Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Walter Williams’ Legacy
Walter Williams’ Legacy
Mar 16, 2025 4:23 AM

On Sunday, December 25, 2011, at 10:55 a.m., I received an email from Walter Williams. I couldn’t believe it. The email simply read, “Does this work for you? Good luck.” It was an endorsement of my book on Thomas Sowell. It was one of the best Christmas gifts I have ever received. I was deeply honored to receive an endorsement from “the” Walter Williams, and to be exchanging emails with one of my intellectual heroes was the icing on the cake. When I learned that Dr. Williams passed away on December 1, 2020, my heart sank.

Walter Williams authored more than 10 books and dozens of scholarly and popular articles. He was well known for rejecting progressive munitarian public policy prescriptions for the munity. Williams railed against paternalistic policies that tend to infantilize e blacks as perpetual victims lacking agency to move beyond their circumstances without the near-permanent role of the social assistance state. Williams, as a classical liberal, believed government programs to be limiting rather than liberating. He knew that welfare programs tend to keep fortably poor and often trap families in cycles of dependency for generations. He spent his academic and public intellectual career fighting for black freedom from government coercion, especially for the truly disadvantaged.

Dr. Williams rejected the environmental causal narratives that deprive black men and women of the agency to take advantage of the opportunities this country offers, and he warned against black agency being undermined by well-meaning programs that were hurting the very people they were intended to help. For Williams, this was not merely an argument about principles. Born in 1936, Williams knew exactly what it was like to experience the structural racism of the Jim Crow era and the struggles of being raised by a single mother after his father abandoned the family when Williams was around the age of two or three years old. The one thing progressives would fail at is convincing a man like Walter Williams that poverty causes crime, that being raised by a single-mother was a determining factor, and the greatest barrier to black thriving was racial discrimination. Williams knew that life is plex to reduce all disparities between whites and blacks to America’s history of racism.

Using economics to interrogate race in America may be Williams’ greatest gift. It challenges the prevailing vision of black victims in need of surrogate decision-makers to control their lives. Economists understand that correlation does not mean causation and that there are always additional variables beyond race that better explain the racial disparities we see in American life. For example, in his book Race and Economics, Williams challenges the assumption that the mortgage industry is racist against blacks. Williams notes that the disparity between white and black home loan denials – 17% and 38%, respectively – is more likely attributed to the fact that blacks have worse credit than whites. In one Federal Reserve study, 47% of blacks had bad pared to 27% of whites. Moreover, another study cited in the book highlights the fact that “minority-owned banks reject black applicants at double the rate of their white-owned counterparts.” When other races are included in the mortgage loan data, we find that whites are denied significantly more loans pared to Asian Americans. There is more to disparity than race.

It is this multivariate economic analysis that made Williams such a keen analyst of the black experience. When multiple variables are included, plexities of human decision-making and the limitations of human knowledge dismantle tacit assumptions about black thriving in areas like e inequality, entrepreneurship, affirmative action, the effects of the minimum wage, and so on. Walter Williams taught me to look at the data – lots of data. Then, look at even more data. He showed me not to settle for the rhetorical, univariate cause of racial discrimination as prehensive, explanatory variable of black life in America.

The multivariate, data-driven analysis helps us arrive at different conclusions and points to different prescriptions for social change. Williams was keen on the idea that the best chance for black social and economic mobility was more political and economic liberty, not less – more liberty, less government. He argued this point directly in his book More Liberty Means Less Government. Williams believed that if government policymakers would get out of the way of black progress, and if markets replaced socially planned economics, the persistent lagging of the black underclass could be a thing of the past.

Perhaps his success and popularity was also a liability. Did we rely too much on Walter Williams? Williams represents the beginning of the end of an era. Thomas Sowell is 90 years old. Glenn Loury is in his early seventies. Where is the next generation of black classical liberal and conservative economists, who use data to challenge prevailing narratives while arguing for greater political and economic liberty? I cannot think of any, and that’s a shame. We need black classical liberal economists, even if some will disagree with their analyses and conclusions. It is the classical liberal economic form of viewpoint diversity that Williams brought to the table that may be slouching towards silence – and this, in my view, is why he will be so greatly missed.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Why a Christian Anthropology Matters for Liberty and Love
Dorothy Sayers, playwright, novelist and Christian scholar, wrote an important work in the 1930s entitled,Are Women Human?In her essay,shepresents the biblical case for gender equality in a humorous and insightful way, grounding mutuality in theological anthropology. From the Genesis narratives to the new earth of Revelation, she affirms this thesis: We are all human beings, made in the image of God with a job to do. And we do our jobs as a man or a woman. This theological vision...
The Government Is Hungry: Detroit and ‘The Grapes of Wrath’
Detroit home owners are being put out of their homes, but it’s not because of bankers. Then by who? It’s the Detroit city government seeking to collect back real estate taxes. There are always tax foreclosures, but foreclosures are growing from 20,000 in 2012 to an expected 62,000 in 2015. Who is putting poor people on the streets in Detroit? The government. There is a twist here based on the fact that Detroit homes have an old (and therefore way...
Video: Jeffrey Tucker Explains Why Capitalism Is About Love
The 2015 Acton Lecture Series got off to a rousing start last week with the arrival of Jeffrey Tucker, Chief Liberty Officer of Liberty.me, to deliver the first lecture of this year’s series, entitled “Capitalism Is About Love.” If you go by the conventional wisdom, that seems to be a counterintuitive statement.Jeffrey Tucker explains how the two are actually bound up together. You can watch the lecture via the video player below, and if you haven’t had a chance to...
When is a Ban not a Ban? When it’s a Target
When is a ban not a ban? One answer might be when it is based on moral suasion rather than legal coercion. (I would also accept: When it’s a Target.) In this piece over at the Federalist, Georgi Boorman takes up the prudence of a petition to get Target to remove smutty material and paraphernalia related to Fifty Shades from its shelves. Boorman rightly points to the limitations of this kind of cultural posturing. Perhaps this petition illustrates more of...
Does Slave Redemption Increase Slavery?
Thousands of girls and women in Iraq and Syria have been captured by the Islamic State and sold into sex slavery. But one Iraqi man is trying to save them by buying sex slaves in order to free and reunite them with their families. As the Christian Post reports, “an Iraqi man, who remains nameless, disguises himself as a human trafficking dealer in order to ‘infiltrate’ the Islamic State and get the militants to sell him sex slaves. But in...
The Only Solution to World Poverty
One of the primary assumptions of the modern age is that all choices are multiple choice. Whether we are choosing the color of the car we drive, the occupation that we will work, or the lifestyle we will live, choice is the dominate paradigm. While the expansion of choices has, in many ways, expanded human flourishing, it has also led, in some areas, to a false belief that merely wanting something to be multiple choice will make it so. But...
The 7 Best Super Bowl Commercials About Vocation and Stewardship
Contrary to the trite assertion made every year by people who don’t know how to appreciate football, it is not really true that mercials the best thing about the Super Bowl (at least not always). Sure, it seems that way because the television viewer is mercials than actual game play (in an average game, theratio mercials to playing time is seven to one). The reality, however, is that most of mercials aren’t all that memorable. Only a few stand out...
How ‘Downton Abbey’ Shows Income Inequality Doesn’t Matter
After what seemed to be an interminably long wait, Downton Abbey, a British period drama on PBS, recently returned to America. Many of us who have been hooked on the show for four seasons tune in each Sunday night to watch the new twists in the saga of the Earl and Countess of Grantham, their household, and their servants. But as with most pop culture artifacts, this series about Victorian England is having a subversive effect on the views of...
Communion and Consumerism
“Consumption serves, sustains and munity—above all the munity,” says Rev. Gregory Jensen in this week’s Acton Commentary. Consumption is not an end in itself but has a purpose. We are, Schmemann says, called by God “to propagate and have dominion over the earth”; that is to say, consumption serves human flourishing. The first chapters of Genesis portray creation as “one all-embracing banquet table,” foreshadowing a central theme in the New Testament. In the Kingdom of God we will “eat and...
Spirit Empowerment in the Economic Order
In the latest Journal of Markets and Morality, Joseph Gorra reviews Dr. Charlie Self’s new book,Flourishing Churches and Communities, calling it a “joyous, practical, and insightful primer to the integration of ‘faith, work, and economics” that will inspire “a pathway for leaders of Pentecostal thought to reflect on public life in a renewed way.” The book is one of four tradition-specific primers from the Acton Institute, and although it focuses specifically on a Pentecostal perspective, Gorra rightly observes that Self...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved