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Thomas Sowell ( ; born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, economic historian, and social and Pundit. He is a fellow at the Hoover Institution. 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 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 magna cum laude 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 (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. 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.
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 Conscription 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.
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".
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 Friedman 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.Theodore Rueter (1995). 131528636X, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 131528636X 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 (and the example) 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." Video of Sowell's testimony at C-SPAN
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.Nachman, Larry D. March 1987. "' A Conflict of Visions', by Thomas Sowell ." Commentary.
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; Militant 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 Citation impact 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.
Sowell has also written a trilogy of books on ideologies and political positions, including A Conflict of Visions, in which he speaks on the origins of political strife; The Vision of the Anointed, in which he compares the conservative/libertarian, and liberal/progressive worldviews; and The Quest for Cosmic Justice, in which, as in many of his other writings, he outlines his thesis of the need felt by , , and leaders to fix and perfect the world in and ultimately, he posits, disastrous fashions. Separate from the trilogy, but also in discussion of the subject, he wrote Intellectuals and Society, building on his earlier work, in which he discusses what he argues to be the blind hubris and follies of intellectuals in a variety of areas.
His book Knowledge and Decisions, a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics Center Prize, was heralded as a "landmark work", selected for this prize "because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government". In announcing the award, the center acclaimed Sowell, whose "contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, his work goes deeper and becomes even more significant." Friedrich Hayek wrote: "In a wholly original manner, Sowell succeeds in translating abstract and theoretical argument into highly concrete and realistic discussion of the central problems of contemporary economic policy."
Sowell opposes the imposition of minimum wages by governments, arguing in his book Basic Economics, "Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero, regardless of the laws, and that is the wage that many workers receive in the wake of the creation or escalation of a government-mandated minimum wage, because they either lose their jobs or fail to find jobs when they enter the labor force." He goes further to argue that minimum wages disproportionately affect "members of racial or ethnic minority groups" that have been discriminated against. He asserts, "Before federal minimum-wage laws were instituted in the 1930s, the black unemployment rate was slightly lower than the white unemployment rate in 1930. But then followed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933, and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 – all of which imposed government-mandated minimum wages, either on a particular sector or more broadly... By 1954, black unemployment rates were double those of whites and have continued to be at that level or higher. Those particularly hard hit by the resulting unemployment have been black teenaged males."
Sowell also favors decriminalization of all drugs. He opposes gun control laws, arguing, "On net balance, they do not save lives, but cost lives."
In several of his works—including The Economics and Politics of Race (1983), Ethnic America (1981), Affirmative Action Around the World (2004), and other books—Sowell challenges the notion that black progress is due to progressive government programs or policies. He claims that many problems identified with black people in modern society are not unique, neither in terms of American ethnic groups, nor in terms of a rural proletariat struggling with disruption as it became Urbanization, as discussed in his Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005). He is critical of affirmative action and Racial quota.
He takes issue with the notion of government as a helper or savior of minorities, arguing that the historical record shows the opposite. In Affirmative Action Around the World, Sowell holds that affirmative action affects more groups than is commonly understood, though its impacts occur through different mechanisms, and has long since ceased to favor blacks.
In Intellectuals and Race (2013), Sowell argues that intelligence quotient (IQ) gaps are hardly startling or unusual between, or within, . He notes that the roughly 15-point gap in contemporary black–white IQ scores is similar to that between the national average and the scores of certain White ethnic in years past, in periods when the nation was absorbing new immigrants. (2025). 9781482923537, Blackstone Audio. ISBN 9781482923537
Sowell said the media was "filtering and spinning" its coverage regarding abortions and has spoken out against sex-selective abortion. In 2018, he named George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, and Calvin Coolidge as presidents he liked.
In 2025, Sowell criticized Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs, comparing them to the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs from the start of the Great Depression. Sowell warned that the tariffs might set off a global trade war resulting in a "great reduction in international trade". He further cautioned that policy unpredictability might lead to people hanging on to their money, which would cause economic effects similar to those seen in the Great Depression.
Sowell argues that many U.S. schools are failing children, contends that "indoctrination" has taken the place of proper education, and argues that teachers' unions have promoted harmful education policies. Sowell contends that many schools have become monopolies for educational bureaucracies.
In his book Education: Assumptions Versus History (1986), Sowell analyzes the state of education in U.S. schools and universities. In particular, he examines the experiences of blacks and other ethnic groups in the American education system, and identifies the factors and patterns behind both success and failure.
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." He suggested this may be because "his books rarely engage with the major academic literature on the subject he's writing about" and he often "leaves out crucial pieces of data that would make his position look weaker", citing his writing on minimum wage policy and unemployment as an example. 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. 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". Economist Bernadette Chachere, law professor Richard Thompson Ford, and sociologists William Julius Wilson and Richard Coughlin have criticized some of his work.
Criticisms include neglecting discrimination against women in the workforce in Rhetoric or Reality?, the methodology of Race and Culture: A World View, and portrayal of opposing theories in Intellectuals and Race. 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. Alt URL Columnist Steven Pearlstein criticized Wealth, Poverty and Politics.
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