Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is an economist, a social theorist, and a writer. In an age in which many black leaders argue that racial identity determines political ideology, Thomas Sowell has challenged us to reexamine many widely accepted assumptions about identity and ideology ... In evaluating popular perceptions about the role of oppression and discrimination in limiting the success of certain groups, Sowell integrates history and economics to show how the best opportunities for all people—including blacks and women—come through hard work and applied effort in a free and open market.

Fans of his work will be delighted with Sowell's autobiography Personal Odyssey (2000) providing a glimpse in the life of today's most prolific author on liberty. One of his best-known themes is that culture has a decisive impact on the ability of people to thrive. He has provided dramatic examples from around the world of minorities which prospered despite persecution, because their cultures encouraged their people to be resourceful, work hard, save money and persevere. By contrast, politically dominant populations have often had lower incomes which Sowell attributes to negative aspects of their cultures.

Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. As with many others in his neighborhood, he left home early and did not finish high school. The next few years were difficult ones, but eventually he joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and profession: economics. After graduating magna cum laude ... he went on to receive a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago (1968).

Thomas Sowell is one of the most important and respected writers on politics and social policy in America. He is also a popular and widely-syndicated columnist. ... Sowell has published a large volume of writing. His many books, as well as numerous articles and essays, cover a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism, from civil rights to choosing the right college. Moreover, much of his writing is considered ground-breaking work that will outlive the great majority of scholarship done today. ... His writing is always strongly in favor of free-market economic policy and a libertarian social policy.

Awards and Honors:
Rita Ricardo-Campbell and W. Glenn Campbell Uncommon Book Award (1998)
National Humanities Medal (2002)
Bradley Prize (2003)...
Sowell's current research focuses on cultural history in a world perspective, a subject on which he began to write a trilogy in 1982. The trilogy includes Race and Culture (1994), Migrations and Cultures (1996), and Conquests and Cultures (1998). ... Over the past three decades, Sowell has taught economics at various colleges and universities, including Cornell, Amherst, and the University of California at Los Angeles, as well as the history of ideas at Brandeis University.

Though Thomas Sowell had been a regular contributor to newspapers in the late '70s and early '80s, he did not begin his career as a newspaper columnist until 1984. George F. Will's writing, says Sowell, proved to him that someone could say something of substance in so short a space (750 words). And besides, writing for the general public enables him to address the heart of issues without the smoke and mirrors that so often accompany academic writing. In 1990, he won the prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by The American Enterprise Institute. Currently Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, Calif.

Hoover Institution scholar, prolific author and popular columnist Thomas Sowell acknowledged that Hayek influenced his book Knowledge and Decisions (1980), citing Hayek's "deeply penetrating insight into the way societies function and malfunction, and clues as to why they are so often and so profoundly misunderstood."

The underlying theme ... is that the idea behind the brutality of the Bolshevik nightmare is still the specter that haunts the Western world, in spite of the fall of Soviet-style socialism ... It is what Sowell refers to as the appeal and politics of cosmic justice. "Implicit in much discussion of a need to rectify social inequities is the notion that some segments of society, through no fault of their own, lack things which others receive as windfall gains, through no virtue of their own," he argues ... [He] reminds us of just how unique the American experiment in free government was from its very founding.

In my early libertarian days, Thomas Sowell was one of my heroes. First, he was a very good scholar ... His book, Knowledge and Decisions is a rigorous and excellent economic analysis, using F.A. Hayek's classic paper, "The Use of Knowledge in Society" as a foundation. Second, Sowell has been prolific as a writer, and I always admire productive people. Third, the personal attacks that leftists—black and white—have laid upon him have been merciless and mostly evil ... However, I fear the Former Great Man has crossed his own Rubicon, with his recent column in support of the administration's post-9/11 domestic spying.

This season, Barry Bonds has been a Giant in more than name. While baseball fans and the media have been focussed on his record-breaking home-run feats, far less attention has been paid to his other feats that have been even more spectacular — and, in fact, unique. Barry Bonds is the first batter in the entire history of the National League ... to have a slugging average over .800. ... While Bonds' incredible performance gave new prominence to slugging averages, Ruth's lifetime dominance in that statistic makes clear that the Babe was still the greatest all-around slugger of them all ...

The government's legal attacks on Microsoft for bundling various computer programs in its Windows operating system are attacking precisely what there needs to be more of in the computer industry, where too many products are unbundled now. It is a frustrating business to phone one of the computer companies' technical support systems ... Because developing Kodachrome is more complicated than developing most other color films, Kodak sold it with the processing included, so that they could see that it got done right. But antitrust lawyers forced them to sell the film and processing separately. We need an umpire, not a nanny.

President Clinton in Africa was ... as phony as a three-dollar bill. His apology for slavery while in Uganda was a complete farce. Most people of African ancestry in the United States originated in West Africa, not in Uganda, which is much farther east. It is doubtful whether anyone from Uganda was ever brought to the United States. ... It is not Clinton himself who is dangerous — at least not now, as a lame-duck president. What is dangerous is letting any president get away with flaunting the law, for others are certain to follow in his footsteps and continue dismantling the barriers against abuses of power.

The recent death of baseball great Joe DiMaggio came as a personal blow to those of us who remember him as an icon of an era. He was judged by many to be the greatest ballplayer of his time and, for some, long after his retirement, as the greatest living ballplayer. ... Last year's two most talked-about ballplayers, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, likewise exhibited that elusive thing called 'class' at a time when it was most needed and most lacking in other public figures. May the qualities that Joe DiMaggio epitomized never be something that has 'left and gone away.' We would be a much poorer society without them.

The recent death of Julian Simon was a special loss because he was one of those people who took on the thankless task of talking sense on a subject where nonsense is all the rage. A professor of economics at the University of Maryland, Julian Simon wrote fact-filled books about population—all of them exposing the fallacies of those who were promoting "overpopulation" hysteria. ... [H]is best-known book [was] The Ultimate Resource. To him, the ultimate resource was human intelligence. We should also add, in honor of Julian Simon, the courage to use that intelligence.

Tragic as the lethal rioting in Indonesia has been, what is an additional tragedy for Americans is how few of us seem to have understood what went wrong there — and what could go wrong here. While the media depict the riots as being directed against Indonesia's corrupt and despotic President Suharto, the biggest victims are in fact members of the Chinese minority in that country. It is their stores that are being looted and burned, and it is they who are being assaulted and killed. ... When you see rioting in Indonesia, you are seeing your tax dollars at work. You are also seeing what can happen when a corrupt president is above the law.

Give credit where credit is due. The political left is great with words. Conservatives have never been able to come up with such seductive phrases as the left mass produces. While conservatives may talk about a need for 'judicial restraint,' liberals cry out for 'social justice.' ... Do you want social injustice? ... I would love to believe that the Hoover Institution would continue to hire me if I demanded double my current salary. But you notice that I don't make any such demand. Third parties need to stop making such demands for other people. It is more important for people to have jobs than for busybodies to feel noble.

Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa have been a godsend at a time when we desperately needed somebody in public life to show some class and be someone that young people could look up to. Incidentally, it shows how time flies that neither of these guys had been born when Roger Maris set the home-run record that they both broke. Now that Big Mac is the new home-run king, how does he compare with Roger Maris and with Babe Ruth before him? ... Obviously, no one can slug .800 all season — unless he is Babe Ruth. The Babe was the only man to have slugged over .800 — and he did two seasons in a row. He is still the greatest.

Milton Friedman's 90th birthday on July 31st provides an occasion to think back on his role as the pre-eminent economist of the 20th century. To those of us who were privileged to be his students, he also stands out as a great teacher. ... Without Milton Friedman's role in changing the minds of so many Americans, it is hard to imagine how Ronald Reagan could have been elected president. Nor was Friedman's influence confined to the United States. His ideas reached around the world, not only among economists, but also in political circles which began to understand why left-wing ideas that sounded so good produced results that were so bad.

A San Francisco sports writer has joined the chorus of those who argue that Pete Rose should be admitted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, despite being banned from baseball for violating one of its cardinal rules, against betting on ball games ...
Going easy on criminals in the 1960s led to skyrocketing crime rates that did not reverse until more criminals began to be locked up ... Forgetting the past endangers the future. After Shoeless Joe Jackson has been admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame will be time enough to talk about Pete Rose. But neither of them should be admitted, now or ever.

Now that the decision of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to ban 'under God' from the pledge of allegiance has been protested all over the landscape, perhaps we might step back and consider the broader implications of the fact that such a decision could have been made in the first place. ... We could elect a Senate that will confirm judicial nominees who have a record of sticking to what the written law says, not those who rule on the basis of their own whims or the dictates of political correctness. We have a chance to try that this November before resorting to more drastic measures.

At George Mason University, they are giving a 'roast' — that peculiarly American combination of praise and ridicule — to Walter Williams, professor of economics and columnist extraordinaire. ... Although Walter often comes across as hard-boiled on social issues — he once said that the government has no right to take a dime of his money to spend on someone else —the fact is that he has been very generous using his own money and his own time to help others. He just doesn't want politicians doing it and messing things up. This is a long overdue tribute to a great guy.

One of the reasons given by California's liberal Senator Dianne Feinstein for opposing the confirmation of state Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown to the federal judiciary is that Justice Brown has refused to put property rights on a lower plane than other constitutional rights and has criticized the destruction of property rights in San Francisco. ... How many members of her family will have to sacrifice how much of their paychecks to carry this crushing mortgage burden is a question that doesn't bother most liberals. Senator Feinstein doesn't seem to understand why such things bother Justice Brown.

The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers. Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century—medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing ...
Why can't the talkers leave the doers alone? Perhaps it is because that would leave the talkers on the sidelines, with their uselessness being painfully obvious to all, instead of being in the limelight and "making a difference"—even if that difference is usually negative.

The fact that benefits have costs means that those who create these benefits are tempting targets for accusations from those who know how to dramatize the costs. This means that the doers are constantly on the defensive when attacked by the talkers. These attacks are especially effective in a society where most people have not been taught to weigh costs against benefits ...
The talkers' admirers include people struggling to pay inflated apartment rents and make huge monthly mortgage payments. Even their victims often admire the talkers more than the doers.

A recent thought-provoking television special on race, hosted by young black talk-show host Larry Elder, made me think back to World War II and to what might seem like an unrelated experience. As a teenager then, I noticed that there was a Billy Mitchell bomber and a Billy Mitchell airfield, so naturally I wondered who this man was. When I looked him up in the library, I discovered that, when Billy Mitchell was alive, he was court-martialed for saying the very things for which he was now being honored. ... it is time to leave the 1960s behind and start dealing with today's problems and tomorrow's opportunities.

Headlines were made by the latest results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study. ... American 12th graders fell below the international average in general mathematics and general science. In advanced mathematics, our students were tied for last place and in physics they had sole possession of last place. ... Just as you are not going to catch ocean fish in mountain lakes, no matter how expensive your fishing equipment, so you are not going to get an academically proficient or even academically oriented class of people coming out of education schools and education courses.

Once you have gotten used to a whole vocabulary of euphemisms, it can be shocking to come across the plain truth. The title of a new book may therefore jolt some people: Bad Teachers by Guy Strickland. If every parent whose child has had a bad teacher were to buy this book, it would hit the top of the best-seller list in no time ...
If you buy only one book on education in your lifetime, this is the one to buy. I say that as the author of a couple of books on education myself. But I am willing pass up some sales of my own books in order to urge you to buy this one.