Today's Tune: Bob Dylan "Hard Rain" [Full Song] 1975 | Netflix

Bob Dylan’s Glam Hootenanny: Returning to Rolling Thunder

By Jon Pareles
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/arts/music/bob-dylan-rolling-thunder-revue.html?mc=aud_dev&ad_name={{ad.name}}&adset_name={{adset.name}}&campaign_id={{campaign.id}}&ad-keywords=auddevgate&subid1=TAFI&fbclid=IwAR0cCZKRgRBl27DYX5sd_br8qmzHUcqF7fkOvgl3EAJiuitntfMwLOfZagg&dclid=CO7j49P1hOMCFUPJ4wcdYIUBWQ
June 5, 2019

How distant the mid-1970s seem now. They were unkempt, hairy, hedonistic, improvisational, analog, inefficient — anything but neatly calculated and Instagram-ready. Post-psychedelic and pre-AIDS, they were a continuation of the idealistic, natural 1960s, yet they were also an immediate precursor to the polymorphous, synthetic, role-playing disco era. The bitterness of Vietnam and Watergate lingered; hippie utopianism was giving way to a more selfish search for individual satisfaction. Things were still scruffy, but not quite so communal.

The Rolling Thunder Revue, concocted by Bob Dylan, was precisely a manifestation of its era. Starting in Plymouth, Mass., where the colonial Pilgrims landed, it wandered the northeastern United States and Canada from fall into winter of 1975: a brief peregrination. In Dylan’s public career, which is now well into its sixth decade, it stands as his most peculiar tour of all.

Two new projects revisit the Rolling Thunder Revue in extensive detail. “The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings” is a 14-CD, 148-track boxed set of music from the tour’s rehearsals and performances, vastly expanding the two dozen songs released on a 2002 collection, “The Bootleg Series Volume 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue.” And on June 12, Netflix premieres “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese.” It’s a not-quite-documentary that mixes 1975 tour footage (which was shot for the 1978 film “Renaldo and Clara”) and latter-day interviews with Dylan, Joan Baez and other Rolling Thunder participants, along with some fictional characters.

Both the boxed set and the film sprawl proudly and unpredictably, just as the Revue itself did. And both projects traffic in revelation and put-on, sometimes simultaneously. Onstage in 1975, introducing a then-new song called “Isis” that traces improbable adventures, Dylan claimed, “This is a true story. Actually, they’re all true.”

The Revue’s initial plan was to play spur-of-the-moment, out-of-the-way bookings — a Mah-jongg parlor, a Native American reservation — and shows at small halls that were announced on short notice, with printed fliers and radio ads: no internet then. (For a second, more conventional tour in 1976, the Revue outgrew that approach; both the boxed set and film stick to the initial Revue.) The concerts themselves rambled through their multi-performer bills, often stretching to three or four hours, taking on local guests at whim.

Someday there ought to be a reissue of a full-length, single-night Rolling Thunder Revue concert recording, opening acts and all. The new box is not that. It collects only Dylan’s own appearances — rehearsals, five professionally recorded shows and a final disc of rarities and outliers, like the piano-pounding “Simple Twist of Fate” recorded at the Mah-jongg Parlor in Falmouth, Mass.

The Revue presented itself as an informal hootenanny, but it was a self-conscious one. With a film crew in tow, the shows were also intended to provide material for the amorphous “Renaldo and Clara,” a film that ran nearly four hours when it was released in 1978 and met with near-universal derision. With a script credited to Dylan and the playwright Sam Shepard, “Renaldo and Clara” jumbled documentary and staged scenes, and it scrambled identities; Dylan is billed as Renaldo while the rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins plays “Bob Dylan.”

Dylan started the Rolling Thunder Revue tour singing in a mask, and for most of it he performed in whiteface, a kind of mask itself. Recalling the Revue in the film decades later, Dylan says, “When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s going to tell the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.” When he says that, he’s not wearing a mask.

Pragmatically speaking, virtually all of the peak moments of the new set were collected on the well-chosen 2002 “Live in 1975” set. Yet Dylan completists will likely cherish newly unveiled rehearsal tapes that include a tantalizing, previously unreleased minute-long fragment of a vanished song, a hymn-like tribute to a woman named “Gwenevere.” Dylan scholars can tabulate Dylan’s continual tweaks to lyrics in songs like “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” and, in rehearsals, “She Belongs to Me.”

For those willing to dig in, the new box also makes clear how consistently impassioned Dylan’s Rolling Thunder performances were. The songs were rehearsed but never routine; they changed tempos and attitudes from night to night. Along the way, they grew more dramatic, more forceful and more jocular, all at once.

Bob Dylan, Mick Ronson and Bobby Neuwirth in Toronto, 1975 (Getty Images)

A year before Rolling Thunder, Dylan had played his first full tour since 1966, reuniting with the Band for a triumphant sequel to the tour that had drawn boos from die-hard folkies when he went electric. By 1974, no one was booing. The Band had established its own indelible catalog of earthy, mysterious Americana, and Dylan had clearly won every bygone battle against folky purism. Their shared tour was a victory lap, but it was also a sure thing, a standard mid-70s tour by major stars: two months playing impersonal arenas in major markets. Rolling Thunder would be something else — a deliberate glance back for an experiment going forward.

As early as 1964, with “My Back Pages,” Dylan explicitly repudiated the topical protest songs he wrote during his folk-revival ascent. From the mid-1960s onward he had plugged in to the blues, veered into country, made contrarian easy-listening tracks on “Self-Portrait” and hinted at gospel on “New Morning.” After touring with the Band, he recorded one of his unquestioned masterpieces, “Blood on the Tracks,” exploring lost love and perpetual restlessness in skeletal arrangements. But then, with the Rolling Thunder Revue, he decided to reconnect with what he had left behind.

He gathered Greenwich Village folk revival and Beat Generation figures who had been his early 1960s mentors and peers: Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Bob Neuwirth and the poet Allen Ginsberg, who appears in the film as a philosophical sage. The film catches a prelude to the tour with Dylan and Baez singing at Gerdes Folk City in Greenwich Village, where Dylan had made his reputation back in 1961. But it was 1975; also shown performing there was Patti Smith.

It turned out Dylan wasn’t done with topical protest songs, either. He had an angry new one, “Hurricane,” which decried the triple murder conviction of the boxer Rubin (Hurricane) Carter as a racist injustice; Carter was eventually freed in 1985. The boxed set includes multiple renditions of “Hurricane,” and Dylan gives his all to every one. (One of the film’s comic peaks has Dylan making an unannounced visit to CBS Records executives to discuss releasing “Hurricane” immediately.) Dylan’s set list for the Revue also revived a topical song from the 1960s: “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” another furious reflection on race, class and murder.

In late 1975, Dylan had already recorded — but not yet released — “Desire,” his album featuring songwriting collaborations with the theater director Jacques Levy, including “Hurricane” and other taut, picaresque story-songs about love, trust and death, like “Isis” and “Romance in Durango,” that Rolling Thunder audiences would be hearing for the first time. The album also included “Sara,” a desperate, mournful, arguably autobiographical love song to his wife; she filed for divorce in 1977.

The music on “Desire” drew on both Dylan’s mid-1960s folk-rock and the wheezy authority of the Band, crucially topping the arrangements with Scarlet Rivera’s wailing violin solos and countermelodies: teasing from a distance, spiraling in on him, darting away and returning like a hint of temptation. The story goes that Rivera joined the band by pure happenstance: Dylan was driving through downtown Manhattan and spotted her on the street, carrying her violin, and invited her to audition.

Dylan and his musical director, the bassist Rob Stoner, assembled the rest of the Rolling Thunder band, called Guam; some of its members, including T Bone Burnett, would go on to form the Alpha Band. The Revue also took on Roger McGuinn from the Byrds, Mick Ronson from David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars band, the singer Ronee Blakley and, joining up partway through the tour, Joni Mitchell. In group-sing Rolling Thunder concert finales, Mitchell cheekily adds a verse of Canadian geography to “This Land Is Your Land.” (The film also captures a luminous Mitchell playing “Coyote,” from “Hejira,” in Gordon Lightfoot’s home as McGuinn and Dylan strum along.)

The Woody Guthrie finales — and the presence on the bill of Guthrie’s disciple, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott — invoked folk-revival nostalgia. So did a nightly Rolling Thunder segment of Dylan duets with Baez, harmonizing at one microphone and echoing their 1965 British tour together, when they had a romance. “You’re a lovely couple!” an audience member yelled during a Boston Music Hall show in 1975. “Don’t make myths,” Baez retorts. “A couple of what?”

Sharing songs, rolling through small towns and gathering attention by word-of-mouth, the Revue cultivated an old-timey, medicine-show aura that carried over to its staging — though its mix-and-match, cameo-laden lineups were also oddly similar to current hip-hop shows. But in 1975, after Dylan had headlined arenas, the tour was just as much a superstar’s expensive whim. The Revue was also a psychological experiment: What would happen with all these artistic sensibilities in close quarters?

Scorsese’s film touches on some of the tensions. There were ego battles between performers contending to sing alongside Dylan; there was sexual intrigue. There were mini-dramas of access and status; in the film, Baez recalls disguising herself as Dylan, wearing painted-on facial hair and a flower-topped hat like his pulled low, and finding out how people acted around him. Steven Soles, a guitarist in the band, recalls the atmosphere as “like the court of Henry VIII,” including the possibility of getting beheaded.

The film also points up the mixed agendas for performers, chroniclers, hangers-on and of course Dylan himself. He is shown in 1975, sometimes driving the band’s Winnebago down the road and, decades later, reflecting enigmatically on the Revue, detailing some recollections and shrugging off others. His utterances, past and recent, are typically guarded and oblique. Observers at the time compared Dylan’s whiteface and certain plot points in “Renaldo and Clara” to the 1945 French film “Les Enfants du Paradis,” but in the Scorsese film, Dylan says he got the idea for whiteface from — welcome to the 1970s — Kiss.

No matter what the source was for the greasepaint, the Rolling Thunder Revue was as theatrical as it was organic. Dylan wasn’t the only one wearing makeup; other Revue performers did, too, like folkies testing glam rock. Rivera is shown onstage with a snake painted on her forehead. “Mr. Tambourine Man gives us the opportunity to be whoever we wish to be,” she told the camera in 1975. And although Dylan was playing in smaller rooms than he had a year earlier, his gestures were larger. He had been encouraged, by both Levy and Patti Smith, to be more physically expressive onstage — face, hands, stances — especially in songs where he wasn’t holding a guitar. And even in small rooms, he was playing it big. While the changing song he performed solo each night was an occasion for nuance and suspense, with the band behind him he worked up to a full-throated bellow.

Ever the trickster, Dylan in the Rolling Thunder Revue was many things: folk singer, songwriter, rock star, bandleader, protester, actor, ringmaster, caballero, hero, joker. But from the music on the recordings, and the performances captured onstage, one thing is clear. At the Rolling Thunder Revue, behind the mask of whiteface, his eyes were ablaze.

The Glorious Inefficiency of Local Bookstores

By Dean Abbott
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/10/glorious-inefficiency-bookstores-timeless-dean-abbott.html
October 21, 2018

Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Dean Abbott as he considers the importance of the small, local bookstore to civilization. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher

Our family lives in the kind of town most people only see in fiction: an archetypal, small, Midwestern town of picket fences and blocks of mostly modest bungalows. Homes lining our main streets are, however, far from modest. Along these stand stately nineteenth-century dwellings, lovingly maintained, in spite of the increasing expense of doing so. Our downtown, unlike those of many similar places, isn’t in bad shape, which is to say it still has businesses where customers can buy things, some of which are even useful.

The most improbable of these commercial relics is our bookstore. What should have disappeared long ago as a victim of the twin onslaughts of globalism and e-commerce is still going strong. At least, it was yesterday, when I stopped in to browse. The experience of shopping there, in this little shop devoted to the passing away pastime of reading, is like visiting a shrine. It has more the air of a memorial than of a functioning, money-making operation.

The elegiac atmosphere is part of the appeal. This bookstore, this artifact from a more literate past, serves as a reminder of values that have, in America, faded like pages in a weathered volume. The small, independent bookstore is simply a place out of sync with contemporary culture, chiefly because its very being emphasizes an appreciation of quietude, romance, and the kind of glorious inefficiency upon which the best of human life rests.

Like its cousin the public library, the bookstore once connoted the posture of reflective quiet that digesting a good book requires. No longer. Just try to find some quiet now. Since my childhood in the 1970s, America has moved toward a louder and louder public life. Here are some things that just weren’t there in decades past: television screens in every hospital waiting room, at every gas station pump, bank, and restaurant all inserting their messages at a louder-than-necessary volume into your consciousness; music played at a shattering volume in every shop; kids walking home from school blaring music from a phone in the pocket; some other kid playing video games wherever he goes.

We have lost all sense of aural propriety. Even the big bookstores have fallen prey to this noisy trend with their espresso machines, beeping registers, and background music. There is now no refuge for a man seeking to escape the clatter and listen to his thoughts alone. There is no refuge, except, of course, in our little bookstore downtown. There, a man can sit. Usually, there’s little music here, just the sound of muffled, cheerful conversation and the rustle of pages.

This lack of noise alone makes the bookstore quite unusual. As if to emphasize the point, deep comfortable chairs invite customers to sit and stay. With a book or without, those chairs are an infrastructure that encourages patrons to slow down, sit, and ponder. In a society devoted to novelty, speed, and shallow pursuits of every variety, a place that encourages the slow process of reflection also encourages a kind of rebellion. Sit there long enough, and you’ll find yourself moving away from modern culture whose success requires, above all, a population averse to meditation.

Only through embracing the quiet can we perceive the Romantic nature of the small bookstore. By “Romantic,” I mean not the tropes we associate with passionate and sexual love, but rather, all those things that, like such loves, point to realities beyond themselves. All things Romantic hint at transcendent realities beyond the mundane, and the small bookstore is one of these things.

Thus does the bookstore mirror its stock. Books—good ones, anyway—point beyond themselves. It could not be otherwise because books are only collections of words, and the Word, the quintessential symbol, exists entirely to point beyond itself to some other, more concrete reality.

Our time is hostile to this fact. As Neil Postman pointed out more than thirty years ago, we have surrendered the typographic mind, that way of structuring the intellect to reflect the nature of the written word. Instead, we have become a culture of minds structured like the image, a mode of communication that for all the power and intensity it conveys is self-contained, that does not necessarily, as the Word must, refer to something outside itself. An image-oriented society will always be more shallow than one shaped by the word, for this very reason. Shallow cultures and the people they produce are therefore profoundly anti-Romantic.

Moreover, our time is also hostile to the Romantic because of its thoroughgoing materialism. When the dominant view in a culture is that nothing beyond the physical exists, places and objects whose being naturally directs our attention away from themselves to something beyond it are routinely devalued. Instead, we favor whatever emphasizes the physical, the here and now, the immediate reward. Thus has courtly love given way to the ravages of the sexual revolution, and Saint Francis, who saw the transcendent reflected in every created thing, is replaced with the likes of Harvey Weinstein, who sees but flesh.

As with sainthood, so with the local bookstore. According to this website, about 10,000 bookstores remain. That’s down from around 13,000 in 1997. But, independent bookstores like the one in our town make up less than 2,000 of that number. When all that matters is the physical, commercial transaction, you might as well shop on Amazon. Since there is nothing beyond the act of buying involved in purchasing a book now, you might as well order it online and save yourself the hassle of going outdoors. The act of visiting any local place, whether bookstore or church, to contemplate the transcendent reality it represents, becomes little more than a waste of time.

Amazon is much more efficient. Just tap, click, and wait. Sooner or later, your books will be delivered to you, hassle-free. You don’t even have to talk to anybody. For efficient delivery of the desired good, you can hardly beat Amazon.

But, efficiency is a virtue the modern world has elevated out of all proportion. It is far from the highest good. And the worship of efficiency for its own sake, especially when concern for it eclipses all other concerns, is not a conservative habit. Efficiency is the virtue of the machine, of the bureaucracy, of the soulless functionary who cannot or will not see the meaning hidden behind the sacrifices his god demands.

Shopping at the local bookstore, by contrast, is infinitely less efficient. First, you have to get there. Whether you are fortunate enough to live within walking distance, or whether you have to drive, travel time is still required. Then, you might have to browse, and browsing, as everybody knows, is a waste of life. Then, of course, there’s a good chance you will have to talk to someone. Making conversation is time-consuming with the best of people, but by stepping out into public you run the risk of having to make conversation with someone who displeases you, someone whose conversational skills are less than expert, whose insights are less than dazzling. If the book you want is not on the shelf, you’ll have to order it, and that means waiting, too.

In all these ways, the local bookstore is a less efficient method for acquiring books. But, only a philistine thinks the point of going to a bookstore is to acquire a book. The point of going to the bookstore is to experience its glorious inefficiency, its Romantic signaling of something transcendent, its countercultural cultivation of quietude and dignity.

The preservation of these qualities, the qualities which the remnant of independent local bookstores represent, ought to preoccupy conservatives. It is we, those who most ardently resist the values of our age, who ought to be about the business of actively cultivating all that the small, independent bookstore betokens. Regardless of what they stock, such places serve as an outpost of ideas and attitudes our culture has rejected, an oasis of value in a copious sea of junk.

Unfortunately, we conservatives are too often in the grip of the kind of free-market fanaticism that fetishizes global competition and its twin evil, efficiency. In this, as in so many other things, conservatives have operated in ways counter to our professed goals. Like everything else in modern America, our conservatism is shallow, geared not toward the active cultivation of institutions which, like the neighborhood bookstore, propound in their very being lasting values, but rather geared toward reflexive hatred of Democrats and kneeling football players.

For this reason, movement conservatism has something dire in common with the local, independent bookstore: Both could disappear. Preventing that will require turning conservatives’ attention away from the daily convulsions of the mainstream media and back to deep reflection on the lasting virtues of the true, the good, and the beautiful. We must deepen our hearts and refine our minds if we desire a future that reflects all we hold dear. Such a change can only happen, of course, on the individual level by those willing to sit a while, willing to read and consider, willing to be quiet and inefficient. If you are willing and are wondering how to get started, just ask me. I know a great little bookstore that can help.

This essay in our series of “Timeless Essays” was first published here in November 2017.

Related:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/1/8/local-bookstores

Thomas Sowell Talks About Discrimination, Race, And Social Justice

By David Hogberg
https://thefederalist.com/2019/06/13/an-interview-with-thomas-sowell-on-discrimination-race-and-social-justice/
June 13, 2019

A newly updated version of Thomas Sowell’s book, “Discrimination and Disparities,” came out this spring. The author and famed economist sat down with writer David Hogberg to talk about it and his life’s work.

David Hogberg: I want to read to you something that a currently very popular actress by the name of Brie Larson said at a recent awards show. She stated that, “USC Annenberg’s Inclusiveness Initiative released findings that 67 percent of the top critics reviewing the 100 highest grossing movies in 2017 were white males.  Less than a quarter were white women and less than 10 percent were unrepresented men. Only 2.5 percent of those top critics were women of color. Now you’re probably thinking right now that … doesn’t represent the country I live in. And that’s true. This is a huge disconnect from the U.S. population breakdown of 30 percent white men, 30 percent white women, 20 percent men of color, and 20 percent women of color. So, why does that matter? … If you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will be able to see your movie and review your movie … We need to be conscious of our bias and do our part to make sure that everyone is in the room.”

That’s an example of the main fallacy that you expose in your book, correct?

Thomas Sowell:  It’s one of the many fallacies. My God! We could play the same game with basketball and get even greater skewed representation. Blacks are the vast majority of basketball players in the NBA. That quote is downright silly.

What’s become so frustrating to me over the years is people who assume that if people or events are not evenly represented, then that’s some deviation from the norm. But you can read through reams of what scholars have written and find that nowhere is this norm to be found. You can read people like Gradell and others who have studied internationally various cultural events, and they say again and again that nowhere do they find a distribution of people who is representative of the population of the larger society.

So [people like Larson] are taking something that no one can find and making it a norm, the deviations from which should cause the government to intervene to correct this supposedly rare thing.

Hogberg: What is the “Invincible Fallacy”?

Sowell: It’s what been illustrated by the example you mentioned.  It’s the belief that people would be, in the normal course of events, proportionally represented in various endeavors in the way they are represented in the general population. And if that doesn’t happen it must be some kind of negative factor like either genetics or discrimination that is causing the deviation.

What’s frustrating is that I can come up with 100 examples to the contrary, but the people who believe in the fallacy do not have to produce even one example—not one speck of evidence  from anywhere in the world over thousands of years of human history that what they are asserting is the norm has ever, in fact, happened. 

For example, there is a book called “Why Nations Fail” that asks, why are there such economic disparities among nations? It compared the U.S. to Egypt and asked, why has Egypt failed?  The authors wrote as though what happens in the U.S. is the norm. When, if anything, what happens in Egypt is closer to a norm. In any case, they are assuming that there is this natural tendency among nations that has somehow been thwarted in Egypt and therefore we must do something about that.

Hogberg: If you were to make a list of the causes of disparities with the most important causes being at the top of the list and the least important toward the bottom, where would discrimination be?

Sowell:  I wouldn’t even attempt to rank them since there are so many causes. Just one that I mention in the first chapter of the book is being the first-born child in a family. First-born children tend to have higher IQs than their siblings. They are generally more successful in all sorts of endeavors, they tend to have higher incomes—you can run through the list. There are so many reasons for disparities that to single out one reason a priori is almost madness.

Hogberg: So what impact does discrimination have?

Sowell:  It can have some negative effect. But that is the whole point. When you say A has a certain effect on B, it does not mean that every time you see B you can infer A. One example wholly away from economics or politics is that some children are years late, later than most children, in beginning to talk. Some of them have very severe mental retardation. Because there are many reasons that some children begin talking late does not mean that we can say that mental retardation has nothing to do with it.  But there are other children who talked late and grew up to be intelligent and in some cases geniuses like Albert Einstein.

I didn’t write a book that says discrimination has no effect. There’d be no point in my writing a whole chapter on discrimination in the book if discrimination had no effect.  I did write this book to say that disparities arise from all kinds of factors.

Hogberg: Is it possible for people to face severe discrimination and still prosper?

Sowell:  Yes. The Jews are a classic example. So are the overseas Chinese. Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. You could run through a long list of them.

Hogberg: How important is geography in affecting outcomes?

Sowell: Huge. Just one of the reasons it is important is the enormous difference in the cost of land transport versus water transport. One example I note in the book is that in the days of the Roman Empire you could ship cargo the length of the Mediterranean Sea, more than 2,000 miles, at a cost less than the cost of carting that same cargo 75 miles inland. So, if you lived 75 miles inland, you had nothing like the prosperity that you had on the coast.

And while modern transportation has eased some of that cost, it has by no means eliminated it. So even now, if you are born up in the mountains and someone else is born in the river valley, then the odds are huge against you of ever being as prosperous as that person born near the river.

Hogberg: Before I move on from our discussion of the Invincible Fallacy, I want to briefly talk about genetic determinism. Today, the idea that difference between races is due solely to genetics is pretty much limited to the political fringes in the U.S. But 100 years ago it was huge among the intelligentsia, correct?

Sowell: Absolutely. For example, John Maynard Keynes set up the first eugenics society at Cambridge. And there were many others—Madison Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Harold Laski, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells. In fact, just recently I was looking back over R.H. Tawney’s 1931 book “Equality.” He’s this great egalitarian who says in passing that there is proof of the genetic inferiority of certain peoples.

Hogberg: Now, regarding the practice of discrimination, in your book you note that even if, say, employers are racist and they want to discriminate in their hiring practices, there are often powerful forces that may prevent them from doing so. Can you explain?

Sowell:  It depends on the context. If, for example, it is an industry operating in a labor market in which there is a chronic surplus of qualified job applicants, then it costs the employer nothing to turn away qualified applicants from groups he doesn’t like and instead hire people from groups he does like that are still qualified.

But you seldom have that in a free market because wages adjust over time. You may have temporary surpluses or shortages, but those things tend to self-correct. It is when you have something like the minimum wage law, where you raise the wage rate above where it would be in a free market. Therefore, you increase the amount of workers available to the industry but you reduce the quantity of workers that employers demand because labor is now more expensive. And so you create a chronic surplus of labor.

I go into detail about the minimum wage in the book. And what is fascinating to me is to look back to 1948, when, for all practical purposes, the minimum wage law didn’t apply because inflation had made all wages above what was specified in the law. At that time not only was unemployment as a whole a fraction of what it is today, there was no difference between the unemployment rate of black teenagers and white teenagers. Today that seems almost impossible to believe.

It’s only later on, when politicians started increasing the minimum wage to keep up with inflation and so on, that’s when the total unemployment of teenagers in general became some multiple of what it was in 1948. And that’s when a gap opened up between the unemployment rate of black teenagers and white teenagers.

So, the increase in unemployment among black teenagers was not due to racism, which was at least as great in 1948 as it is today. Rather, the cost of discrimination to the discriminator had changed. You lowered the cost of discrimination. As you would expect, you lower the cost and more is demanded.

Hogberg: There were even costs to discrimination in South Africa, correct?

Sowell: Even in South Africa. That was the classic case. And I use that example in the book instead of getting bogged down in these questions about how much racism exists and so forth. I deliberately picked the country where there is no question at all about the racism of the people in control of the country. Which is to say that the whites had openly proclaimed white supremacy. And yet in South Africa, there were occupations where the black workers outnumbered the white workers even though it was illegal to hire any black workers in that occupation. And this was not due to the white employers having different social views. Rather, the cost to them of not hiring blacks was just too high.

If I may, just the other day I came across an article about how employers setting up new factories in the United States have been deliberately locating those factories away from concentrations of black populations because they find it costlier to hire blacks than to hire whites with the same qualifications. The reason is that the way civil rights laws are interpreted, it is so easy to start a discrimination lawsuit which can go on for years and cost millions of dollars regardless of the outcome.

It makes no sense from a business standpoint to hire a black worker if a white worker can be hired with the same qualifications who can’t start a lawsuit. So what this suggests is that when you give some people special rights, those special rights have special costs, not only to other people but to the people with special rights.

Hogberg: Related to discrimination, you have a section where you note that Harlem, which was predominately white in the early 20th century, was less hostile toward blacks when it came to providing housing that blacks could afford than San Francisco is today. Please explain.

Sowell: The landlords of Harlem weren’t less hostile toward blacks, they were more hostile. The realtors and building owners were assuring the white tenants that they were not going to let any blacks move into Harlem and, thus, there was no reason for their tenants to leave. Well, as it turned out that was a bad prediction. And my point is the reason it failed was the cost to the discriminators.

Now, if every single realtor in Harlem had stood firm on not letting blacks into Harlem, then Harlem might not be black today. But even racists, who prefer one race to another by definition, tend to prefer themselves most of all. So if a landlord has a building where he is having trouble finding tenants at the prices he wants to charge, but he can find blacks willing to pay those prices, then he is not going to pass up that money. Most people would not. And once that process starts, it becomes costlier and costlier for the holdouts among landlords and realtors to continue holding out.

Now, in San Francisco, they have restricted the supply of housing by restricting the building of housing. And there is no cost—people who already own houses or apartment buildings can easily vote to restrict the building of more housing. That causes the price of existing housing to go up. So, by 2005, the number of blacks living in San Francisco was less than half of what it had been in 1970 even though the total population of the city had increased. And that’s because more and more blacks were priced out of the housing market and forced economically to leave San Francisco.

So I doubt there was anywhere near the amount of hostility toward blacks in San Francisco in the late 20th century as there was toward blacks in Harlem one hundred years earlier. But where the cost of discrimination was low, people discriminated and where it was high they had to give it up.

Hogberg: Let’s talk about crime. You write, “Statistics cited in support of claims that the police target blacks usually go no farther than showing that the proportion of black people arrested greatly exceeds the roughly 13 percent of the American population who are black.” Why is that charge misleading?

Sowell:  It’s misleading because what is relevant is not the percentage of people in a population but the percentage of people who are doing a given thing, in this case committing crimes. As long as there has been data collected, the homicide rate among blacks has been some multiple of the homicide rate among whites. Among blacks and whites, murderers tend to kill people among their own race. It’s the one area where segregation still reigns. And so, therefore, the relevant comparisons are the number of black homicide victims as compared to white victims and the number of blacks arrested for homicide as compared to whites.

The media have this thing where they do not mention the race of people who commit a crime but they do mention the race of people who are punished for committing a crime. Well, just from that one inconsistency you can generate a whole range of outrageous rhetoric about how the cops are targeting blacks.

There have been studies, for example, of people who are speeding on the highway, and they show that blacks speed more than whites. Therefore, it is not at all surprising if the cops pull over more black motorists than white motorists. So the whole argument that cops are discriminating against blacks falls apart when you put facts into the equation. Unfortunately, there are lots of people who have great incentive to avoid putting facts into the equation.

Hogberg: In other books you talk about what you call the “cracker culture” among blacks. What is that, and how much does that have to do with the higher crime rates in black areas in the U.S.?

Sowell: It’s many things. It’s a culture that is far more violent. It is far less oriented around education or entrepreneurship. It puts far less emphasis on human capital. Andrew Carnegie once went down to Birmingham and saw iron ore and coal located very close to each other. He wondered why someone hadn’t thought to build a steel mill there. The transportation costs of bringing the coal and iron ore together would be relatively cheap.

But, of course, the people in Alabama were not the same as Andrew Carnegie. And even years later when they did develop a steel industry in the South, the more complicated things that had to been done with steel were still being done in Pittsburgh and Gary, Indiana and other places in the North because they did not have the same skills in the South.

Now, the white population in the American South has had a higher violent crime rate than the white population of the rest of the country. Nor is this unusual. The murder rates in Eastern Europe have for centuries been some multiple of the murder rates in Western Europe. Like so many things that should theoretically be equal, they’re not, and they never have been.

Now, of course, over 90 percent of blacks in the U.S. came out of the South at some point in history. And so it’s not surprising that they bring many of the same cultural attitudes of Southern Whites to the North, East and wherever else they settle.

There is a whole history behind these things. But whatever the history, these groups were culturally different whether they were black or white or whatever.

Hogberg: You have a section on merit versus productivity, and you discuss the difficulties in judging merit in the sense of moral worth. Can you talk about that?

Sowell: Merit is the extent to which outcomes are due to the virtues of the particular individual compared to those circumstances the individual was born into or encountered in the larger world. I find it hard to believe that anyone specifically thinks that he can separate those things out in order to tell who is meritorious. Perhaps a mass murderer would have turned out to be a humanitarian under some other conditions, but we don’t know what those other conditions would be, and we certainly don’t know how to change him from a mass murderer into a humanitarian. And so we have to deal with things as they are.

What we can judge is productivity. We do know that someone will, say, produce a certain amount of a product per hour, while someone else will produce a lot more and someone else will produce a lot less. One of the problems of the political left is that they come up with things that they want to do, but pay very little attention to the key question of can you actually do those things? For example, wealth redistribution.

Those on the political left have no question in their minds that they can determine which rich people are unworthy and thus it is justifiable to confiscate wealth from them, and which poor people are worthy and should be given that wealth. One of the key problems for such schemes is that the source of wealth is human capital—the skills and knowledge about how to generate wealth.

Human capital is inside people’s heads and it can’t be confiscated. You can confiscate money and wealth and all the tangible things that you want to, but those things wear out over time. And unless you have someone there who can generate some more, you are worse off than before.

There are countries that have gone through that process and I mention some of them in the book. Some group in a country is prospering wonderfully and then a political leader says, well they have too much, we’ll take it from them. In some cases, they expel that group and in other cases, those people flee to a different country because they are tired of people taking their wealth.

Hogberg: Let me pose a related question. In Washington, D.C., there is the Trump International Hotel, owned by Donald Trump. People who stay there are certainly lining Donald Trump’s pockets. Now, Trump is certainly not a paragon of virtue. He has not been faithful to his wives for example, and he has at one time or another associated himself with vile people like Roy Cohn. What would you say to people who say it is immoral to book a room at Trump International Hotel?

Sowell: Is it immoral to buy a Volkswagen because Hitler was one of those promoting the Volkswagen? I mean, the Trump Hotel notion is silly beyond words. Perhaps there should be a moral surcharge based on the background of Hilton or some other hotel founder before we book a room at any of them? Again, that is asking people to do something we are not equipped to do.

Hogberg: Toward the end of the book you talk about what we can learn by examining the causes of disparities among different groups, and you write, “We can learn how dangerous it is, to a whole society, to incessantly depict outcome differences as evidence or proof of malevolent actions that need to be counter-attacked or avenged.” Why is that dangerous?

Sowell:  I think we’ve seen a good illustration of why it is dangerous based on what has happened in the U.S. and Britain since the 1960s. Back then, one of the big preoccupations was with countering the fact that some people had more than other people. What the political left sets out to do is one thing; what they’ve actually done is quite another.

The left has polarized whole societies. They have set the sexes against each other, the races against each other, the classes against each other. They have delegitimized moral principles, they have delegitimized law and order, and the consequences can be seen almost daily. For example, the homicide rate among black males fell by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. In the 1960s, it rose by dozens of percentage points—I don’t recall the exact number. [The homicide rate among black males per 100,000 population rose about 83 percent from 1960 to 1970—Ed.]

Steven Pinker’s book on violence internationally shows that this trend in homicide rates is something that happened across the Western world at the same time. There were declines in homicide rates until 1960, and then in the 1960s homicide rates did a U-turn. They shot up to levels that hadn’t been seen since the 19th century. It was quite a coincidence. Indeed, there were many such “coincidences” of trends that were getting better and then suddenly turned around and started getting worse in the 1960s.

Now the academics who study the history of that era aren’t likely to see it since they are often too busy celebrating the 1960s. Thus, the bad ideas and their consequence are not the sorts of things academics are going to put into their books.   

Hogberg: What changed in the 1960s that caused all of that?

Sowell:  It is what I call the “Social Justice” vision. That is, if there are disparities, it proves that somebody was wronged by somebody else. It’s one of those things that you don’t need one speck of evidence for. It sounds so good that many people will easily buy into it.

And many people around the world have paid with their lives for that vision. Especially in communist countries where communists came to power to supposedly correct such disparities. And once the communists are in power they create problems that make the problems that came before seem like nothing.

But that’s true of the left in general. They judge their actions by the wonderful things they are trying to do and are often oblivious to the actual harm they visibly doing to society.

Hogberg: Related to that, did you follow the controversy surrounding the actor Jussie Smollett? And what impact do hate-crime hoaxes have on fomenting racial hatred? 

Sowell: I’ve tried not to, but it is hard to escape. The impact certainly isn’t good. What’s amazing is how impervious some people are to evidence that the charges are hoaxes. I think back to the Duke-Lacrosse case, where people were just hell-bent on believing that this terrible crime had been committed. And counter evidence didn’t stop the prosecution or the public. Some people, activists especially, are primed to believe certain things and when they see an opportunity they run with it, facts be damned.

Hogberg: We have an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes in the nation, going back at least ten years. Do you think that has a lot to do with the social justice vision?

Sowell:  Yes. Especially given that these claims are so readily believed and rewarded.  You can turn in the grievances for benefits just like they were airline miles.

Hogberg: And what makes it even worse is that Smollett got off with a slap on the wrist, apparently because he is connected to someone close to former President Obama.

Sowell: Yes. And that’s one of the deadly costs of all this stuff. You eventually erode the faith people have in the law. And once people no longer have faith in the law, you cannot hire enough police officers to maintain law. When the lawbreakers are a small group, the cops can keep that under control. But once the idea that the law is just a racket becomes pervasive then society is in a very dangerous situation.

Hogberg: You write that our society has a taboo “against discussing anything that might be considered negative in the individual behavior or social culture of lagging groups” and that is “counterproductive.” Why is that taboo counter-productive?

Sowell: It is counterproductive because human beings of every conceivable background are so imperfect that to exempt anybody from criticism is not a benefit but a curse. Think of the proverbial mother who dotes on her child and makes excuses for everything he does wrong. That child is going to have some hard time in our society. The reason is that not everybody is going to be making up excuses for him. And he could even end up behind bars for a long time because he didn’t realize that people other than his mother wouldn’t make excuses for him.

Hogberg: Finally, you’ve now released a revised edition of “Discrimination and Disparities,” a book that challenges this widely held notion that most if not all disparities are due to discrimination such as racism and sexism. And yet, outside of conservative media, this book doesn’t seem to be getting any attention. Why is that?

Sowell: I think back to a time when my books were reviewed not only by The New York Times but also the New York Review of Books. These days that doesn’t happen. I can’t say definitively, but I think people find that their best strategy is to pretend my books don’t exist if they can’t answer the arguments in them. And it’s not just with my writing but also other writers who challenge the prevailing vision. Their books are not going to get reviewed because the reviewers who believe in the prevailing vision don’t have a very effective answer to that challenge.

David Hogberg is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research. He is author of Medicare’s Victims: How the U.S. Government’s Largest Health Care Programs Harms Patients and Impairs Physicians.