Knowledge and Decisions is a non-fiction book by American economist Thomas Sowell. Sowell explicates social and economic knowledge and how it is transmitted through the many facets of society, and how that transmission affects decisions made.
Emphatically, Sowell repeatedly rejects the popular tendency to put economic and political decisions and their results in moral terms. Doing so, he argues, ignores the trade-offs and limitations inherent in ...
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Knowledge and Decisions is a non-fiction book by American economist Thomas Sowell. Sowell explicates social and economic knowledge and how it is transmitted through the many facets of society, and how that transmission affects decisions made.
Emphatically, Sowell repeatedly rejects the popular tendency to put economic and political decisions and their results in moral terms. Doing so, he argues, ignores the trade-offs and limitations inherent in every economic system and society. Consistent with his established Laissez-faire viewpoints, Sowell also indicts price controls such as rent control, minimum wage, price fixing, and subsidies as interfering in the implicit communication between consumers and producers necessary to optimize the choices of each. That some industries or government agencies seem particularly incompetent or corrupt over many turnovers of their staff, he argues, cannot be explained in terms of "bad" people performing those duties, but rather rational people acting...
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