This Thomas Sowell Wisdom from 2010 Explains How Experts Bungled the COVID Pandemic
Few figures in conservativism are more revered than Thomas Sowell. A free-market economist, social theorist and philosopher, Sowell’s work has spanned decades and influenced generations.
Sowell wrote a nationally syndicated column, authored dozens of books and dazzled television audiences time and time again with his commonsense, anti-intellectual approach to political and cultural issues.
The following story is part of The Western Journal’s exclusive series “The Sowell Digest.” Each issue will break down and summarize one of Sowell’s many influential works.
This country’s response to the 2020 pandemic was a classic example of the blind leading the blind.
We were told ad nauseam, and are still told today, that we need to “trust the experts.” But as it turns out, even “experts” don’t know what they don’t know.
At the urging of many public health experts, this supposedly free nation — and many others like it — completely shut down its economy in order to “slow the spread.”
Studies now show the lockdowns did very little to slow the spread of COVID-19 while causing a slew of social and economic problems. The consequences of letting public health experts craft policy will be felt for decades to come.
For those who have followed Thomas Sowell’s work over the past several decades, none of this should have been a big surprise.
In fact, Sowell’s 2010 book “Intellectuals and Society” at times feels prophetic in the way it talks about “experts” and “intellectuals.” It couldn’t apply any better to the country’s COVID-era troubles.
If more Americans had read this book prior to 2020, perhaps lockdowns could have been completely avoided.
Experts Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
On the book’s very first page, Sowell quotes Victorian-era philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who once said there is such a thing as “unwise intellect.”
It is one thing to memorize a series of facts and figures. Many of those in our expert class have done a bang-up job consuming such knowledge.
However, a wise man knows where his expertise ends. Many “experts” today lack this insight.
“Sheer brainpower — intellect, the capacity to grasp and manipulate complex concepts and ideas — can be put at the service of concepts and ideas that lead to mistaken conclusions and unwise actions,” Sowell wrote.
“Brilliance — even genius — is no guarantee that consequential factors have not been left out or misconceived.”
Experts Often Make the Wrong Call with the Right Information
Throughout “Intellectuals and Society,” Sowell lays out examples of how “expertise” has led many smart men to make incorrect assumptions about the world.
One of the best examples is a prediction made by 20th-century forestry experts.
These experts concluded that a “timber famine” was looming. However, it never materialized.
Why? Because of the laws of free-market economics.
As the supply of timber began to decline, its price subsequently rose, as the price of any product naturally does when it becomes more scarce.
The forestry experts behind this prediction may have known many facts and figures relevant to their own field of expertise, but they lacked even the most basic economic knowledge. Otherwise, they would have known a “timber famine” was never going to happen.
In similar fashion, the experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization knew many facts and figures about COVID-19. However, they too lacked basic economic knowledge.
So why, then, did we allow a handful of public health experts to help craft policies that shut down our economy?
Without a good grasp of economics, they couldn’t possibly have fathomed the endless consequences such actions would have.
Even more than that, public health experts couldn’t possibly have foreseen the social, mental and spiritual costs that came with locking down the country.
Experts Have Their Place — “On Tap, Not on Top”
Sowell affirms in “Intellectuals and Society” that experts are indeed important.
However, quoting an old expression, he wrote that they should be “on tap, not on top.”
“For broader social decision-making … experts are no substitute for systemic processes which engage innumerable factors on which no given individual can possibly be expert,” Sowell wrote.
In other words, when it comes to large-scale societal problems like COVID that impact a countless number of communities and institutions, no one person could possibly be an “expert” on how exactly to handle it.
So the best approach for such a situation is to have the experts give the people information, and then the freedom to choose how best to deal with the issue.
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