If it's culture that might be interesting to you, and you're still looking at Sowell, I found Immigrations & Cultures and Conquests & Cultures to be excellent.

I'll start a backlog for audio books. I'm not much of a reader, so do you have any further culture-related recommendations? I'm done being frustrated at a lack of culture acknowledgement in public discourse; I'll only be able to advance my theories by going to books, it seems. You'd think it would get brought up in at least 1/5 of discussions about "multiculturalism" or "culture war", but nope.

hatred of middle-men minorities comes from resentment of a single group's success, typically observed by a domestic population that doesn't understand why that group succeeded.

I mostly agree there. But it's slightly complicated by some other factors. Say you're some prole that actually understands how they succeeded and you want to join in too - can you? What if they've already garnered support from governing or regulatory power structures to inhibit competition? A "fuck these guys" attitude is appropriate at that point. But I know little about the history of free markets and whether they ever existed.

I'd wager that in most of those cases where the middlemen minorities got banished/killed, there were a bunch of businessmen waiting to take up those middlemen roles they failed to innovate themselves. That's where a lot of the problem is, in my view. They understood it, but chose to engage jealousy instead of just being angry. If the businesses engaged with the middlemen would just get together and talk, they could probably come to an arrangement that saves them money and creates new infrastructure that makes those middlemen positions obsolete (for some middlemen roles, at least).

The same type of skillset used to discover and innovate business opportunities like middlemen is also used to subvert law. A nation would be nuts to embrace such people unless it's prepared to make their legal system more robust (not that it's 100% bad stuff that can come of it; they might work towards eliminating various forms of corruption). Some poor immigrants aren't gonna be able to influence politics easily, so that's probably a solid reason to ignore their abilities. But they stop being poor without a lot of trouble due to their ability to innovate (I'd even say that they may have been forced to innovate) and gain the ability to move superpowers within a few generations. Maybe it's just proof that money should be disconnected from power influence. You could also argue that negative feedback should be directed towards legislators who failed to adapt, but that gets into an argument about whether a weak man deserves to be conquered by a strong man (and whether the weak have a duty to be conquered).

Further negatives come from what I recognize as jewish culture, but I'll just state one of those: responding hysterically to criticism. There's an eagerness to take the least generous interpretation of criticism ("greedy? that's anti-semitic!"). It shouldn't be hard to understand what a terrible feedback loop this creates, we all saw it in grade school when nerds got bullied. It feeds into other issues like the refusal to adapt to your host culture and a desire to be treated as a victim (I wonder how common self-deprecative humor was 200 years ago). Sowell's point about jews being generic is terrific because it means I might be able to find more sample data sometime (whereever the fuck white armenians went) to see if any of this jewish culture stuff applies to them, which it might if enough circumstances match up to trigger the same evolutionary psychology principles.

So okay, yeah, middlemen have a valid marketable skillset and they provide tremendous innovation opportunities where they pop up. But that's just the positives. I could make a similar argument for sociopaths, a group that I'm actually jealous of because it seems extremely liberating to be a monster incapable of caring for others.

I don't even need to blame middlemen for the existence of managerialism, as I think it's an organic product of other systems (much like a tumor). It doesn't demand a similar skillset, though it can still reward it.