Dismantling America

What It Is

A collection of syndicated columns, published by Basic Books in 2010 as Dismantling America: and other controversial essays. Sowell was eighty. He had been an economist at the Hoover Institution for decades and a newspaper columnist for almost as long, and this is the columnist rather than the economist.

The pieces are short, written to a newspaper's word count, on bailouts, immigration, race, education, the courts, the press and the first years of the Obama presidency. The title essays carry the book's central charge: that the country is being taken apart from inside, by an intellectual and political class that Sowell believes holds the ordinary competence of ordinary people in contempt.

Why It Matters

Sowell is among the most widely read conservative writers America has produced, and this is the least guarded thing he wrote. Knowledge and Decisions, A Conflict of Visions and Basic Economics are where the case is constructed. This is where it is fired.

The core claim deserves a hearing whatever you make of the politics. Policy, Sowell says, is made by people who will not bear its costs; intentions are not results; and the question that matters about any decision is not whether it was well meant but who had the knowledge to make it and who pays when it is wrong. That is Hayek's argument about dispersed knowledge, carried into American domestic politics by a man who writes far better prose than Hayek ever did.

He is a very good essayist, and that is why the columns outlived their news cycle. Short sentences. One statistic where another writer would use ten. No shouting, in a genre that is mostly shouting.

The weaknesses follow from the form. It is a collection of columns and it reads like one: repetitive, occasional, pinned to arguments most readers no longer remember. The polemical register is not the analytical one, and Sowell rarely engages the strongest opposing case here; where the books argue, this book asserts, and it assumes a reader already nodding. And the anger dates it. The targets are specific to 2008 and 2010, and much of the volume now reads as a period document of the early Obama years.

If you want to know whether Sowell is right, do not start here. If you want to know what he sounds like when he has run out of patience, this is the book.

Before You Read

Around 300 pages, six or seven hours, and nobody should read it in one sitting. Two or three columns at a time is the correct dose; more than that and the repetition begins working against him.

It is easy. Sowell never makes you look up a word, which is itself part of his argument about how experts talk.

Skip around freely. Nothing here depends on order, and the pieces are short enough that you can hold a whole one in your head and test it, which most of his admirers never bother to do.

Which Edition to Read

• The Basic Books paperback — recommended. The complete text, cheap, and the right physical form for a book you will dip into rather than march through. The cost: there is no apparatus of any kind, no introduction and no editorial framing, so you must supply from memory the week each column was answering. In a book this tied to its news, that is a real absence. View on Amazon →
• The Basic Books hardcover, 2010. The first edition, and the one to have if you collect Sowell. The cost: you are paying for the binding, not the book.
• The ebook. The best format for a column collection, because search is the only index this book has. The cost: no margins to argue in.

Take the paperback or the ebook, whichever you will actually open. There is no annotated edition and none is needed.

If this is your first Sowell, buy A Conflict of Visions instead and come back to this. That book is why he matters; this one is what he did on deadline.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it as journalism. Each piece was written for a particular week, and the ones that still hold when you have forgotten the week are the ones worth arguing with.

Read the strongest opposing case on anything here that persuades you. If a column has changed your mind in four pages, that is a fact about the length of the column.

Watch the method rather than the conclusions. Sowell's habit is to take a claim about intentions and replace it with a question about incentives, and once you have seen him do it, you will see him doing it on every page, on subjects where he is right and subjects where he is not.

The commonest mistake is to take this for Sowell's case rather than his commentary. He built the case elsewhere, over forty years, and it deserves to be met where he built it.