and Decisions now, sixteen years after its initial debut, reflects the continuing importance of the issues raised in it, and offers an opportunity to update some conclusions while re-affirming others.The social vision underlying the analysis in Knowledge and Decisions is the opposite of what I have elsewhere called The Vision of the Anointed. I There the focus was on a set of people and their perception of their role in a world whose problems they saw as caused by the inadequacies of others. Here the focus is not on particular people or their beliefs, but on social processes and the constraints within which those processes operate. The analysis begins with one of the most severe constraints facing human beings in all societies and throughout historyinadequate knowledge for making all the decisions that each individual and every organization nevertheless has to make, in order to perform the tasks that go with living and achieve the goals that go with being human.How a variety of social institutions and processes coordinate innumerable scattered fragments of knowledge, enabling a complex society to function, is the central theme of the first half of Knowledge and Decisions. This approach focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of particular institutions and processes in mobilizing the knowledge needed for making particular kinds of decisions. Families, markets, armies, churches, corporations, and sports teams are just some of the wide spectrum of formal and informal social mechanisms for mobilizing and coordinating the knowledge and experience of many to guide or influence individual decisions by others.Perhaps the most important feature of the first half of Knowledge and Decisions is simply its analysis of decision-making processes and institutions in terms of the characteristics and consequences of those processes themselves-irrespective of their goals. As noted in Chapter 6, this approach rejects the common practice of "characterizing processes by their hoped-for results rather than their actual mechanics." "Profit-making" businesses, "public interest" law firms, and "drug prevention" programs are just some of the many things commonly defined by their hoped-for results, rather than by the characteristics of the decisionmaking processes involved and the incentives created by those processes. Socalled "profit-making" businesses, for example, often fail to make a profit and most of them become extinct within a decade after being founded. In Knowledge and Decisions the owners of such businesses are defined not as profitmakers but as residual claimants to the firm's income-that is, to what is left over after employees, suppliers, and others have been paid. Put this way, it is clear from the outset that what is left over may be positive, negative, or zero. There is no more reason to expect "drug prevention" programs to prevent drug usage or "public interest" law firms to serve the public interest than to expect that most "profit-making" enterprises will in fact make profits. Whether any of these organizations do or do not live tip to their expectations or claims is a question of empirical evidence. Pending the presentation of such evidence, such organizations can be analyzed in terms of what they actually do, not what they hope or claim to achieve. In Germany a 1933 "Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich" gave the chancellor dictatorial powers,2 which in turn allowed Adolf Hitler to start wars that brought unprecedented distress-indeed, devastationto the German people and nation.The point here is not simply that laws, policies, and programs can have counterproductive results. The point is that, when social processes are described in terms of their hoped-for results, this obscures the more fundamental question as to just what they actually do-and circumvents questions as to whether doing such things is likely to lead to the results expected or proclaimed. More specifically, we need to know what incentives and constraints are created by these social processes. Therefore socialism, for example, is defined in this book not in terms of such goals as equality, security, economic planning, or "social justice," but as a system in which property rights in agriculture, commerce, and industry may be assigned and re-assigned only by political authorities, rather than through transactions in the marketplace.To the socialist, of course, government ownership of the means of production is but a means to the various social ends being sought, but such results that are hoped for tell us nothing about the institutional processes set in motion or the incentives inherent in those processes, much less their actual consequences. Indeed, lofty goals have long distracted attention from actual consequences, most notably in many Western intellectuals' determined resistance to acknowledging the devastating consequences of communism in the Soviet Union, which the Communists themselves eventually acknowledged during the era of glasnost under Gorbachev. The lofty goals of communism-always receding before them like the horizon-kept many Soviet sympathizers in the West mesmerized for decades, while more millions were slaughtered under Stalin than in Hitler's death camps.Insurgent movements in general-whether religious, political, or academiclook very different when viewed in terms of their respective goals than they do when viewed in terms of their incentives and constraints. Whether the goal of an insurgency has been to establish the Christian religion in the days of the Roman Empire, to create an Interstate Commerce Commission in nineteenthcentury America or to promote civil rights for minorities in the twentieth century, what a successful insurgency does in institutional or process terms is to change the incentives and constraints facing others, as well as the incentives and constraints facing themselves and their successors. Against this background, it is not surprising that there should be certain patterns common to insurgent movements, whether those movements have been promoting religion, political ideology, minority interests, or innumerable other causes.One of these patterns in the history of many insurgent movements has been a disappointment in the direction that the movement has taken after victory, including claims that the revolution has been "betrayed" and that the later leaders and followers have failed to live up to the high standards set by their predecessors in the insurgency. None of this is surprising when such movements are examined in terms of their processes, including the incentives and constraints at work.First of all, the kinds of people attracted to the original insurgency, under the initial set of incentives and constraints, tend to he very different from the kinds of people who gravitate to it after it has become successful and achieved a major part of its goals. By definition, an insurgent movement forms under a set of incentives and constraints very different from those which it seeks to create. Often the members face a certain amount of hostility, or even persecution, from those around them or from an elite currently benefitting from the status quo. These original insurgents may even face dangers to their careers or to their lives. These are not conditions which tend to attract timid careerists or there opportunists, unless the opportunists foresee a high probability that the insurgency will succeed within a period of time that is relevant to their personal ambitions.After the success of the insurgency, however, radically different incentives and constraints are created by that very success. Many Christians in the Roman Empire, for example, went from being a poor and persecuted minority to being among the powerful agents of a state religion, able to enrich themselves and to persecute others. A similar pattern marked the history of the Communists in Russia many centuries later. On a smaller scale, the life cycle of regulatory agencies in the United States has often been seen to follow a pattern leading to control by very different kinds of people and policies from those behind the movement which led to creation of the agency in the first place.3 Cries of the betrayal of the original ideals of the American civil rights movements have also been widely heard in recent years, along with lamentations about the caliber of the later individual and organizational leadership of that movement.None of this should be surprising. A successful insurgency not only presents different incentives and constraints to its successors, that success itself can winnow out its original supporters in a non-random way. Opportunists within the insurgency are among those most likely to remain after the spoils of success become available, while those most activated by the original ideals that have now been largely achieved may he among those more likely to drift away, either to private life or to other crusades on other issues that remain unresolved in the society. Outside opportunists and careerists are also likely to be attracted in growing numbers over the years. Degeneracy and betrayal are hardly surprising under such circumstances.The point here is not to single out insurgent movements for criticisms that might be equally (or more) applicable to supporters of the status quo. Indeed, much of the current status quo is the result of prior insurgencies. The more general and more important point is to distinguish between (1) examining issues and institutions in terms of their process characteristics versus (2) examining them in terms of their proclaimed goals or ideals.Among the ways in which various decision-making processes differ is in the extent to which they are institutionally capable of making incremental trade-offs, rather than attempting categorical "solutions." Consumers continually make incremental trade-offs when deciding what to buy in supermarkets or in automobile dealerships, but appellate courts may have only a stark choice to make between declaring a statute constitutional or unconstitutional. This is one of the central points explored in the first half of Knowledge and Decisions and remains as relevant today as when the book was written. The importance of incremental trade-offs-whether in economic, social, or personal decisions-is emphasized here, in part because it is so often lost in the shuffle of more emotionally appealing categorical priorities that are its antithesis. The distinction between incremental trade-offs and categorical "solutions" has been highlighted by recent trends in laws, policies, and judicial decisions creating such categorical goals as protecting endangered species, eliminating the last "vestiges" of segregation, creating innumerable "rights," and promoting "safety" of many sorts-all this not explicitly at all costs, but often in practice treating costs as somehow unworthy considerations to be almost always over-ridden.Diminishing returns alone can make categorical decision-making counterproductive in its impact, when the point is reached where trivial amounts of one thing are being gained at the cost of devastating losses of another. But, even aside from diminishing returns, categorical decision-making means that the very hen- efit being sought in one form may be sacrificed in another form. One particular kind of safety, for example, may be achieved by creating vastly greater dangers of another kind, as when pesticides are banned to eliminate their residual dangers in the environment, at the cost of a thousand-fold increase in the incidence of deadly, insect-borne diseases, such as malaria.The second half of Knowledge and Decisions looks at how different kinds of decision-making processes have been evolving and how particular decisions once made in one kind of place are increasingly being made in other kinds of placesin the schools, rather than in the home, in the courts rather than in the marketplace, and so on. More important, the implications of such changes in the locations of decisions are examined, not only in terms of the accuracy and scope of the knowledge conveyed to different decision makers, but also in terms of what it all means for human freedom.The analysis in the first half of this book stands as I wrote it more than fifteen years ago. More examples could be added now, but are not needed. However, the trends discussed in the second half have, of course, continued to evolve and so will have to be updated here. The central theme of the second half of Knowledge and Decisions is contained in two sentences in Chapter 7:Even within democratic nations, the locus of decision making has drifted away from the individual, the family, and voluntary associations of various sorts, and toward government. And within government, it has moved away from elected officials subject to voter feedback, and toward more insulated governmental institutions, such as bureaucracies and the appointed judiciary.In many areas, these trends have clearly continued, but in some especially in the economic area during the 1980s- there was some movement toward reversing such trends. From a global perspective, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and of apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s both represent trends towards greater individual freedom. What history will make of these mixed trends of the past fifteen years is of course a question which only the fixture can answer. What can be done today is to examine these developments in more detail in social, economic, and political terms.
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