Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell (/soʊl/ SOHL; born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, social philosopher, and political commentator. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.[1][2] With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative.[3][4][5] He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.[6][a]
Thomas Sowell
June 30, 1930
Democratic (until 1972)
Independent (after 1972)
2
- U.S. Department of Labor (1961–1962)
- Rutgers University (1962–1963)
- Howard University (1963–1964)
- Cornell University (1965–1969)
- University of Chicago (1967–1968)
- Brandeis University (1969–1970)
- University of California, Los Angeles (1970–1980)
- Urban Institute (1972–1974)
- American Enterprise Institute (1975–1976)
- Stanford University
- Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1976–1977)[a]
- Hoover Institution (1977–present)[b]
- Amherst College (1977–1978)
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- Knowledge and Decisions (1980)
- A Conflict of Visions (1987)
- Inside American Education (1993)
- The Vision of the Anointed (1995)
- Basic Economics (2000)
- Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One (2003)
- Affirmative Action Around the World (2004)
- Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005)
- Intellectuals and Society (2009)
- The Housing Boom and Bust (2010)
- Wealth, Poverty and Politics (2015)
- Charter Schools and Their Enemies (2020)
- Historical analysis of Say's law
- Greenhouse effect
- Dispersed knowledge
- Middleman minorities
- Unintended consequences
- Black redneck theory
- Global analysis of affirmative action
- Einstein syndrome
- Francis Boyer Award (1990)
- American Philosophical Society (1998)
- National Humanities Medal (2002)
- Bradley Prize (2004)
- GetAbstract International Book Award (2008)
Sowell was born in segregated Gastonia, North Carolina, to a poor family, and grew up in Harlem, New York City.[7] 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 took night classes at Howard University and then attended Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958.[7] He earned a master's degree in economics from Columbia University the next year and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.[8] 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.[3][9][10] He was offered a position as Federal Trade Commissioner in the Ford administration,[11] and was considered for posts including U.S. Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration,[12] but declined both times.[11][13]
Sowell is the author of more than 45 books (including revised and new editions) on a variety of subjects including politics, economics, education and race, and he has been a syndicated columnist in more than 150 newspapers.[14][15] His views are described as conservative, especially on social issues;[4][16][17][18] libertarian, especially on economics;[16][19][20] or libertarian-conservative.[21] He has said he may be best labeled as a libertarian, though he disagrees with libertarians on some issues, such as national defense.[22]
Academic career[edit]
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 [who were] 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."[34]
Sowell has taught economics at Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst College, and the University of California, Los Angeles.[28] At Howard, Sowell wrote, he was offered the position as head of the economics department, but he declined.[35] 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.[30][36] The Hoover appointment, because it did not involve teaching, gave him more time for his numerous writings.[12] 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.[35] 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."[35]
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.[11] He said in another interview that he was offered the post of United States Secretary of Education but declined.[13] 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.[37][38] Sowell was appointed as a member of the Economic Policy Advisory Committee of the Reagan administration,[12] 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 (and the example) of Milton Friedman, that some individuals can contribute more by staying out of government".[39]
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."[40]
In a review of Sowell's 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions, Larry D. Nachman in Commentary magazine described Sowell as a leading representative of the Chicago school of economics.[41]
Reception[edit]
Nathan J. Robinson stated that Sowell "is not given much attention by mainstream scholars in the academy, and few of his books are reviewed by major liberal-leaning publications."[88] Economist James B. Stewart wrote a critical review of Black Rednecks and White Liberals, calling it "the latest salvo in Thomas Sowell's continuing crusade to represent allegedly dysfunctional value orientations and behavioral characteristics of African Americans as the principal reasons for persistent economic and social disparities." He also criticized it for downplaying the impact of slavery.[89] Particularly in black communities in the 1980s Sowell became, in historian Michael Ondaatje's words, "persona non grata, someone known to talk about, rather than with, African Americans".[90] Economist Bernadette Chachere,[91] law professor Richard Thompson Ford,[92] and sociologists William Julius Wilson[93] and Richard Coughlin[94] have criticized some of his work.
Criticisms include neglecting discrimination against women in the workforce in Rhetoric or Reality?,[93] the methodology of Race and Culture: A World View,[94] and portrayal of opposing theories in Intellectuals and Race.[92] Economist Jennifer Doleac criticized Discrimination and Disparities, arguing that statistical discrimination is real and pervasive (Sowell argues that existing racial disparities are mostly due to accurate sorting based on underlying characteristics, such as education) and that government intervention can achieve societal goals and make markets work more efficiently.[95] Columnist Steven Pearlstein criticized Wealth, Poverty and Politics.[18]
Classical liberals, libertarians, and other conservatives of different disciplines have received Sowell's work positively.[96][97][98][99] Among these, he has been noted for originality, depth and breadth,[100][101] clarity of expression, and thoroughness of research.[102][101][103] Sowell's publications have been received positively by economists Steven Plaut,[103] Steve H. Hanke[104] James M. Buchanan;[76] and John B. Taylor;[105] philosophers Carl Cohen[106] and Tibor Machan;[107] science historian Michael Shermer;[108] essayist Gerald Early;[4] political scientists Abigail Thernstrom[109] and Charles Murray;[100] psychologists Steven Pinker[110][111] and Jonathan Haidt;[112][113] and Josef Joffe, publisher and editor of Die Zeit.[101] Steve Forbes, in a 2015 column, stated that "it's a scandal that economist Thomas Sowell has not been awarded the Nobel Prize. No one alive has turned out so many insightful, richly researched books."[114]