Thomas Sowell is a national treasure and one of the top five public intellectuals in America.  He began as a Marxist but eventually saw the light and became what most would call 'conservative'; he might simply say 'realist'.  In DISCRIMINATION AND DISPARITIES he returns to familiar subjects.  His purpose is to dispel what the seventeenth century might have termed 'vulgar errors'â€”things that are widely believed even if they are not so.  His chief instruments are empirical.  He offers hard facts and common sense and notes that many accepted dogmas are simply untrue.  They continue to exist and even thrive because politicians are invested in them and because they constitute key elements in political/historical narratives that appeal to the politicians' bases.  Unless and until we move beyond them and begin our discussions and formulations of policy with that which is actually the case we are unlikely to make much progress.One of the principal ways in which vulgar errors are perpetuated is by casting them in statistical terms which subtly distort reality.  One example: 'poverty' is a construct, not a reality.  If one divides the citizens of a country into quintiles you will always have 'rich' and 'poor' (if that is the way you seek to categorize them).  However, it is possible to have a country of billionaires in which the millionaires in the lowest quintile are still categorized as 'poor'.  Hence the phenomenon that, e.g., the 'poor' in the U.S. are comparable to the upper middle class in many other countries.  Moreover, when we speak of quintiles we are not speaking about living/breathing human beings.  We are speaking of statistical exemplars, because actual human beings rise from the lowest quintile regularly and fall from the highest quintile regularly.  If you do not distinguish between salaries and capital gains, e.g., you find individuals with very high 'incomes' who only have those incomes within limited time frames.  In the year that a farmer sells the family farm his 'income' is very high, but that does not mean that he is rich in the way that orthopedic surgeons are rich.One very nice extended point in this regard concerns the use of 'household income' rather than individual income.  Consider the case of two individuals with incomes of $20,000 each.  They share an apartment because they cannot, individually, afford the rent.  Statistically they are a 'household' with $40,000 of income.  If each takes a new job and gets a promotion to $30,000 and then move out, taking their own apartments, we suddenly have two 'households' with household incomes of $30,000 each rather than one of $40,000.  Unless you drill down into the statistics it appears that poverty (as measured by household income) is increasing.In addition to the hard facts/common sense arguments there are a number of simple bludgeons.  In the course of discussing the politics and economics of a 'minimum wage', e.g., he reminds us that fast food jobs are not 'dead end jobs'.  They are first jobs in which we learn some basic skills and behaviors and prepare ourselves for greater responsibilities and higher incomes.  He gives the example of young people working in grocery stores; their average time in such jobs is 97 days.  Obviously, these are not 'dead ends'; they are points through which one transitions.Since Dr. Sowell is now 87 years old we should cherish every work that issues from his desk.  DISCRIMINATION AND DISPARITIES is a gem.  How many writers can open our eyes to persistent economic errors and do so this clearly and lucidly?