Perspective

Thomas Sowell is a well-known libertarian conservative economist and historian. As such, he tends to have emphases in line with these social and political ideologies in his approach to ethnic histories.

Historians and economists on the left tend to emphasize causal forces in ethnic progress that are "external" to these ethnicities. Examples include institutional circumstances, political accommodation, government programs aimed at poverty reduction and discrimination and cultural perceptions of American society at large. Left-wing social scientists often hold that the individual or ethnic group is a product of forces external to it and can be easily controlled, dominated, manipulated and altered by those forces. Ethnic success is due to institutional organization, not personal responsibility, merit, innate differences, or cultural values. As a result, social scientists on the left resist explaining a lack of cultural progress of a minority due to faults of that culture.

Sowell takes a very...