Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, economic historian, and social theorist.
With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he is a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative.
He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution
and was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.
Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, and grew up in Harlem, New York City. Due to poverty and difficulties at home, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and worked various odd jobs, eventually serving in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. Afterward, he graduated with honors from Harvard University in 1958. He earned a master's degree in economics from Columbia University the next year, and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. In his academic career, he held professorships at Cornell University, Brandeis University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked at think tanks, including the Urban Institute. Since 1977, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy.
Sowell was an important figure to the conservative movement during the Reagan era, influencing fellow economist Walter E. Williams and U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. He was offered a position as Federal Trade Commissioner in the Ford administration and was considered for posts including U.S. Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, but declined both times.
Sowell is the author of more than 45 books on a variety of subjects, including politics, economics, education, and race, and he has been a syndicated columnist in more than 150 newspapers. His views are described as conservative, especially on social issues; libertarian, especially on economics; or libertarian-conservative. He has said he may be best labeled as a libertarian, though he disagrees with the "libertarian movement" on some issues, such as national defense.
Early life
Sowell was born in 1930 into a poor family in Gastonia, North Carolina. His father died shortly before he was born, leaving behind Sowell's mother, a housemaid who already had four children. A great-aunt and her two grown daughters adopted Sowell and raised him. His mother died a few years later of complications while giving birth to another child. In his autobiography A Personal Odyssey, Sowell wrote that his childhood encounters with white people were so limited that he did not know blond was a hair color. He recalls that his first memories were living in a small wooden house in Charlotte, which he stated was typical of most black neighborhoods. It was located on an unpaved street and had no electricity or running water. When Sowell was nine, he moved with his extended family from North Carolina to Harlem, New York City. He and his aunt were forced to room in other people's apartments, due to frequent family quarrels.Sowell qualified for Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious academic high school in New York City; he was the first in his family to study beyond the sixth grade. However, he was forced to drop out at age 17 because of financial difficulties and family quarreling. He worked a number of odd jobs, including long hours at a machine shop, and as a delivery man for Western Union. He also tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948. Sowell was drafted into the armed services in 1951 during the Korean War and was assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps. Although Sowell opposed the war and experienced racism, he was able to find fulfillment as a photographer, which eventually became his favorite hobby. He was honorably discharged in 1952.
Higher education and early career
After leaving military service, Sowell completed high school, took a civil service job in Washington, D.C., and attended night classes at Howard University, a historically black college. His high scores on the College Board examinations and recommendations by two professors helped him gain admission to Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He earned a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University the following year. Sowell had initially chosen Columbia University to study under George Stigler, who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, but when he learned that Stigler had moved to the University of Chicago, he followed him there and studied for his doctorate under Stigler upon arriving in the fall of 1959.Sowell has said that he was a Marxist during his 20s. One of his earliest professional publications was a sympathetic examination of Marxist thought vs. Marxist–Leninist practice. But in 1960, he began to change his mind toward supporting free-market economics after studying the possible impact of minimum wages on unemployment of sugar-industry workers in Puerto Rico, as a U.S. Department of Labor intern. Workers at the department were surprised by his questioning, he said, and he concluded, "they certainly weren't going to engage in any scrutiny of the law".
Sowell received his Doctor of Philosophy in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. His dissertation was titled "Say's law and the General glut Controversy".
Academic career
From 1965 to 1969, Sowell was an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. Writing 30 years later about the 1969 seizure of Willard Straight Hall by black students at Cornell, Sowell characterized the students as "hoodlums" with "serious academic problems admitted under lower academic standards", and noted, "it so happens that the pervasive racism that black students supposedly encountered at every turn on campus and in town was not apparent to me during the four years that I taught at Cornell and lived in Ithaca."Sowell has taught economics at Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst College, and the University of California, Los Angeles. At Howard, Sowell wrote, he was offered the position as head of the economics department, but he declined. Since 1980, he has been a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds a fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman, his mentor. The Hoover appointment, because it did not involve teaching, gave him more time for his numerous writings. In addition, Sowell appeared several times on William F. Buckley Jr.'s show Firing Line, during which he discussed the economics of race and privatization. Sowell has written that he gradually lost faith in the academic system, citing low academic standards and counterproductive university bureaucracy, and he resolved to leave teaching after his time at the University of California, Los Angeles. In A Personal Odyssey, he recounts, "I had come to Amherst, basically, to find reasons to continue teaching. What I found, instead, were more reasons to abandon an academic career."
In an interview, Sowell said he had been offered a position as Federal Trade Commissioner by the Ford administration in 1976, but that after pursuing the opportunity, he withdrew from consideration to avoid the political games surrounding the position. He said in another interview that he was offered the post of United States Secretary of Education, but declined. In 1980, after Reagan's election, Sowell and Henry Lucas organized the Black Alternatives Conference to bring together black and white conservatives; one attendee was a young Clarence Thomas, then a congressional aide. Sowell was appointed as a member of the Economic Policy Advisory Committee of the Reagan administration, but resigned after the first meeting, disliking travel from the West Coast and lengthy discussions in Washington; of his decision to resign, Sowell cited "the opinion of Milton Friedman, that some individuals can contribute more by staying out of government".
In 1987, Sowell testified in favor of federal appeals court judge Robert Bork during the hearings for Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. In his testimony, Sowell said that Bork was "the most highly qualified nominee of this generation" and that what he viewed as judicial activism, a concept that Bork opposed as a self-described originalist and textualist, "has not been beneficial to minorities."
In a review of Sowell's 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions, Larry D. Nachman in Commentary described Sowell as a leading representative of the Chicago school of economics.
Writings and thought
Themes of Sowell's writing range from social policy on race, ethnic groups, education, and decision-making, to classical and Marxian economics, to the problems of children perceived as having disabilities.Sowell had a nationally syndicated column distributed by Creators Syndicate that was published in Forbes and National Review magazines, and The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The New York Post, and other major newspapers, as well as online on websites such as RealClearPolitics, Townhall, WorldNetDaily, and the Jewish World Review. Sowell commented on current issues, which include liberal media bias; judicial activism and originalism; abortion; minimum wage; universal healthcare; the tension between government policies, programs, and protections and familial autonomy; affirmative action; government bureaucracy; gun control; militancy in U.S. foreign policy; the war on drugs; multiculturalism; mob rule; and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Sowell was the most cited black economist between 1991 and 1995, and second-most cited between 1971 and 1990.
Sowell was a frequent guest on The Rush Limbaugh Show, in conversations with Walter E. Williams, who was a substitute host for Limbaugh.
On December 27, 2016, Sowell announced the end of his syndicated column, writing that, at age 86, "the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long", and cited a desire to focus on his photography hobby.
The TV show Free to Choose, distributed by the Free to Choose Network, features Sowell along with Milton Friedman and a number of other panelists as they discuss the relationship between freedom and individual economic choices. A documentary detailing his career entitled "Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World" was released by the Free to Choose Network in 2021.