Quotes from Thomas Sowell

From the flourishing trade center of Zanzibar, whose leading trade items were ivory and African slaves, the Arabs began to conquer parts of coastal East Africa.

The presumption of equal outcomes in the absence of malign actions can lead to incorrect— and disastrous— conclusions in other circumstances.

the selling of curriculum materials of a more general nature is a substantial business in itself. A captive audience of more than 40 million school children is attractive to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons. The susceptibility of educators to such fasionable "innovations" is what opens the floodgates to permit the intrusion of such programs into the public schools. This susceptibility is only partly spontaneous.

Over the centuries, African nations rose and fell, like nations elsewhere around the world, the strong conquering the weak and either subjugating or enslaving those unable to resist.

These were neither the first nor the last times when statistical disparities led people to jump to conclusions about villainy being the cause. False assumptions as to causation are more than intellectual errors, and their consequences go far beyond economic losses.

An estimated one out of every five Africans is a Nigerian.

Abstract people have an immortality which flesh-and-blood people have yet to achieve.

Iron was smelted in what is now Nigeria five centuries before Christ.

People who have already been out in the real world, practicing for years whatever their particular specialty might be, have some basis for determining which things are relevant enough to go into a curriculum to teach those who follow. The idea that students can determine relevance in advance is one of the many counterproductive notions to come out of the 1960s.

In short, statistical disparities are commonplace among human beings. Many historical and cultural reasons underlie the peculiar patterns observed. But the even "representation" of groups chosen as a baseline for measuring discrimination is a myth rather than an established fact. It is significant that those who have assumed that baseline have seldom, if ever, been challenged to produce evidence.

when the monetary value of output per capita in Nigeria is less than 2 percent of that in the United States-and in Tanzania less than 1 percent°~-that clearly cannot all be due to exchange rates.

Britain's historic decision to ban the international slave trade in the early nineteenth century entailed a large and long-run political and military commitment in West Africa, the source of most transatlantic slave shipments.

The Islamic jihads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created new Moslem states in West Africa, which in turn promoted enslavement on a larger scale.7'Altogether, between 1650 and 1850, at least 5 million slaves were shipped from West Africa alone.74

The need for Nigerian clerks and other subordinates to help man the colonial administration required creating a new class of African people with education in the English language, with Westernized concepts, and with experience in Westernized ways of doing things.

Most of the slaves shipped across the Atlantic were purchased, rather than captured, by Europeans.

As world prices fell during the Great Depression, the poll tax imposed on Africans remained the same in money terms, which is to say, it increased in real terms. To ensure the payment of this tax, the colonial official pressured African farmers into growing larger export crops, even at the expense of food. Thus Africans had to depend on government famine relief when local food crops were disappointing.

Moreover, even in the absence of accumulating personal experience, it was difficult to believe that soaring murder statistics reflected simply better record keeping, since it had always been hard to ignore a dead body.

To the Ibos, Western education was a rare opportunity to be seized.

How can this be, when the whole purpose of rent control is to keep rents down? First of all, the purpose of any policy tells you absolutely nothing about what will actually happen under that policy. Too many disastrous laws get passed because those who pass them win political points for their good intentions and nobody bothers to check up later to see what actually happened.

This has often been carried to the point of encouraging lagging groups to proudly cling to their own culture, or even resurrect it in some cases, with little concern that these groups' economic and educational lags might be— at least in part— a result of the cultures they were being encouraged to cling to.

The challenge of determining the net balance of numerous windfall advantages and disadvantages for one individual at one given time is sufficiently daunting. To attempt the same for whole broad-brush categories of people, each in differing stages of their individual life cycles, in a complex and changing society, suggests hubris.

What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, The world has never been a level playing field.

The greatest abuse of all-the slave trade-was ended as a direct result of the political influence of evangelical Christians in Britain, who were connected with missionary work in Africa.

More generally, confidence that an investment of labor and resources could claim its reward-whether at harvest time or when dividends were issued years later-has been crucial to the economic efforts which create national prosperity.