Free Markets JUIOWLEDGE AND DECISIONS By Thomas Sowell. 422 pp. New York: Basic Books. $18.50. By MARC F. PLA'ITNER HOMAS SOWELL is probably America's most distinguished black social scientist. An econo­ T mist by training and profession - currently professor of economics at U.C.L.A. -he is better known to a wider public for hit; cogent and unorthodox writings on such controversial issues as education, I.Q. tests, affirmative action and ethnicity. In his new book, Professor Sowell tries to embrace these and other social-policy concerns within a unified theoreti­ cal perspective that derives primarily from free-mar~ ket economics. And this ambitious a~empt displays both the strength and the weakness of that perspec- tive. · suit. Conversely, what Professor Sowell calls "sys­ The first of th;.,two parts into which "Knowledge temic" processes may produce a rational result, even and Decisions" is divided tends to be quite abstract, if no agent within the system intended such an out­ although it is frequently enlivened by clever exam­ come. Biological evolution is one example cited in ples. Professor Sowell portrays society as a collection "Knowledge and Decisions," but for Professor Sowell of interconnected and overlapping decision-making the critical "systemic" process is, of course, the mar­ units ranging from "a married couple to a police de­ ket, propelled by Adam Smith's famous "invisible partment to a national government." Although the hand." The market's virtues as a decision-making decision-making processes employed by these various mechanism include its capacity to respond in a fine­ institutions differ in a number of significant respects, grained fashion to a wide range of individual prefer­ they share even more significant similarities. Most ences, and the promptness and effectiveness with important, Professor Sowell argues, they all operate which it transmits "feedback," thus enabling it to cor­ under the inherent constraint of scarcity, and hence rect mistakes and adapt to changing conditions. face the necessity of engaging in "trade-offs." Par­ ents deciding how much time and energy to devote to The second part of "Knowledge and Decisions" the care of each of their children or a police depart·· marshals these theoretical notions in the service of a ment determining which laws it will enforce most topical and polemical thesis: Over the past century, vigorously cannot escape the necessity of forgoing Professor Sowell contends, "the locus of decision­ some desirable options in order to pursue others. The making has drifted away from the individual, the weighing of costs and benefits that characterizes the family, and voluntary associations of various sorts, economic sphere can in fact be seen at work through­ and toward government. And within government, it out the full range of human choice: "Social values in has moved away from elected officials subject to voter gener~l are incrementally variable: neither safety, feedback, and toward more insulated institutions, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is cate­ such as bureaucracies and the appointed judiciary." gorically a 'good thing' to have more of, without Deploring this tendency as both a threat to individual limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ulti­ freedom and a source of social irrationality and ineffi­ mately negative returns." If. morality is pushed past a ciency, Professor Sowell attacks a whole series of certain point, for e,xample, it slides into a moral fa­ 20th-century policies and Political trends that have naticism that is incompatible with individual freedom contributed to it-minimum-wage laws, rent control, and diversity. affirmative action, court-ordered busing, Judicial ac­ At first sight, this emphasis on the pervasive neces­ tivism, the growth in the size of the Federal govern­ sity of tallying costs and benefits might seem to imply ment-and the increasing political power of intellectu­ a preference for super-rationality and decision by ex­ als. The populist spirit ~ which Professor Sowell con­ perts. But Professor Sowell's argument moves in pre­ ceives this critique is indicated by the concluding sen­ cisely the opposite direction, because rational deci­ tence of his book, which identifies freedom with "the sion-making itself has costs in terms of time and other right of ordinacy people to find elbow room for them­ resources and, more important, because "the degree selves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of social rationality ... does not depend upon the de­ of their 'betters.' " gree of individual rationality." Government decision­ makers, for example, may act rationally within the The free:market viewpOint that Professor Sowell context of their own personal and bureaucratic incen­ champions is often contemptuously dismissed by tives and constraints (such as the desire for re-elec­ others as either merely a rationalization for economic tion or promotion, or for increasing the power of their privilege or a simplistic call for turning back the clock agency), but this may produce a socially harmful re- to an earlier age. "Knowledge and Decisions," by the power and practical relevance of many of its argu­ . Marc F. Plattner is on the staff of the Twentieth ments, offers convincing proof that such assessments Century Fund and is the author of "Rousseau's State are seriously mistaken. The free-market economists of Nature." Continued on Page 42 12 , Charles Wright and Louise Gltick. There are also om­ of plenty write when he becomes a poet of depriva­ nibus reviews, seasonal encounters with new books of · tion?" She puts the question not only because it has poetry in batches of eight or ten; difficult assign­ been answered in grand style by Whitman, Stevens ments, even for Miss Vendler. and (in part) Yeats, but also because a poem of depri­ The title of the book is taken from Stevens' "Aca­ vation tells us what we will all come to in the end, and demic Diseourse at Havana," where he says of the lets us hope that a certain nobility of feeling will be poet that "as part of nature he is part of us," and goes possible even then. She admires Marianne Moore, sub­ on to say that the poet's rarities are ours: ject to the major reservation that she thinks her later poems went soft, a defect nearly fatal to a reader who May they be fit wants to hear gallant syllables spoken from poverty, as in Stevens' "The Rock." And reconcile us to ourselves in those Seldom angry, Miss Vendler is angered by W. S. True reconcilings, dark, pacific words, Merwin, whom she scolds as a healthy mother scolds And the adroiter harmonies of their fall. her anemic child, telling him to eat up like his brothers and sisters, for God's sake. Faced with "elusive pal­ It is a congenial title. Miss Vendler does not try to lors" of Merwin's poems, Miss Vendler lets go: "is it establish her poets in order of their merits or probable ill will in a reader to want to force-feed these pale chil· durability. Mainly she is a descriptive critic, con­ dren till they, when cut, will bleed?" The short answer cerned to offer, even in a brief review, a profile of the is: yes, it is ill will. But a long answer would explain to poetry or, in the longer essays, a more elaborate ico­ the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children nography of the poet in the scene of his entire work. that the knife-wielder, apparently keen on b~oodlet. She has not gone in for esthetic theory. Mostly, she is ting, is really concerned to see that the emotional pos. content if the poet achieves in his poem a distinctive sibilities of life are maintained to the last. voice and, by the same arduous token, pays continu­ It is reasonable to compare Miss Vendler's book ous attention to the world in which we all live. Nothing with Randall Jarrell's "Poetry and the Age" (1953), matters but the- quality of the attention, in the end. another collection of occasional essays and reviews of Miss Vendler loves words, but does not turn them into American poetry. The comparison mainly shows that idols; chiefly she loves their reconciling power. Not a Jarrell was luckier if not wiser in his poetic genera­ remarkably close or technical critic, she stays close tion. He had in front of him and all around him the enough to hear in the words the "adroiter harmonies poets he could take to represent their common time. of their fall." He could write of Lowell, Bishop and Richard Wilbur On the evidence of .this book, Miss Vendler likes in direct relation to William Carlos Williams, Stevens, poems of two kinds: sundry poems, which take and John Crowe Ransom, Frost, Marianne Moore and give pleasure in the miscellany of ordinary experi­ other poets, with Whitman at the beginning to show ence, allowing vagary all the space it needs; and, bet­ what an American poet could nerve himself to do. Jar. ter still, what I call all-the-time poems, provoked by rell's book was no more systematic than Miss Ven­ perennial themes, like Louise GlUck's poem on the dler's, but it arose from a more comprehensible poetic death of children, a poem that could have been written scene. anytime in the past 300 years and is all the richer for I have no hard evidence for my assumption that that character. We read such a poem, Miss Vendler fewer poets were competing for space then, or that the says, "as a truth complete within its own terms, re­ relationship between talent, publication, publicity and flecting one of the innumerable configurations into fame was easier to understand than it is now.