Intellectuals have some very bad incentives according to renowned economist Thomas Sowell. He defines an intellectual as someone’s who’s end products are ideas (i.e. not an engineer, scientist, medical doctor, etc.). While admitting that he himself is an intellectual, he condemns the lunacy that pervades much of the intellectual community. The problem is there are no checks on their ideas. If an engineer builds a bridge and it collapses, that engineer has failed. But how exactly do you judge a literary deconstructionist? Well, by what other literary deconstructionists think of their work, of course. It’s a revolving door of mindless group think and self-praise.

And if an intellectual pushes for certain policies that turn out to be disastrously wrong, they rarely face any ramifications for this whatsoever. For example, Paul Ehrlich claimed that “The battle to feed humanity is over… Population control is the only answer,” in his 1968 book The Population Bomb. Despite his prediction being astronomically wrong, Ehrlich’s career hasn’t been dinged by this misstep in the slightest. It would seem, as Eric Hoffer put it, “One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.”

Furthermore, intellectuals have an incentive to make things look as bad as possible. That, after all, gives them a reason to have a job. If things were all just fine and dandy, no one would ever want intellectuals to plan society for us. Thus, intellectuals put forth plans to fix the problems they dreamed up, such as income stagnation or the male-female wage gap, both of which are almost embarrassingly easy to refute. But since these fallacies got filtered down through the media by intellectuals over and over again, they have become ‘common knowledge’ among everyone else.

Here Sowell explains how intellectuals have treated the subject of economics:

For the complete interview, see here. And to purchase Thomas Sowell’s new book, where he takes intellectuals on from every angle, check out Intellectuals and Society.