Examines Marx's theories about history, capitalism, the exploitation of workers, business cycles, morality, and economics, and offers a profile of the British philosopher.

"This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences...

Sowell unravels the world of intellectuals in order to illustrate an important social phenomenon: how the thinkers of a society mold that society, leaving an impact on people in every walk of life, even if these thinkers are basically unknown to the world at large.

An indictment of the American educational system criticizes the fact that the system has discarded the traditional goals of transmitting knowledge and fostering cognitive skills in favor of building self-esteem and promoting social harmony.

This book is the culmination of 15 years of research and travels that have taken the author completely around the world twice, as well as on other travels in the Mediterranean, the Baltic and around the Pacific rim. Its purpose has been to try to understand the role of cultural differences within nations and between nations, today and over centuries of history, in shaping the economic and social fates of peoples and of whole civilizations.

Annotation

This book shows the persistence of cultural traits in particular racial and ethnic groups and the role these groups' relocations play in redistributing skills, knowledge, and other forms of "human capital" from where they originated to the four corners of the earth. Each ethnic group has carried forth a particular set of skills, attitudes, and lifestyles, whether settling in Russia, Brazil, Australia, or the United States. What are the effects of...

"Challenges believers in such one-factor explanations of economic outcome differences as discrimination, exploitation or genetics. It offers its own new analysis, based on an entirely different approach--and backed up with empirical evidence from around the world. The point is not to recommend some particular policy "fix", but to clarify why so many policy fixes have turned out to be counterproductive, and to expose some seemingly invincible fallacies...