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Thomas Sowell. Economic Facts and Fallacies. New York: Basic Books, 2007. 272 pp. Cloth: $26.00. ISBN: 978-0465003495.
The latest book by prolific author Thomas Sowell, the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, has two aims: to provide a list of widely held but demonstrably false economic beliefs and then to demonstrate their invalidity using hard facts. These economic beliefs come in six areas: the economics of cities, differences between men and women, differences among races, higher education, income inequality, and developing economies. He deals with each topic in a separate chapter.
The opening chapter lays out four fallacies: the zero-sum fallacy, the fallacy of composition, the chess piece fallacy, and the open-ended fallacy. The chess piece fallacy is never mentioned again, and the other three appear in only a single chapter each. If this typology of fallacies were useful, it would have been more important to the subsequent discussion. Instead, the introductory chapter seems strangely irrelevant to the understanding of what follows.
The other failing of the introduction is that it does not lay out a common template for evaluating these fallacies. As a result, the presentation of the fallacious beliefs and even the quality of the evidence varies greatly across the chapters.
The best of the chapters deals with income distribution. The beliefs to be tested are clearly enumerated at the start of the chapter, including the loss of the American middle class to the purported excess compensation of...