From the standpoint of the army as an economic decision making unit, it is rational to draft a chemist to sweep floors as long as his cost as a draftee is lower than the cost of hiring a civilian floor sweeper.

Here’s Sowell on the misallocation of labor due to conscription:Įven in an all-out war, most soldiers do not fight, but perform a variety of auxiliary services, many of which can be performed by civilian employees, since most of these services take place far from the scenes of battle. Like other forms of price controls, usury laws distort the communication of correct facts about credit risks without in any way changing those facts themselves.

Here’s another excerpt from the same Sowell book: In many of my classes I taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, after teaching Hayek’s “Use of Knowledge in Society,” which was also on at least 3 syllabi in my first year at UCLA, I used a short excerpt on the “Physical Fallacy” that includes the quote above. The physical fallacy arose as spontaneously as the actions which demonstrated its falsity. What is of wider social significance is that those prisoners who performed these services were both widely utilized and deeply resented. The article is a masterpiece.) Sowell writes: (By the way, if recall correctly, this article was on at least 3 of the syllabi we had during my first year of graduate school at UCLA, 1972-72. Radford, a British economist who had been a prisoner in a P.O.W. In his 1980 book Knowledge and Decisions, my favorite of his books, he discusses a famous economics article, “The Economics of a P.O.W. Here are some of my favorite quotes from Sowell. Other than that, I found virtually everything in his writing straightforward. The main controversy I could come up with is over his distinction between the “constrained vision” and the “unconstrained vision.” A very early article by Bryan Caplan helped me put my finger on my difficulties. I spent more time than I usually do coming up with discussion questions because Sowell’s writing is so clear, so evidence-based, and so persuasive, that I had trouble injecting controversy.

I’ll be discussion leader of a symposium this coming Friday and Saturday on the work of Thomas Sowell.

Thomas sowell knowledge and decisions