Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell (born June 30, 1930) is an American economist and social theorist who is currently a Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Sowell was born in North Carolina but grew up in Harlem, New York.

During the Korean War, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and served in the US Marine Corps.

He earned a bachelor's degree, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1958, and a master's degree from Columbia University in 1959.

He obtained his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. Sowell has served on the faculties of several colleges, including Cornell University and University of California's Los Angeles.

He has also worked for think tanks, including the Urban Institute.

He has been working at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 1980.

He writes from a libertarian conservative perspective, advocating supply-side economics.

Sowell has written more than thirty books (some of whom have been reprinted in updated editions), and his work has been widely circulated.

He received the National Humanities Medal for his pioneering scholarship that blended history, economics, and political science.

Early life

In segregated Gastonia, North Carolina, Sowell was born into a poor family. His father died a short time before he was born, leaving Sowell's mother, a housemaid with four children, behind. Sowell was adopted by a great-aunt and her two older daughters who raised him. When giving birth to another child a few years ago, his mother died of complications. Sowell wrote A Personal Odyssey, that his white people's childhood experiences were so limited that he didn't know the blond was a hair color. He recalls that his first memories of living in a tiny wooden house in Charlotte, North Carolina, which he says was typical of most Black communities. It was located on an unpaved street and had no electricity or running water. When Sowell was nine years old, he and his extended family moved from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Harlem, New York City, for greater opportunities, contributing to the large-scale migration of African-American migrants from the American South to the North. He and his aunt were forced to sleep in other people's apartments as a result of a family feud.

He registered for Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious academic high school in New York City; he was the first in his family to enroll in anything beyond the sixth grade. However, he was compelled to leave early at age 17 due to financial hardships and family rivalry. He worked in a variety of odd jobs, including long hours in a machine shop and as a Western Union delivery man. In 1948, he tried to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. During the Korean War, Sowell was drafted into the military service and was sent to the United States Marine Corps. Despite the fact that Sowell protested the war and suffered with racial discrimination, he was still finding fulfilment as a photographer, which eventually became his favorite pastime. In 1952, he was honorably discharged.

Personal life

Sowell married Mary Ash in 1981, who was previously married to Alma Jean Parr from 1964 to 1975. He has two children, John and Lorraine.

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Higher education and early career

After leaving military service, Sowell took a civil service job in Washington, DC and attended night classes at Howard University, a historically black college. His high scores on the College Board exams 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's 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, when he arrived in the fall of 1959, studied for his Doctor of Philosophy degree under both Stigler and Milton Friedman.

Sowell has said that he was a Marxist "during the decade of my 20s"; accordingly, one of his earliest professional publications was a sympathetic examination of Marxist thought vs. Marxist–Leninist practice. What began to change his mind toward supporting free market economics, he said, was 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 that "they certainly weren't going to engage in any scrutiny of the law".

Sowell ultimately received his Doctor of Philosophy degree (PhD) 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 [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."

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 economic 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. 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 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 magazine described Sowell as a leading representative of the Chicago school of economics.

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