Racing Against Walter Williams
The death of Walter Williams on December 2, 2020 has persuaded me to come clean on some crucial aspects of my career.
Boys learn early on the playground who the best athletes are. Everyone learns in the classroom who the smartest students are.
From the day that a boy realizes that there is a pecking order in performance, he begins to look for where he is on that hierarchical order of rank. He knows who he cannot possibly beat, and he also knows who is so far down on the performance scale that he does not have to give any thought to being overtaken by that person.
The finest description of this process that I have ever read was written by Jean Shepherd. Shepherd was America’s greatest radio raconteur in terms of both regularity (five nights a week) and quantity (30 years). He wrote and narrated A Christmas Story (1983). He even had a cameo role: the bearded guy in the department store who sends Ralphie to the end of the line. In his book, The Ferrari in the Bedroom (1972), chapter 12 is “The Great Chicken-Clawed Chooser.”
From the day they begin to walk, males just naturally get involved in competitive games of all types and varieties, ranging from kicking a tin can around the street to throwing little sticks up in the air to seeing who can pee the highest up the garage wall. . . . No matter where you go on the face of the earth, under whatever system or culture you can find, males try to see who can throw the dingdong the furthest, catch the kangaroo the quickest, stay underwater the longest, harpoon the most seals or dry and shrink the most Baptist heads (p. 157).
To explain this, he devotes the chapter to the sequence of which kids get picked to play a pickup softball game. I will not go into the details here. If you are male, you have been there. You probably were not the first kid chosen.
When it came to softball, I was the last kid chosen. I was the kid none of the other kids had to worry about, other than the captain of the team, who had to choose me because there was nobody left to play right field. But in the classroom, most of them had to worry about me. Yet it was not until my senior year in high school in just one course, civics, that I was the best student in the class. In fact, I was the best student in the school. That experience shaped the rest of my life. I am writing this article because of it.
You learn to size up the competition early. Sometimes, winning depends on this. Other times, mere survival depends on it. You have to know where you are on the pecking order. It tells you where to focus your efforts. It is a waste of time and effort to try to beat the best. It is not worth your time and effort to try to beat the worst.
By the time I was 21, I wanted to be a Christian economist. In the fall of 1963, when I made this decision regarding my calling in life, I had already identified the man I could not possibly beat in terms of economic performance: Murray Rothbard. Over the summer, I had read three of his recently published books: The Panic of 1819 (1962), Man, Economy, and State (1962), and America’s Great Depression (1963). There was no way that I was going to top that. I wasn’t sure about the pecking order under Rothbard.
My standard was based on two things: precision of argument and clarity of argument. Rothbard wrote flawless prose. His arguments were rigorous. They were carefully crafted, although for Rothbard, carefully crafting an article meant writing it off the top of his head, and then going back to type X's across words. I did not know this in 1963. It would have made the challenge seem even more unsurpassable.
In 1980, I spotted someone who would give Rothbard a run for his money: Thomas Sowell. I read Knowledge and Decisions (1980). I had read one of his articles 15 years earlier, when he was still a Marxist. I was not impressed. In 1980, I was impressed. He took one idea -- accurate knowledge is a scarce resource -- and pursued it down dozens of trails. I was not going to write anything as creative as that book. (Neither was anyone else.)
When Sowell became a newspaper columnist, I realized that I could never match him at this task, either. I regard Sowell as the most well-informed economist ever to write a twice weekly syndicated column.
If I couldn’t beat Rothbard, and I couldn’t beat Sowell, who was next down on the hierarchy? Could I beat him at least occasionally? Could I give him a run for his money?
THEN CAME WALTER WILLIAMS
I targeted Walter. As with Sowell, he wrote a twice-weekly column. He could really crank it out. I wondered if I could match him on this.
I also wondered if I could match him in terms of my ability to explain economic concepts in common language.
He had far more peer-reviewed articles in journals than I ever did. But that was not what I was interested in writing. Also, I did not know how to write the kinds of technical articles that would be accepted by peer-reviewed journals.
One thing that I spotted early in Williams' newspaper column career was this: he was never technical. He never used jargon. He wrote for what he imagined to be an intelligent, curious reader.
Throughout his entire career, the style of those articles never changed. They were cogent. He did not put on airs. He seemed to be talking to the same reader from the beginning of his career until the end. The style didn’t change.
He would often ask a question about economic cause and effect in a specific area. Then he would give the answer. Then he would add this phrase: “If you got this correct, go to the head of the class.” Then he would show how some government agency had not gotten the answer correct. He would then expound on the predictable negative results that the agency's policy makers did not predict.
I searched Google for these terms: “Walter Williams” and “go to the head of the class.” I got 11,500 hits.
His columns reflected the way he taught in a classroom. He was a superb teacher -- not just as a speaker, but also by engaging listeners. I saw him do this on occasion. He loved teaching. In his obituary of Walter, Sowell wrote this: “Walter once said he hoped that, on the day he died, he would have taught a class that day. And that is just the way it was, when he died on Wednesday, December 2, 2020.”
He went out with his boots on. That’s the way to depart. (I want my widow to find me at my desk, my head slumped on top of my 1984 PC AT keyboard. I want the screen to be filled with a number. I think 6 would be good, but 7 would be OK.)
Walter understood early in his career as a columnist to target a specific reader, and then write for that reader in every column for the rest of his career. Over the years, I never came up with just one reader. I would write different articles for different readers. In that sense, I was not a self-disciplined columnist. Walter was.
For the articles that I really cared about, I had a targeted reader in mind: Walter’s grandmother.
WALTER'S GRANDMOTHER
Walter wrote about his grandmother lovingly on many occasions. He gave the indication that she was a Christian lady. She was important in rearing him, which is often the case in black families. Black grandmothers have historically provided the stability and guidance to grandchildren who needed both. (It is not widely recognized, but this was also the case in the Soviet Union. Grandmothers were a major factor in preserving an undercurrent of Christianity that survived the Bolshevik Revolution for three generations.)
He would sometimes ask a question on an examination that related to an economic issue raised in the Bible. He would warn students on the question sheet to take this question seriously. He expected them to provide an answer that in some way was related to economic cause and effect.
That impressed me. My specialized project in life, beginning in 1973, was to go through the entire Bible and ask economic questions regarding hundreds of biblical passages. When it was all over, I had written chapters on over 700 passages. That took me 39 years and 31 volumes.
I decided that my shorter columns on Christian economics should be understandable by Walter’s grandmother, despite the fact that she had departed from this world before I started the project. I assumed that if I could not persuade her of the logic of my position, this was my problem as a writer, not her problem as a reader. It was my responsibility to write in such a way that a person of normal intelligence but above-normal interest in the Bible would be able to follow my logic.
Walter understood that it is the writer’s responsibility to make things cogent for the reader, not the reader's responsibility to follow a poorly constructed argument. But he did not write for his grandmother. She was interested in the Bible. Her attention was focused. He knew that his readers would not be equally focused on the Bible. So, I decided that I would write for her.
I regret now that I never told him this. I had thought about telling him this, but I never did. Once again, a person’s death reminds us of things left unsaid that should have been said. Even more depressing is the thought that things were said that should not have been said. I never had that problem with Walter.
THE RACE IS NOT OVER
Walter is gone, but his legacy as a columnist remains. I still will have him in the back of my mind. I’m still trying to beat him in the marathon. Writers stay in the marathon for as long as they have readers. They may be long gone, but readers are still observing how well they ran the race.
I am not trying to win a gold medal. Of those economists still alive, Sowell is still in the race. I have written that he is the greatest living economist. I sent a copy to Walter in July, which he forwarded to Sowell.
Readers determine who wins writers' races. Different readers conclude that different winners were victorious. This is the intellectual activity known as imputation. Consumers of writing impute value to producers of writing.
I would like to think that some future reader with the same interests in the Bible that Walter’s grandmother had will conclude that I won the race. That reader probably will not be reading a lot of Rothbard, Sowell, and Williams. In this race, I am almost the only runner. I sure hope I win it.
When it comes to performance in classrooms for half a century, plus performance at a typewriter for four decades, plus the ability to make political liberals look silly every time they challenged him, Walter Williams was the gold medalist in my generation. I wish somebody had videotaped all of his classroom lectures over the last 30 years. If only they were on YouTube.