Two Thomases

This post has nothing directly about music, but my mandate, "classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy..." is pretty broad. I'm titling it "Two Thomases" because both names came up in a dinner party last night. There was an old British tv comedy called "The Two Ronnies."

The first Thomas is Thomas Sowell who recently retired after a long career as an economist, writer and educator. The photo accompanying the Wikipedia article is very, very old, so:

He has a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago, which means he is loosely in the "Chicago School of Economics" as opposed to being a Keynesian or, you know, a socialist. He is eighty-eight years old and just recently retired, though he is still a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written a host of books of which perhaps the most generally useful is his Basic Economics, which is as clear-headed and sensible discussion as one could hope to find. In the new edition of the work, there are some new chapters one of which talks about why there are such great economic inequalities in the world:

Any study of international economic activities inevitably encounters the fact of vast differences among nations in their incomes and wealth. In the early nineteenth century, for example, there were four Balkan countries where the average income per capita was only one-fourth that in the industrialized countries of Western Europe.{ 847} Two centuries later, there were still economic differences of a similar magnitude between the countries of Western Europe and various countries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Albania, Moldova, Ukraine and Kosovo were each less than one-fourth of the per capita GDP of Holland, Switzerland, or Denmark— and less than one-fifth of the per capita GDP of Norway.{ 848} Similar disparities are common in Asia, where the per capita GDP of China is less than one-fourth that of Japan,{ 849} while that of India is barely more than ten percent of the per capita GDP of Japan. The per capita GDP of sub-Saharan Africa is less than ten percent of the per capita GDP of the nations of the Euro zone.{ 850} Many find such disparities both puzzling and troubling, especially when contemplating the fate of people born in such dire poverty that their chances of a fulfilling life seem very remote. Among the many explanations that have been offered for this painful situation, there are some that are more emotionally satisfying or politically popular than others. But a more fundamental question might be: Was there ever any realistic chance that the nations of the world would have had similar prospects of economic development? Innumerable factors go into economic development. For all the possible combinations and permutations of these factors to work out in such a way as to produce even approximately equal results for all countries around the world would be a staggering coincidence. We can, however, examine some of these factors, in order to get some insight into some of the causes of these differences. 

Sowell, Thomas. Basic Economics (pp. 527-528). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The book has no graphs and no highly technical discussion, just a good introduction to economics from a common sense viewpoint. Sowell has written a lot of other books on cultural and social issues as well so you might have a look around.

The other Thomas is an utterly different kind of person. Thomas Merton I became acquainted with a few decades ago, partly through the influence of a religious friend of mine.

I got the idea for writing this post because I was surprised to find that no-one at my dinner party had ever heard of Thomas Merton--and they were all, to some extent, religious people. If you read the Wikipedia article, as you should, you will find that Merton was one of the great spiritual figures of the 20th century. In 1948 he published a memoir of his path to the faith, The Seven Storey Mountain. I found it a fascinating read, though it that was long ago and I should probably re-read it. Merton spent most of his life as a Trappist monk whose vocation was, basically, to write books. Ones that I read and found interesting include The Wisdom of the Desert in which he delves into the Christian desert fathers of the 4th century and finds some interesting parallels with Zen masters!

I hope you take a bit of time and look into either or both of this writers as they are likely both worth the effort.