The title asks a question, and the book spends a hundred and ninety pages answering it. No.
These are Thomas Sowell's short pieces from the early 1990s, written for Forbes, for newspaper syndication, and for The American Spectator, collected by the Hoover Institution where he was a senior fellow. They range across economics, race, and education, and they share one habit of mind that runs through everything he wrote: a policy is to be judged by what it actually does rather than by what its advocates hoped it would do.
That sounds like a modest standard. Sowell spent a career demonstrating how rarely it is applied, and these essays are the method at its most concentrated — a few pages each, a single argument apiece, and a closing turn that usually leaves the opposing position with nothing to stand on.
The short form suits him. His long books build their case over hundreds of pages of data; here the same reasoning arrives in a sitting, which makes this the better place to start for someone who has heard of Sowell but not yet read him. The book closes with a section of his quotations, most of them quoted ever since.
Read it alongside Basic Economics, which lays out the machinery these essays take for granted.
