Monday, March 27, 2006

Chief of the Fat Police: Bill Clinton’s new role

On Fat Tuesday, repentant sinner Bill Clinton declared war on cheeseburgers, fried oysters, fudge, and other tools of the devil. Identified by the Associated Press as “a reformed overeater,” Bill, looking quite ghostly when compared with the robust figure he cut in his glory days, warned the National Governors Association that America has “a huge cultural problem and unless we change it our children may grow up to be the first generation with shorter life spans than we had.”

The problem, according to Clinton, is that Americans are serious chowhounds whose love of grub is a major threat not only to themselves, but to the national economy. According to the Associated Press, Clinton noted that if the U.S. could reduce health spending — now 16 percent of GDP — to 11 percent (in line with what other countries spend), the savings would be $700 billion. But it won’t be easy. “No matter what else you say, no matter what different studies show, you’ve got to consume less and burn more,” Clinton said. “To do that you’ve got to change the culture.” The governors, many of whom support anti-fat school programs, responded with thunderous applause.

It is clear to some of us that this drastic turnaround in Clinton’s viewpoint is the result of post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by that ill-advised investigation of his romantic life, capped by impeachment. Back in the day, he preferred a little plumpness: Monica, let us recall, was only a few corpuscles shy of being renamed Lulu. Now he’s become yet another leading American who believes it’s his duty to tell us what we should and should not be eating.

Clinton’s warning was no doubt welcomed by the health authorities, especially in light of a recent study indicating that eating less fat late in life does not lower the risk of cancer and heart disease in women. That $415 million investigation “showed no difference in the rate of breast cancer, colon cancer, and heart disease among those who ate lower-fat diets and those who didn’t,” according to a press account. This wasn’t what researchers were hoping for. “These results do not suggest that people have carte blanche to eat fatty foods without health problems,” snipped Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and co-author of the study. “The results, of course, are somewhat disappointing.”

Yet we should take Clinton’s transformation seriously, especially the part about changing the culture. Whenever an American icon says “change the culture,” it’s time to fix bayonets.

The message Bill and his ilk hope to pound into the public consciousness is that every time we order French fries we do damage not only to ourselves, but to the nation’s economy and our children’s future. This same argument holds that we commit sin against the earth by driving cars and running weed eaters, etc., etc. Each individual act is measured against the common good — and is generally found wanting. Only dangerous sex is exempt from this wide-ranging scowl.

This is a major turnaround. To our ancestors the current state of culinary affairs would represent paradise. To be able to walk into a Kroger and purchase, at very reasonable prices, French wine, Swiss chocolates, cow tongues and filets, éclairs, massive bags of ginger snaps, rivers of honey and thick crème, butter and pretty much whatever else the taste buds crave — that could hardly be imagined.

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THOMAS SOWELL

Though it is sure to cause a bit of teeth-grinding among those who try to accuse me of being a racist, the person I quote most on my blogs is in fact an American black man -- Thomas Sowell. So I thought that the biographical note below might be of interest



Thomas Sowell's excuse for limiting interviews to an hour is that it helps him "avoid stress." But one suspects the real reason is that he has better uses for his time than to humor nettlesome journalists. In any case, it's hard to question the time-management preferences of a man who's published nearly 30 books, while also producing academic articles, long-form magazine essays and a seldom-dull newspaper column for more than two decades. Not bad for an orphan from Jim Crow North Carolina who never finished high school and didn't earn a college degree until he was 28.

Mr. Sowell's unorthodox views on racial matters have made him our foremost "black conservative," but the modifier sells him way short. He is one of the country's leading social commentators--without qualification. And his scholarship is not only voluminous but wide-ranging, covering everything from education and law to political philosophy, migration and the history of ideas. His primary discipline, however, is economics, specifically the history of economic thought, the subject in which he earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1968 under Milton Friedman and George Stigler. It is the subject he taught at Cornell, UCLA, Amherst, Brandeis and elsewhere during an academic career in the 1960s and '70s. And it is the subject of his most recent book, "On Classical Economics," which Yale has just published.

Mr. Sowell, who will turn 76 this year but looks 20 years younger, sat for an interview on a cool, drizzly morning at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, his perch since 1980, and where he is--appropriately--the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow. He describes his latest tome as "partly an old book and partly a new book." It combines four somewhat revised essays on microeconomics, macroeconomics, methodology and social philosophy from his 1974 publication, "Classical Economics Reconsidered," with four new essays, on Mill, Marx, Sismondi and economic history.

Asked why classical economics--and economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Mill and Marx--continues to deserve attention, Mr. Sowell replies that "if classical economics is relevant, than Mill and Marx are relevant. Why is classical economics relevant? I guess it's relevant because there are people who study it, and if they're going to talk about it they ought to know what they're talking about, which is a requirement sometimes overlooked."

Free-market economics, a legacy of the classical school, is thought of as an old conservative doctrine. But Mr. Sowell explains that it was in fact one of the most revolutionary concepts to emerge in the history of ideas. Moreover, "the thinking of the classical economist was not only a radical break from landmark intellectual figures like Plato and Machiavelli but also from mainstream thinking to this day." The notion of a self-equilibrating system--the market economy--meant a reduced role for intellectuals and politicians, he says. "And even today many still haven't accepted that their superior wisdom might be superfluous, if not damaging."

Mr. Sowell may be an unabashed free-market adherent, but he's proud to say that Professor Sowell left his personal views out of the classroom. In his 2000 memoir, "A Personal Odyssey," he relates an episode in which some students approached him after taking his graduate seminar on Marxian theory. They expressed appreciation for the course but added, "We still don't know what your opinion is on Marxism." He took it as an unintended compliment.

"My job was to teach them economics, not teach them what I happen to believe," says Mr. Sowell, who adds that efforts by some today to counterbalance the prevailing liberalism in academia with more right-wing instructors is not only an exercise in futility but a disservice to students. "Even if you succeed in propagandizing the students while they're students, it doesn't tell you much [about how they'll turn out]. I suspect that over half [of the conservatives at the Hoover Institution] were on the left in their 20s. More important, though, let's assume for the sake of argument that, whatever you're propagandizing them with on the left or right, every conclusion you teach them is correct. It's only a matter of time before all those conclusions are obsolete because entirely different issues are going to arise over the lifetimes of these students. And so, if you haven't taught them how to weigh one argument against another, you haven't taught them anything."

This lifelong passion for economics has been much on display in recent years--"On Classical Economics" was preceded by "Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy" (2000) and "Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One" (2003), both of which were written for the general public. And it's worth noting the extent to which Mr. Sowell's background in the dismal science also informs his better-known works on ethnicity, race and culture. Other black conservative scholars have their strengths, to be sure. Shelby Steele writes like a dream and favors an existential approach to racial matters. John McWhorter's prose is as hip as it is provocative.

But Mr. Sowell's forte has always been rigorous analysis and adherence to facts, however stubborn and wherever they lead. And the facts led him on a writing tear in the '70s and '80s. Some titles, like "Race and Economics" (1975), "Markets and Minorities" (1981) and "The Economics and Politics of Race" (1983), betray his technical background. But Mr. Sowell's other influential books of this period--"Black Education: Myths and Tragedies" (1972), "Ethnic America" (1981), "Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?" (1984)--are no less distinguished by the dispassionate empiricism he brings to such emotionally charged topics. In these tomes and elsewhere, Mr. Sowell's research questions the basic assumptions behind popular public policies aimed at minorities.

And in the process, he's made mincemeat of the sloppy methodology and flaccid arguments put forward by mainstream civil right leaders and their liberal sympathizers. He has shown, empirically, that affirmative action does not benefit poor blacks. He has shown, empirically, that political clout is not a prerequisite for ethnic economic advancement. And most importantly, he has exposed the harmful fallacy of using racial and gender discrimination as an all-purpose explanation for statistical group disparities.

Asked why many of these failed ideas, and the black leaders who promote them, don't seem to lose credibility, Mr. Sowell responds that the phenomenon is hardly limited to the realm of race. "You could take it beyond the black leadership," he says. "Has [John Kenneth] Galbraith lost any credibility? I remember 'The New Industrial State'"--the 1967 book in which Mr. Galbraith famously argued that large corporations were immune to marketplace forces--"but since then, Eastern Airlines has gone out of business. The Graflex Corporation has gone out of business. Similarly with all kinds of big businesses. This hasn't made the slightest dent in Galbraith's reputation. We have Paul Ehrlich, who has told us there would be mass starvation in the world in the '80s, and now we find our two biggest problems are obesity and how to get rid of agricultural surpluses." Mr. Sowell's conclusion is a cynical one. "I have a book called 'The Vision of the Anointed,' and there's a chapter in there called 'The Irrelevance of Evidence.'"

The idea to apply economic concepts to racial issues came, says Mr. Sowell, from the late Benjamin Rogge, who taught economics at Wabash College in Indiana. "I was at Cornell, and Ben Rogge came on campus to give a talk called 'The Welfare State Against the Negro.' I happened to be out of town, so when I got back I wrote him a letter that said I heard you gave this talk and that you're going to write a book on the same theme. I said it's really amazing that no one's thought of this before because there's so much material out there. At this point [in the late '60s] I had no thought that I would ever touch it myself."

The two became friends over the years and "it occurred to Ben that he was never going to write that book. And so Ben Rogge took his manuscript and simply handed it to me and said do with it whatever you can. I was flabbergasted. I don't think I ever used anything directly from his manuscript. But the fundamental idea the you could apply economics to racial issues--that was the inspiration."

Similarly, Mr. Sowell says his interest in "international perspectives"--most notably demonstrated in his lengthy trilogy on cultural history published in the 1990s--initially came from reading Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1963 classic study, "Beyond the Melting Pot." "It was really the first book I read about different ethnic groups. There were many different patterns. And more than anything else, each group had its own pattern.

"The left likes to portray a group as sort of a creature of surrounding society. But that's not true. For example, back during the immigrant era, you had neighborhoods on the Lower East Side [of Manhattan] where Jews and Italians arrived at virtually identical times. Lived in the same neighborhoods. Kids sat side by side in the same schools. But totally different outcomes. Now, if you look back at the history of the Jews and the history of the Italians you can see why that would be. In the early 19th century, Russian officials report that even the poorest Jews find some way to get some books in their home, even though they're living in a society where over 90% of the people are illiterate.

"Conversely, in southern Italy, which is where most Italian-Americans originated, when they put in compulsory school-attendance laws, there were riots. There were schoolhouses burning down. So now you take these two kids and sit them side by side in a school. If you believe that environment means the immediate surroundings, they're in the same environment. But if you believe environment includes this cultural pattern that goes back centuries before they were born, then no, they're not in the same environment. They don't come into that school building with the same mindset. And they don't get the same results."

It somehow seems an imposition to press Mr. Sowell on his next project, though he graciously allows that a collection of correspondence, as well as a book on intellectuals, is in the works. As the interview clock winds down, however, he returns briefly to the topic of race. He laments the fact that more public intellectuals aren't applying economic analyses to racial policies, even while he understands the hesitation.

"I think it would be great if someone would sit down and take a sort of systematic textbook approach to it," says Mr. Sowell. "[George Mason University economist] Walter Williams has written a couple of very good books, but unfortunately they were not well promoted. Guys like Gary Becker have other fish to fry, and they're writing for a different audience. Besides Walter and me, I don't know who else out there would write it. And heaven knows it's not the golden pathway to instant popularity."

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Lawyer wants Jesus off school wall: "An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer has asked a West Virginia high school to remove a picture of Jesus Christ that has hung at the school for 40 years. Harold Sklar, who works for the FBI, told the Charleston Daily Mail he first took up the issue 10 years ago. Two weeks ago, he finally decided to go over the heads of Bridgeport school administrators and take the matter to the Harrison County school board. "I have absolute respect for anyone who looks at the painting for comfort," Sklar said. "This is just a pure constitutional issue." The picture has been on display at Bridgeport High School since the school was built, mostly hanging in a hallway outside the principal's office. School officials, who say they have more important things to think about, said they have been getting a lot of calls in support of the picture".

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