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461 results for “eyeinhand”
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Heute habe ich erfolgreich einen #Drucker repariert. Nach langer Standzeit war bei einem Epson Workforce 7720 der Druckkopfbereich für gelb eingetrocknet, die anderen Bereiche ließen sich mit mehrmaligem Reinigen streifenfrei machen.
Eine Riesenhilfe bei der #Reparatur war folgendes Video:
https://invidious.perennialte.ch/GsQVsUwrQwMHier wird der Druckkopf *einhändig* entfernt 😀🤯
Mit warmen Wasser und Isopropanol gespült, der Drucker druckt wieder wie er soll, Gerät #gerettet.
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Mor er tydeligvis alt for opptatt til å klø frøkna på stumpen...
Også i et møblert hjem, da gitt!!
"Øyh!! Ta et hint FFS!! Denne rævva klør seg ikke på egenhånd!!" 😅
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Man nennt es #Altweibersommer , und wenn es so schön aussieht, sollte man sich aufs #Fahrrad schwingen. Man sollte aber wissen, dass der Begriff "Altweibersommer" von den jetzt durch die Luft fliegenden Spinnenfäden herrührt, die an die dünnen grauen Haaren "alter Weiber" erinnern sollen. Heute war es so extrem, wie ich es noch nie erlebt habe: Ich fuhr fast nur einhändig, weil ich mir dauernd das Zeugs aus dem Gesicht wischen musste. Ich sah aus, als wäre ich durch Zuckerwatte gefahren 🙄
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Appropos daytrading og løgner. Og Høyres tidslinje med Finnes skyld og Solbergs uskyld. Husker dere da statssekretæren til Erna, Peder Egseth, tok kontakt med Molde-ordfører Torgeir Dahl for å komme med et utspill mot Oslos håndtering av covid? "Han hadde gjort det helt på egenhånd". Men han beholdt jobben.
#NorskTut #politikk #Høyre #ErnaSolberg #ErnaErStjerna #daytrading #Finnes #covid #corona
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Appropos daytrading og løgner. Og Høyres tidslinje med Finnes skyld og Solbergs uskyld. Husker dere da statssekretæren til Erna, Peder Egseth, tok kontakt med Molde-ordfører Torgeir Dahl for å komme med et utspill mot Oslos håndtering av covid? "Han hadde gjort det helt på egenhånd". Men han beholdt jobben.
#NorskTut #politikk #Høyre #ErnaSolberg #ErnaErStjerna #daytrading #Finnes #covid #corona
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Appropos daytrading og løgner. Og Høyres tidslinje med Finnes skyld og Solbergs uskyld. Husker dere da statssekretæren til Erna, Peder Egseth, tok kontakt med Molde-ordfører Torgeir Dahl for å komme med et utspill mot Oslos håndtering av covid? "Han hadde gjort det helt på egenhånd". Men han beholdt jobben.
#NorskTut #politikk #Høyre #ErnaSolberg #ErnaErStjerna #daytrading #Finnes #covid #corona
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Appropos daytrading og løgner. Og Høyres tidslinje med Finnes skyld og Solbergs uskyld. Husker dere da statssekretæren til Erna, Peder Egseth, tok kontakt med Molde-ordfører Torgeir Dahl for å komme med et utspill mot Oslos håndtering av covid? "Han hadde gjort det helt på egenhånd". Men han beholdt jobben.
#NorskTut #politikk #Høyre #ErnaSolberg #ErnaErStjerna #daytrading #Finnes #covid #corona
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Der verzweifelte Versuch des Lieferdienstes #Gorillas, die durch heftige Proteste der Belegschaft und schlechte Presse ins Gerede gekommene Bude um jeden Preis betriebsratsfrei zu verticken, wird immer bizarrer. Jetzt soll das versaute Image und die aufmüpfige Belegschaft kurz vor einem Gerichtstermin auf #Franchise-Nehmer abgeladen werden. Die potentiellen Betreiber solcher Franchise-Warehouses werden sich wohl zweimal überlegen, ob sie sich den absehbaren Ärger mit den rebellischen #Ridern wirklich einhandeln wollen...
https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/gorillas-will-in-berlin-franchise-modell-einfuehren-a-c8fde46a-0096-44b0-98ac-191ea63ebd9e -
Nicht immer wird sich die Europäische Union darauf verlassen können, dass Querulanten und Blockierer wie Viktor Orban bei demokratischen Wahlen verschwinden. Die kontroverse Diskussion um eine Abschaffung oder Einschränkung des Einstimmigkeitsprinzips in der EU geht also weiter. Bundesaußenminister Wadephul hat gerade eine grundlegende Reform der EU-Entscheidungsprozesse mit einer Abschaffung des Einstimmigkeitsprinzips vorgeschlagen und bereits die Unterstützung von zwölf Staaten gefunden. Bei den Feiern zum Tag der Europäischen Einigung am 9. Mai war der Ruf nach einem Ende des Einstimmigkeitsprinzips unüberhörbar.
Die Vorgabe der Einstimmigkeit mag durchaus Sinn haben. Sie ist ein Zeichen von Verlässlichkeit, schützt die Souveränität der Mitgliedstaaten und bietet Schutz vor Überraschungen und Übervorteilungen. Sie fördert die Konsensbildung und bewirkt, dass die Entscheidungen der EU eine hohe Legitimität aufweisen.
Andererseits wirkt das Erfordernis der Einstimmigkeit als Entwicklungshemmnis und Fortschrittsbremse, wenn einzelne Mitgliedstaaten die Notwendigkeit einer Anpassung an Änderungen der wirtschafts- und geopolitischen Lage nicht erkennen können oder wollen. Der Zwang zu Einvernehmlichkeit führt zur Einigung auf den kleinsten gemeinsamen Nenner und schwächt die EU. Besonders bedenklich ist das Verfahren, wenn die Zustimmung an sachfremde Bedingungen geknüpft wird oder wenn versucht wird, im Gegenzug auf anderen Handlungsfeldern eigennützige Vorteile auszuhandeln. (wie es Orban getan hat), Solch ein Veto wirkt dann wie eine Erpressung.
Wadephul erwartet, dass die EU flexibler und innovativer wird und sich stärker der aktuellen Realität anpasst. Das Einstimmigkeitsprinzip hindere sie bislang oft daran, geopolitisch zügig und wirksam tätig zu werden. Daher greift er frühere Vorschläge für ein Kerneuropa auf. „In Politikbereichen, in denen gemeinsame Fortschritte mit allen 27 Mitgliedstaaten absehbar nicht erreichbar sind,“ will er mit einer kleineren Gruppe an Staaten vorangehen. Hier wären dann Mehrheitsentscheidungen möglich. Es müssten nicht sofort alle mitmachen, zumal sich gezeigt habe, dass andere Staaten später nachzögen. Beim Beitritt neuer Staaten wäre z.B. denkbar, ihr Stimmrecht stufenweise zu gestalten. Ansonsten würde sich die EU weitere Vetokandidaten einhandeln.
Die Neuregelung soll den Initiatoren zufolge vor allem in der Gemeinsamen Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik angewendet werden, wo derzeit das Prinzip der Einstimmigkeit gilt. Staaten, die nicht mitmachen, behindern dann nicht diejenigen, die vorangehen wollen. Bei einer qualifizierten Mehrheit könnten die Entscheidungen der EU rascher getroffen werden. Die Suche nach Konsens müsse nicht aufgegeben werden, würde aber durch die Abschaffung von Blockadehaltungen erleichtert. Allerdings müssten, um das Einstimmigkeitsprinzip abzuschaffen oder abzumildern, wiederum alle 27 Mitgliedstaaten zustimmen.
Das Europäische Parlament hat in den vergangenen Jahren mehr als 40 mal Pläne erstellt und Beschlüsse gefasst, um das Einstimmigkeitsprinzip abzuschaffen und durch qualifizierte Mehrheitsentscheidungen zu ersetzen. Vor allem in den Schlüsselbereichen sollen Blockaden durch einzelne Mitgliedstaaten verhindert werden. Dazu legte das Parlament eine Reihe pragmatischer Vorschläge vor. Der Europäische Rat wurde aufgefordert, ein Verfahren zur Änderung der EU-Verträge einzuleiten. Bislang ist das nicht erfolgt, zumal solche Modifikationen die Zustimmung aller Mitgliedstaaten bedingen.
Das Parlament legte dazu einen konkreten Zeitplan vor. Bis Ende 2023 sollen Mehrheitsentscheidungen bei Sanktionen, Energiesteuern und Haushaltsfragen möglich werden, bis Ende 2024 sollen internationale Verträge in der Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik folgen. Als geeignetes Instrument werden sogenannte Passerelle-Klauseln empfohlen, die freiwillige Vereinbarungen vorsehen, wonach für bestimmte Angelegenheiten eine qualifizierte Mehrheit ausreicht. Doch auch für solche Übereinkünfte ist Einstimmigkeit erforderlich.
Sanktionen oder vergleichbare Maßnahmen zur Einbindung von widerstrebenden Mitgliedstaaten kennt die EU nicht. Da kann nur Überzeugungsarbeit helfen. Ein formeller Ausschluss von Mitgliedstaaten ist nicht vorgesehen. Jedoch ist in der Vergangenheit schon mehrfach gefordert worden, eine solche Möglichkeit zu schaffen. Bei schwerwiegenden Verletzungen der Grundwerte (Demokratie, Rechtsstaatlichkeit) können bestimmte Mitgliedschaftsrechte, z.B. das Stimmrecht, suspendiert werden. Um eine solche Strafe zu beschließen, bedarf es der Einstimmigkeit. Alternativ kann die EU Geldzahlungen kürzen, wenn Rechtsstaatsdefizite bestehen.
Das Einstimmigkeitsprinzip der EU gilt nur in bestimmten Bereichen, nämlich solchen, die von den Mitgliedstaaten als sensibel betrachtet werden. Im Lissabon-Vertrag von 1.12.2009 hat die EU den Umfang der Entscheidungen, die mehrheitlich getroffen werden können, ausgeweitet. In diesem Abkommen wurde auch erstmals die Möglichkeit eingeführt, freiwillig aus der EU auszutreten. Der Europäische Rat hat die Punkte mit Einstimmigkeitsvoraussetzung wie folgt aufgelistet. Eine Stimmenthaltung steht der Annahme von Beschlüssen, für die eine Einstimmigkeit erforderlich ist, nicht entgegen.
~ Gemeinsame Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik (einschl. Migrationspolitik, Militäreinsätze, Sanktionen)
~ Gewährung neuer Rechte für EU-Bürger/innen
~ Aufnahme weiterer Staaten
~ steuerliche Harmonisierung nationaler Rechtsvorschriften
~ EU-Finanzen, vor allem Eigenmittel
~ ausgewählte Bestimmungen in der Justiz- und Innenpolitik
~ Harmonisierung nationaler Rechtsvorschriften im Bereich der Sozialen Sicherheit
Die Liste belegt, warum es so schwierig ist, das Prinzip der Einstimmigkeit abzuschaffen oder abzuschwächen. Hier finden wir besonders wichtige Themenbereiche, bei denen leicht erkennbar wird, dass zwischen den Mitgliedstaaten Meinungsunterschiede entstehen und die Einstimmigkeit verhindern können. Bei Migrationspolitik, Sanktionen, Militäreinsätzen und Aufnahme neuer Mitgliedstaaten, aber auch bei den Finanzen und Gesetzgebung wird rasch deutlich, welche Unvereinbarkeiten auftauchen können.
Das Erfordernis der Einstimmigkeit gilt nur für den Ministerrat. Dagegen reichen bei Abstimmungen in der Kommission und im Parlament einfache Mehrheiten. Die EU-Kommission entscheidet in wöchentlichen Sitzungen als Kollegium, meist durch einfache Mehrheit der 27 Kommissare, wobei in wichtigen Themen ein schriftliches und in Routineangelegenheit ein mündliche Verfahren genutzt wird. Es gilt das Prinzip der Kollegialität, wonach alle Mitglieder die Beschlüsse mittragen.
Das Europäische Parlament stimmt über Gesetzesvorschläge überwiegend mit einfacher Mehrheit der abgegebenen Stimmen ab. Bei Zweifeln erfolgt eine elektronische Abstimmung. Bei Rechtsakten wird namentlich abgestimmt. In Sonderfällen ist eine absolute Mehrheit vorgeschrieben. Das Parlament ist nicht nach Nationalitäten, sondern nach politischen Fraktionen organisiert. Es spielt eine zentrale Rolle bei der Gesetzgebung und der Wahl der Kommission.
Schon heute gilt in 80 Prozent aller Fälle in der EU das Prinzip der qualifizierten Mehrheitsentscheidung. Dabei müssen mindestens 55% der Mitgliedstaaten mit Ja stimmen – das sind 15 von 27 – und sie müssen zusammen mindestens 65% der gesamten EU-Bevölkerung repräsentieren. Theoretisch gibt es auch schon jetzt die Möglichkeit, das Einstimmigkeitsprinzip durch sogenannte ‘Brückenklauseln‘ (Passerelle-Lösungen) zu umgehen. Die Mitgliedstaaten müssen sich dazu darauf einigen, dass für bestimmte Angelegenheiten eine qualifizierte Mehrheit ausreicht. Diese seit 2009 mögliche Ausnahmeklausel bedingt jedoch, dass ihr alle Staaten zustimmen. Daher ist sie bisher noch nie angewandt worden.
Über Heiner Jüttner:
Der Autor war von 1972 bis 1982 FDP-Mitglied, 1980 Bundestagskandidat, 1981-1982 Vorsitzender in Aachen, 1982-1983 Landesvorsitzender der Liberalen Demokraten NRW, 1984 bis 1991 Ratsmitglied der Grünen in Aachen, 1991-98 Beigeordneter der Stadt Aachen. 1999–2007 kaufmännischer Geschäftsführer der Wassergewinnungs- und -aufbereitungsgesellschaft Nordeifel, die die Stadt Aachen und den Kreis Aachen mit Trinkwasser beliefert.
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Book Review: A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell
Most political arguments feel like they are about specific policies: tax rates, minimum wage laws, immigration quotas, criminal sentencing guidelines. Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, first published in 1987, makes a compelling case that this is an illusion.
The real disagreements, he argues, run much deeper than any particular policy debate. They trace back to fundamentally different assumptions about human nature itself, assumptions so basic that most people hold them without ever having examined them consciously. That idea alone makes this one of the more genuinely illuminating books written about political and economic thought in the past half century.
Who Is Thomas Sowell?
Thomas Sowell was born in 1930 in Gastonia, North Carolina, grew up in Harlem, and came to economics through a path that included leaving high school early, working manual jobs, serving in the Marines during the Korean War era, and eventually earning a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Milton Friedman.
He spent most of his career as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and authored more than 30 books on economics, history, culture, and social policy. His best-known work, Basic Economics, introduced millions of general readers to economic thinking without a single graph or equation. A Conflict of Visions is a different kind of book, more philosophical and more demanding, but it may ultimately be his most important contribution to how people think about ideas and ideology. He retired from his syndicated newspaper column in 2016.
Buy A Conflict of Visions on Amazon
What the Book Is About
The central argument of A Conflict of Visions is that the recurring disagreements between what we loosely call the political left and the political right are not primarily the result of different values, different levels of intelligence, or different amounts of compassion. They are the result of two fundamentally different visions of human nature, which Sowell calls the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.
The constrained vision holds that human nature is essentially fixed. People are self-interested, limited in their knowledge and rationality, and prone to error in predictable ways. Because human nature cannot be meaningfully improved, social systems must be designed to work within those constraints, channeling self-interest through institutions, laws, traditions, and incentive structures rather than trying to appeal to altruism or cultivate virtue directly. The market economy, common law, and constitutional checks and balances are all examples of institutions built around the constrained vision. Adam Smith is Sowell’s primary example of a constrained vision thinker.
The unconstrained vision holds that human nature is malleable and that people are capable of significant moral and intellectual improvement given the right conditions, education, and leadership. Social problems are not inherent to human nature but are the result of flawed institutions, bad incentives, or insufficient knowledge among decision-makers. If the right people, with the right understanding, are in a position to design better systems, human welfare can be dramatically improved. William Godwin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are Sowell’s primary examples of unconstrained vision thinkers.
Sowell is careful to note that these are not perfectly binary categories. Most people and most ideological traditions draw on elements of both visions. But he argues that one or the other tends to dominate in any given thinker’s worldview, and that the resulting differences in how people see human nature lead almost inevitably to different conclusions about trade-offs, process versus outcomes, and the role of expertise and authority in social decision-making.
The book then traces how these two visions play out across a remarkably wide range of debates, including war and peace, equality, power, and the role of law, showing how the same underlying disagreement about human nature generates consistent patterns of political disagreement across centuries and across cultures.
Buy A Conflict of Visions on Amazon
Lessons Readers Can Take Away
The most important lesson of A Conflict of Visions is also the most humbling: most of us walk around with a set of deep assumptions about human nature that we have never examined and that drive our political and economic opinions far more than the specific facts of any particular debate. Becoming aware of those assumptions is a genuine act of intellectual growth.
For readers interested in personal finance and economics, this has direct practical value. The constrained vision has obvious implications for how you think about your own financial behavior. If human nature is fixed and self-interest is a constant, then the most reliable financial strategies are those that work with human psychology rather than against it. Automatic contributions to a savings account or retirement fund, for example, do not rely on sustained willpower or virtue. They channel behavior through structure, which is exactly what constrained vision thinking recommends.
The unconstrained vision, by contrast, tends to produce financial advice that asks people to simply try harder, be more disciplined, and make better choices through conscious effort. That advice is not wrong, but it often underestimates how difficult sustained behavioral change is in the absence of structural support. Understanding the difference between these two approaches can help you design your own financial life more realistically.
A second lesson is about the nature of trade-offs versus solutions. Constrained vision thinkers tend to see trade-offs everywhere, because resources are limited and human nature imposes real constraints on what is achievable. Unconstrained vision thinkers tend to see problems as having solutions, if only the right policies or the right people are applied to them. In personal finance, the constrained vision is more useful. There are no solutions to the tension between spending and saving, only trade-offs. Accepting that reality is the beginning of a realistic financial plan.
A third lesson is about the value of process over outcomes. Constrained vision thinkers tend to trust evolved institutions and established processes, such as markets, legal systems, and democratic deliberation, because those systems encode accumulated knowledge that no individual fully possesses. Unconstrained vision thinkers tend to be more willing to override existing processes in favor of outcomes that seem clearly better to the experts involved. For investors, the parallel is between trusting a systematic, rules-based approach to investing, such as consistent contributions to a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, versus trying to beat the market through active management based on the belief that sufficiently smart analysts can identify the right outcomes in advance. The evidence on that particular question has generally favored the constrained vision.
Buy A Conflict of Visions on Amazon
Criticisms of the Book
A Conflict of Visions has earned genuine admiration across ideological lines, but it has also attracted substantive criticism that is worth engaging with honestly.
The most common critique is that Sowell’s framework, despite his stated evenhandedness, consistently portrays the constrained vision in a more favorable light. Critics point out that the constrained vision’s emphasis on evolved institutions and the limits of human reason has historically been used to defend arrangements that were not merely imperfect but actively unjust, including slavery, legal segregation, and the exclusion of women from political and economic life. The unconstrained vision’s willingness to override tradition in pursuit of better outcomes is precisely what drove the abolition movement, the suffrage movement, and the civil rights movement. A framework that treats institutional conservatism as the more intellectually humble position has to reckon with that history.
A second criticism is that the binary of constrained versus unconstrained, however useful as a rough heuristic, oversimplifies the actual diversity of political and philosophical thought. Many serious thinkers do not map cleanly onto either category, and Sowell’s assignment of historical figures to one vision or the other sometimes requires ignoring significant portions of their work.
A third critique is that the book is more descriptive than prescriptive. It explains why people disagree with remarkable clarity, but it does not ultimately tell you which vision is more correct, or how to adjudicate between them when they produce conflicting policy recommendations. Readers looking for a resolution to the tensions Sowell describes will not find one here.
These are legitimate criticisms of a serious book, and they are reasons to read widely rather than reasons to avoid this particular work.
Should You Buy This Book?
Yes, and fairly emphatically so, with the understanding of what kind of book it is.
A Conflict of Visions is not a personal finance book in any conventional sense. It will not tell you how to budget, which index funds to buy, or how to build an emergency fund. What it will do is give you a more sophisticated framework for understanding why people disagree so consistently about economic and political questions, and for examining the assumptions that drive your own opinions about money, markets, and policy.
For readers who have already worked through books like Basic Economics by Sowell himself, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, or The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, A Conflict of Visions represents a natural next step in building a more complete intellectual foundation. It is the kind of book that changes how you think rather than simply adding to what you know, and those books are rarer and more valuable than any other kind.
It is worth noting that the book is academic in its pacing. It rewards careful reading rather than skimming. If you prefer books that move quickly through concrete examples and practical recommendations, this one will require some patience. The payoff is real, but it takes longer to arrive than it does in Sowell’s more accessible works.
Final Thoughts
A Conflict of Visions is one of those books that readers tend to describe as clarifying. After finishing it, you will find yourself noticing the underlying vision in op-eds, policy debates, financial arguments, and casual conversations about economics in ways you likely did not before. That kind of perceptual shift is rare and valuable.
Thomas Sowell wrote this book not to settle the debate between the constrained and unconstrained visions but to show that the debate is real, that it is coherent, and that understanding it is prerequisite to thinking seriously about almost any social or economic question. On that count, he succeeds.
The lessons it offers about human nature, trade-offs, the limits of expertise, and the value of process over outcomes translate directly into better financial thinking. The investor who trusts a systematic process over their own ability to outsmart the market, the saver who builds structure into their habits rather than relying on willpower, and the consumer who thinks carefully about second-order effects before making a major financial decision are all, in their own way, applying the constrained vision to their personal finances.
That is not a bad framework to carry with you.
Buy A Conflict of Visions on Amazon
#AConflictOfVisions #BasicEconomics #BookReviews #Books #MiltonFriedman #Politics #ThomasSowell -
Book Review: A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell
Most political arguments feel like they are about specific policies: tax rates, minimum wage laws, immigration quotas, criminal sentencing guidelines. Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, first published in 1987, makes a compelling case that this is an illusion.
The real disagreements, he argues, run much deeper than any particular policy debate. They trace back to fundamentally different assumptions about human nature itself, assumptions so basic that most people hold them without ever having examined them consciously. That idea alone makes this one of the more genuinely illuminating books written about political and economic thought in the past half century.
Who Is Thomas Sowell?
Thomas Sowell was born in 1930 in Gastonia, North Carolina, grew up in Harlem, and came to economics through a path that included leaving high school early, working manual jobs, serving in the Marines during the Korean War era, and eventually earning a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia, and a doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Milton Friedman.
He spent most of his career as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and authored more than 30 books on economics, history, culture, and social policy. His best-known work, Basic Economics, introduced millions of general readers to economic thinking without a single graph or equation. A Conflict of Visions is a different kind of book, more philosophical and more demanding, but it may ultimately be his most important contribution to how people think about ideas and ideology. He retired from his syndicated newspaper column in 2016.
Buy A Conflict of Visions on Amazon
What the Book Is About
The central argument of A Conflict of Visions is that the recurring disagreements between what we loosely call the political left and the political right are not primarily the result of different values, different levels of intelligence, or different amounts of compassion. They are the result of two fundamentally different visions of human nature, which Sowell calls the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.
The constrained vision holds that human nature is essentially fixed. People are self-interested, limited in their knowledge and rationality, and prone to error in predictable ways. Because human nature cannot be meaningfully improved, social systems must be designed to work within those constraints, channeling self-interest through institutions, laws, traditions, and incentive structures rather than trying to appeal to altruism or cultivate virtue directly. The market economy, common law, and constitutional checks and balances are all examples of institutions built around the constrained vision. Adam Smith is Sowell’s primary example of a constrained vision thinker.
The unconstrained vision holds that human nature is malleable and that people are capable of significant moral and intellectual improvement given the right conditions, education, and leadership. Social problems are not inherent to human nature but are the result of flawed institutions, bad incentives, or insufficient knowledge among decision-makers. If the right people, with the right understanding, are in a position to design better systems, human welfare can be dramatically improved. William Godwin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are Sowell’s primary examples of unconstrained vision thinkers.
Sowell is careful to note that these are not perfectly binary categories. Most people and most ideological traditions draw on elements of both visions. But he argues that one or the other tends to dominate in any given thinker’s worldview, and that the resulting differences in how people see human nature lead almost inevitably to different conclusions about trade-offs, process versus outcomes, and the role of expertise and authority in social decision-making.
The book then traces how these two visions play out across a remarkably wide range of debates, including war and peace, equality, power, and the role of law, showing how the same underlying disagreement about human nature generates consistent patterns of political disagreement across centuries and across cultures.
Buy A Conflict of Visions on Amazon
Lessons Readers Can Take Away
The most important lesson of A Conflict of Visions is also the most humbling: most of us walk around with a set of deep assumptions about human nature that we have never examined and that drive our political and economic opinions far more than the specific facts of any particular debate. Becoming aware of those assumptions is a genuine act of intellectual growth.
For readers interested in personal finance and economics, this has direct practical value. The constrained vision has obvious implications for how you think about your own financial behavior. If human nature is fixed and self-interest is a constant, then the most reliable financial strategies are those that work with human psychology rather than against it. Automatic contributions to a savings account or retirement fund, for example, do not rely on sustained willpower or virtue. They channel behavior through structure, which is exactly what constrained vision thinking recommends.
The unconstrained vision, by contrast, tends to produce financial advice that asks people to simply try harder, be more disciplined, and make better choices through conscious effort. That advice is not wrong, but it often underestimates how difficult sustained behavioral change is in the absence of structural support. Understanding the difference between these two approaches can help you design your own financial life more realistically.
A second lesson is about the nature of trade-offs versus solutions. Constrained vision thinkers tend to see trade-offs everywhere, because resources are limited and human nature imposes real constraints on what is achievable. Unconstrained vision thinkers tend to see problems as having solutions, if only the right policies or the right people are applied to them. In personal finance, the constrained vision is more useful. There are no solutions to the tension between spending and saving, only trade-offs. Accepting that reality is the beginning of a realistic financial plan.
A third lesson is about the value of process over outcomes. Constrained vision thinkers tend to trust evolved institutions and established processes, such as markets, legal systems, and democratic deliberation, because those systems encode accumulated knowledge that no individual fully possesses. Unconstrained vision thinkers tend to be more willing to override existing processes in favor of outcomes that seem clearly better to the experts involved. For investors, the parallel is between trusting a systematic, rules-based approach to investing, such as consistent contributions to a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, versus trying to beat the market through active management based on the belief that sufficiently smart analysts can identify the right outcomes in advance. The evidence on that particular question has generally favored the constrained vision.
Buy A Conflict of Visions on Amazon
Criticisms of the Book
A Conflict of Visions has earned genuine admiration across ideological lines, but it has also attracted substantive criticism that is worth engaging with honestly.
The most common critique is that Sowell’s framework, despite his stated evenhandedness, consistently portrays the constrained vision in a more favorable light. Critics point out that the constrained vision’s emphasis on evolved institutions and the limits of human reason has historically been used to defend arrangements that were not merely imperfect but actively unjust, including slavery, legal segregation, and the exclusion of women from political and economic life. The unconstrained vision’s willingness to override tradition in pursuit of better outcomes is precisely what drove the abolition movement, the suffrage movement, and the civil rights movement. A framework that treats institutional conservatism as the more intellectually humble position has to reckon with that history.
A second criticism is that the binary of constrained versus unconstrained, however useful as a rough heuristic, oversimplifies the actual diversity of political and philosophical thought. Many serious thinkers do not map cleanly onto either category, and Sowell’s assignment of historical figures to one vision or the other sometimes requires ignoring significant portions of their work.
A third critique is that the book is more descriptive than prescriptive. It explains why people disagree with remarkable clarity, but it does not ultimately tell you which vision is more correct, or how to adjudicate between them when they produce conflicting policy recommendations. Readers looking for a resolution to the tensions Sowell describes will not find one here.
These are legitimate criticisms of a serious book, and they are reasons to read widely rather than reasons to avoid this particular work.
Should You Buy This Book?
Yes, and fairly emphatically so, with the understanding of what kind of book it is.
A Conflict of Visions is not a personal finance book in any conventional sense. It will not tell you how to budget, which index funds to buy, or how to build an emergency fund. What it will do is give you a more sophisticated framework for understanding why people disagree so consistently about economic and political questions, and for examining the assumptions that drive your own opinions about money, markets, and policy.
For readers who have already worked through books like Basic Economics by Sowell himself, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, or The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, A Conflict of Visions represents a natural next step in building a more complete intellectual foundation. It is the kind of book that changes how you think rather than simply adding to what you know, and those books are rarer and more valuable than any other kind.
It is worth noting that the book is academic in its pacing. It rewards careful reading rather than skimming. If you prefer books that move quickly through concrete examples and practical recommendations, this one will require some patience. The payoff is real, but it takes longer to arrive than it does in Sowell’s more accessible works.
Final Thoughts
A Conflict of Visions is one of those books that readers tend to describe as clarifying. After finishing it, you will find yourself noticing the underlying vision in op-eds, policy debates, financial arguments, and casual conversations about economics in ways you likely did not before. That kind of perceptual shift is rare and valuable.
Thomas Sowell wrote this book not to settle the debate between the constrained and unconstrained visions but to show that the debate is real, that it is coherent, and that understanding it is prerequisite to thinking seriously about almost any social or economic question. On that count, he succeeds.
The lessons it offers about human nature, trade-offs, the limits of expertise, and the value of process over outcomes translate directly into better financial thinking. The investor who trusts a systematic process over their own ability to outsmart the market, the saver who builds structure into their habits rather than relying on willpower, and the consumer who thinks carefully about second-order effects before making a major financial decision are all, in their own way, applying the constrained vision to their personal finances.
That is not a bad framework to carry with you.
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