Social Justice Fallacies

Recommended by Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology

Pinker says that everyone claims to value diversity, but this seldom includes diversity of political viewpoint. It’s one of the reasons he highly recommends “Social Justice Fallacies” by Thomas Sowell, a “brilliant” African American conservative.

In this book, Sowell reprises themes he has explored in many books over the decades. Principally, he argues that contemporary notions of social justice, which attribute differences in power and wealth among groups to biased treatment, is based on the fallacy that social outcomes otherwise would be identically distributed among groups. In reality, he says, this never happens because of differences in history, geography, economics, and cultural and social capital.

Sowell also notes that antisemitism may be a part of a widespread hatred for economically successful “middlemen minorities.” Agree or disagree, Pinker believes no educated person should be unfamiliar with sophisticated conservative thinking.

“The book will startle many readers with his deeply researched analyses of race and ethnicity,” he said.