you define an intellectual? >> guest: someone who's and product his ideas and ideas whose validation is through peer consensus rather than by any particular established institution. in other words they chemists might be intellectual because their objective rules for which you can judge his work or a mathematician are an engineer but if you are a deconstruction is the only test is for the other deconstructionist to like what you are doing. >> host: doesn't matter what popular opinion says about your work? >> guest: no. >> host: why not? >> guest: their whole career and self-esteem and all that comes from their peers so it doesn't matter. some take great pride in being out of step. >> host: are you an intellectual? >> guest: i suppose you would have to say that. since my work and then ideas and people like them or don't like them, that's the way it is.

>> host: you talk about intellectuals clustering together as a whole. what do you mean by that? >> guest: is someone called the herd of independent minds and they tend in a given era to believe pretty much the same things. they may change as the groove from one to the other. for example during the first world war intellectuals on the left were gung ho for the first world war. after they saw the carnage of it they all became pacifists, again as they heard afterwards and remained pacifists for i guess perhaps to this day. >> host: how to intellectuals trust when it comes to raise? >> guest: they have clustered in different ways. early in the 20th century they clustered behind the belief that genes determine everything. that some races were inferior and some more superior and that means the people on the left and john maynard keynes who was one of the founders of the cambridge

eugenics society, many distinguished leading intellectuals of that era were absolutely dogmatic on the subject. then by the end of the century they swung to the other end of the spectrum, again as a group and anyone who'd dared to disagree with them was regarded as a racist. >> host: dr. thomas sowell on the where are intellectuals clustered in your view on this today? >> guest: they are still clustered. at the end it says that all differences between groups must be do or presumptively due to others. they are impervious to evidence. for example the housing situation, when they discovered that they were turned down by prime mortgage loans at a higher rate than whites that was due to racial information.

if you look at the same statistics on blacks and whites and look at the statistics for asian-americans it undermines that completely. for example when blacks were turned down at a rate nearly double that of whites, at the very same time whites were turned down at a rate nearly double that of asian-americans. moreover, black-owned banks turned down blacks at a still higher rate than the why don't banks did. so you find it very hard to reconcile with what they believed. but there is a tendency among intellectuals to have a preconception and when they find numbers that seem to fit that preconception they don't go any further. they have no reason to look up the data for asian-americans which undermines the whole argument they have made. >> host: in your book sub -- "intellectuals and race" you talk about the fact of emotion talking about race. how do you get rid of that

factor or can you get rid of that factor? >> guest: you can to a great extent as a practical matter. one of the things i've noticed in many countries around the world people of different races to get along together and sometimes even lived as neighbors for generations and yet when the right demagogue comes along you can turn them against each other and they can be at each other's throats. in india. it has helped and in sri lanka and it's happened in nigeria. you can run through a whole list of countries so it's not a wholly spontaneous thing. many years ago one of the less memorable songs himself pacific said you've got to be taught to hate. intellectuals have taught people to hate those that are better off than themselves. >> host: who are some of the demagogues he referred to? >> guest: oh happens they are different in different countries.

sri lanka was one of the most painful examples. sri lanka was held up in mid-century as a model of the country where people of different races got along wonderfully and they did. the educated members of these two different groups lived in the same neighborhoods. they have different religions. they would attend holiday services in the house of worship and so on. that was fine until he decided he wanted the prime minister and then he turned them against each other and the tamils turned against the similes. these people who never had a race riot in the entire first half of the 20th century began to have riots which then escalated into outright civil war. it went on for decades with unspeakable atrocities and more people killed in this little country than the americans lost during the entire vietnam war.

so it's a scary example of how a given time things may look very good on the surface and yet when the right demagogue comes along in the right circumstances people can be turned against each other with hate. >> host: at in your view sub toni had their been -- dr. thomas sowell one on a have there have been in the united states? >> guest: it's one of the most lucrative occupations. some have said if i have tried to convert jesse jackson to my views in times said i'm sure jesse jackson makes 10 times what i make great how can you ask a man to reduce his income by 90%? >> host: what is there race that you talk about? >> guest: the naacp played an important role but one of the problems within the institution that has one goal is once they have achieved that old they don't say all right folks we are having a going out of business ceremony. they have to go on.

the eeoc for example they have to prevent discrimination but is they have to expand the definition of discrimination so now if you don't want to hire people who have been in prison they think that's discrimination. >> host: you write in "intellectuals and race" that the kind of society to which that can lead when you talk about the race industry etc. is one in which a newborn baby injures the world supplied with prepackaged grievances against other babies born on the same day. >> guest: yes, yes. this idea that you can redress history which we have seen in specific contexts in this country, it's around the world. the czechs after the world war one of the goals they had was to address the injustices of the 17th century. nobody from the 17th century

was alive that they end of the first world war. they tried to take this out by having policies that would favor the germans and so on and they set in motion a chain of events in which the czechs and the germans were worse off than they have ever been before and both were victims of tragedy trying to undo what happened to people who were now long dead. >> host: do we have policies in this country that are formed in the same way? >> guest: oh yes. affirmative action, the demand for reparations and so on. one of the sad things is that we talk in this country as if slavery was something unique to the united states or to blacks and whites and in fact slavery was one of the oldest institutions among human beings. they go far back as there's recorded history. every single corner of the world.

pollination since late other polynesians. for most of history people enslaved people who work the same race themselves for the simple reason that they said they didn't have the resources to go to another continent and take people and move them someplace else but late in history and this is what happened in the united states in the western hemisphere. many thanks, much of the pathologies of the black community is said to be a legacy of slavery. the irony is if you look at the facts, for example the breakdown of the family, most a lot kids grew up in homes with two parents. under slavery itself in three generations thereafter and as late as the 1960s, most black children grew up in two parent homes. it's only when you started having massive societies and other such things that you see in in the family that has survived all of this for all this time now began to disintegrate. >> host: from "intellectuals

and race" dr. thomas sowell there's other evidence that the black sub culture has a negative effect on intellectual achievement. in other words brighter black students do not perform as well and settings where there are many other lakh students around them contrary to the theory that what is needed in educational institutions is some larger critical mass of black students clear -- >> guest: studies that i sighed and there will show that subs not just my opinion. one of the studies i did many years ago was in dunbar high school in washington which is a really outstanding all-black academic institution. over the years from 1892 to 1894 think it was graduates of dunbar high school went to amherst college. three-quarters of these kids

graduated and of those who graduated more than one quarter for phi beta kappa's soap clearly you don't need a critical mass. they never had anything resembling a critical mass. what you need is a good educational background and the absence of people who are distracting you from what the purpose of the colleges. >> host: is there a relationship or an important relationship between race and mental capacity? >> guest: capacity, if you mean by capacity potential, then who knows? you can't measure potential currently and i suspect for the next 100 years or so probably. what you can recognize and measure his capacity, developed capabilities over s.a.t.'s and stuff like that but potentially you cannot.

>> guest: . >> host: when it comes to race how does that play into the measurements that we have today? >> guest: i'm not sure what you mean by that great. >> host: is there a correlation between iq and what we have on what we are able to measure today and raise? >> guest: oh sure. there has always been a mom all sorts of people around the world. i mean people into hebrides island have the same iq as in washington the united states and probably for similar reasons. people from isolated cultures tend not to have the same as people who are in culture that have a larger culture universe to draw upon. so the data for measuring what is likely to happen with the given person in a given circumstance whether it's the ultimate potential at the moment of conception no one has come

close to making like that. >> host: in "intellectuals and race" and by the way where did this book come from? >> guest: [inaudible] >> host: why did you break out for raise? >> guest: i was urged to bring a second book to begin with and i said what do she no? i realized she was right. so i said all right. >> host: how about asian-americans who often seem to as a group reform that are in school than other groups. why is that? >> guest: i think the one four-letter word we can't use is work. they just work. i remember when i was teaching at ucla and i had to go on saturday nights to the research libraries and as i looked around almost everybody i saw were asian-american. i looked in vain for any black students there and there weren't

many white students there so the following week when i go to classifying the asian-americans better prepared. there's no real mystery to it to me. they work. >> host: do you teach here at stanford? >> guest: no, i have not taught here at stanford. when i first came there were little hence that i might when i went to seminars but i never got those hints. >> host: do you miss teaching at all? >> guest: yes and no. teaching as it is today, no. teaching as it was when i started out in 1962 in a little college in new jersey, i really loved it. when i taught my last class at the end of the week i was looking forward to the next class the following monday. over the years the academic world change drastically and now when i got the offer from the hoover institution which involved the teaching at all i

said this is it. there are many people out there who may well have wanted to teach that the conditions of teaching in the universities became such that it was just not worth it. >> host: which one of those conditions has changed? >> guest: i think the attitude of the students, the faculty and the administration. it doesn't leave much else. [laughter] the students really began to think that they showed up her class that obey was a constitutional right. students would come to me at the end of the class and they would say i'm a graduating senior. do you believe in predestination? they thought it must my responsibility to see that they graduated. i've never took that view. >> host: 's dr. thomas sowell is our guest and we are on the campus of stanford university

talking him about his most recent book "intellectuals and race." how many books have you written? >> guest: you know i haven't counted them. >> host: i think it's about 25. >> guest: it may well be. >> host: as the milton and a friedman -- >> guest: i was asked that as an expert witness in the opposing attorney says it says you here you are senior fellow. just what is a senior fellow to? i said a senior fellow has no hours and no duties and the judge said i wouldn't mind having a job like that. >> host: do you just spend the day thinking? >> guest: that's it. i once wrote bears nothing but brilliant ideas and it's just exhausting. [laughter] >> host: dr. thomas sowell hahne when you talk about cosmic justice what do you mean by

that? >> guest: i guess with some people mean by social justice, which is the justice for groups, and initial opportunity to have the same life chances but i call it cosmic justice because no society is able to do that or has ever done that. what you are asking for is for the whole life chances to be the same and if you think of all the differences it's virtually impossible. some kids may be raised in families that are at the same economic level but one family has one set of attitudes towards education and the other while not. the one family that does not have that same attitude, he may be a fine fellow and maybe write in all of that but he doesn't have the same object entities. there's almost no way he could have the same chance. >> host: our goals like economic equality or economic

opportunity, racial equality, are those good goals for the nation? >> guest: if you mean by equality of opportunity, yes. if you mean any belief that you are going to get the same end results, the answer is no. with those kinds of goals do is simply tear a society apart often making them all worse off than they would have been otherwise. it's sad, affirmative action takes minority students and mismatches them with institutions. for example when i was at colonial the average black student enrolled in corneil at that time scored in the 75th percentile in the s.a.t.'s. the average white student at cornell at that time scored in the 99th percentile. half of the students were on academic probation.

you have kids who would have been on the dean's list that they were sent to colleges where they were virtually guaranteed not to make it. >> host: are there any affirmative action of them so you think are worthwhile? >> no. that's the easiest question of all. >> host: .or sowell i might've just asked you this but i've are you forgotten the answer. are you working on another book right now? >> guest: this is one of the few times in my life when i do not have another book underway at the moment. well, i'm always up dating so if you mean that i'm always doing that. but if you mean in my starting on a new venture in bookwriting not for the moment. >> host: you mentioned that at the beginning of this interview that intellectuals in your field should have your approval. >> guest: i didn't say they should have.

if they all get the same idea becomes unstoppable. >> host: do you have your approval? >> guest: i have never asked my peers for their approval. >> host: why not? >> guest: i don't care. >> host: what would you like your legacy to be when it comes to what your work over the years has created? >> whatever it is it's going to be, i won't be here to know it so it really doesn't concern me that much. >> host: do you like doing television interviews? >> guest: sometimes. i wouldn't want to put a percentage on it. >> host: how well did you know milton friedman? >> guest: i was a student of his at one time. of course he was the reason that i was brought to the hoover institution with a book called knowledge and decisions. really one of the fine h