Very intriguing "Quote of the Day" showed up on my Google homepage today:

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
  - Thomas Sowell

Upon following the link provided, you will get a longer, and rather more complete, version of the idea

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Thomas Sowell, Is Reality Optional?, 1993

Now, I really like this quote.  It matches my own world view that I have deduced from reading a lot of different material, better than most I've heard publicly, but I have never heard of Thomas Sowell.  That surprised me as usually characters of this nature are hailed as Nazis or Racists in the popular press.  I decided I wanted to include the quote on this site, but needed to do a little digging first.  I will not post quotes from individuals I don't wish to provide exposure to, unless it is to prove a point, usually negative, about that person.  This is what I found:

Thomas Sowell is an economist for Stanford University, is well published, award winning and respected social conservative, according to Wikipedia.  I did not read the entire article as it is rather lengthy.  But his focus seems to be in social programs and their failures in the 20th Century.  Many of the summaries of his work hint that racial oppression is not a significant factor in the last 3 or 4 decades in the problems of lower income groups.  Further digging turned up an interesting interview that included some more intriguing thoughts:

Thomas Sowell: A flat tax would not penalize additional efforts at an increasingly higher rate. This would reduce the discouragements to such efforts and to the taking of risks.

Interesting, I've been saying that a graduated tax penalizes the successful and ultimately discourages risk, but I am not an economist.  Not directly social, but a very important issue to me as a mid-income taxpayer.

Thomas Sowell: Affirmative action has been a boon to those blacks who were already affluent and particularly for those who were rich but has done little or nothing for those blacks who are neither. Moreover empirical data from other countries around the world shows the same general pattern from group preferences.

That's not a popular opinion, and bound to be viewed racially.

Thomas Sowell: The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them. If those who were enslaved were alive, they would deserve huge reparations and their captors would deserve worse punishments than our laws allow. But death has put both beyond our reach. Frustrating as that may be, creating new injustices among the living will not change that.

The "Back to Africa" plan in intelligent terms.  Also very controversial, and my point exactly; not that we should send the complainer to Africa, but modern day descendants are better off because of the suffering of their ancestors.  I will go one step further and challenge anyone to come up with an ethnic group that couldn't make that claim.

Now about this time, you are probably wondering why you haven't heard of this man before.  Surely the race-card toting headline-chasers would have exposed him as hateful and oppressive.  But I then found his personal site, including a biography.  Check it out yourself, but here is the surprise:

He is completely non-biased.