Foreword
Thomas Sowell (born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, sociologist and historian, currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. . He is the inheritor and guardian of the Chicago School of staunch economic tradition, and is probably the most powerful defender of the capitalist free market economy after Hayek and Friedman. He wrote prolifically throughout his life, and his academic and theoretical views are all over the world. His theories and independent intellectual personality have become the banner of American academic and social research fields. Even those who disagree with his academic and theoretical views are sincerely convinced. His controversial and rigorous views are particularly valuable in the current societies where left-leaning, collectivist tendencies and political correctness are prevalent in Western countries, and have become the foundation of the self-healing and error-correcting abilities of these societies. This article is compiled from a lecture by Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal editorial writer and editorial board member whose recent book, "Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell," was released in May 2021 . As a black man, Mr. Riley holds views on racial and social justice principles that are completely consistent with Sowell's. He considers himself a lifelong friend of Sowell's. His early book, Please Stop Helping Us! ” is a thorough reflection on race-based welfare and social distribution policies in American society. It believes that racial quotas and social practices based on equal rights have brought greater harm to black society. He advocates returning to the economic and social policies advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King, where everyone is equal and based on personality rather than skin color.
In the process of doing a lot of research for my biography of the economist Thomas Sowell, I kept coming across Sowell’s own descriptions of the scholars he admired, and I was often struck by them. Sowell was shocked that the description applied entirely to Sowell himself.
For example, Nobel Prize winner George Stigler was one of Sowell’s thesis advisors at the University of Chicago. After Professor Stigler passed away in 1991, Sowell Weir writes:
In a world filled with self-promoting academics who coin buzzwords and align themselves with the popular angels of the moment, George Stigler was a man of rare integrity and rare The epitome of intelligence. He never wavered in academic camps, never advocated for a cause, and never created a cult of personality. He did the job of a scholar and a teacher - both excellent - and he found that was enough. If you want to learn, and most importantly, if you want to learn how to think--how to avoid vague words, vague ideas, or pessimism that clouds reality--then Stiegler is your guy.
Here is Sowell's description of another of his professors at Chicago, Milton Friedman:
[He] was one of the very few who had both genius and common sense. One of the intellectuals. He could express his highest level of analysis to his fellow economists in academic journals, while also writing popular books... that could be understood by people who knew nothing about economics.
I am hard-pressed to think of better ways to describe Thomas Sowell himself. When I think of his scholarship, I think of: intellectual integrity, analytical rigor, respect for evidence, skepticism of the kind of fads that come and go, and then clarity of thought. Column after column, book after book, written in plain English for the general public.
Education and Charter Schools
In 2020, 90-year-old Sowell published his 36th book, "Charter Schools and Their Enemies." I certainly don’t want him to end his book here, but if he did, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more fitting end to a publishing career that has spanned sixty years. Editor's note: Charter schools are an attempt to reform public education in the United States. Charter schools still receive government funding but are completely independent in school management and operations.
Sowell's first two books were scholarly.
But his third book, the semi-autobiographical "Black Education: Myth and Tragedy," published in 1972, was written for the general public. The book grew out of a long article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine in 1970 about college admissions standards for black students. It begins with an account of his own education—first in segregated schools in North Carolina, where he was born, and later in integrated schools in Harlem, New York City, where he grew up.
Over the decades, Sowell has returned to the topic of education again and again. In the preface to "Charter Schools and Their Enemies," he describes a conversation in the early 1970s with Irving Kristol, editor of Public Interest magazine. Kristol asked Sowell what it would take to create high-quality schools for blacks, and Sowell responded that such schools already existed, and had done so for generations.
Kristol asked Sowell to write about these schools, and in 1974 the Public Interest magazine published Sowell's article on the history of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., which had all black children. Not only did the school outperform local white schools, it met or exceeded state standards on standardized tests multiple times throughout the first half of the 20th century. Sowell wrote that from 1870 to 1955, "most of Dunbar's graduates went to college, although most Americans -- white or black -- did not." Two years later, in the same publication, he Wrote another article about successful black elementary and middle schools across the country.
In a sense, today’s public charter schools, which tend to serve predominantly low-income black and Hispanic students, are the heirs to the high-performing black schools Sowell studied more than 40 years ago. As he points out, these charter schools aren't just doing better than traditional public schools with the same demographic groups. In many cases, inner-city charter school students are outperforming those in some of the nation's wealthiest and whitest suburban school districts. Peers. For example, in New York City, the Success Academy system (which operates 47 schools in New York City with 17,000 students) as a charter school has effectively closed the academic achievement gap between black and white students.
Sowell writes in the book:
The educational success of these charter schools defies those who believe in genetic determinism, claims of cultural bias in testing, and assertions of racial "integration." It is a necessary condition for black people to achieve educational equality or that income differences are one of the "fundamental causes" of educational differences, and so on.
Sowell went on to say that this last narrative about poverty "has been used for decades to absolve traditional public schools of any responsibility for the educational failures of low-income minority communities."
But the opposition and agitated enemies charter schools currently attract are not because they don’t work, but precisely because they do. As such, they pose a threat to the educational status quo. They threaten the current balance of power that allows the interests of the adults who govern public education to prevail over what is best for students. Bad schools continue to receive government funding because they still provide good jobs for adults. Whether children are learning is, at best, a secondary question.
As Sowell writes:
Schools exist to educate children, not to provide teachers with a job, not to provide billions of dollars in dues to teachers unions , not to provide a monopoly to the educational bureaucracy, not to provide a guaranteed market for [graduates] of teachers' colleges, not to provide a captive audience for the indoctrinators of ideas.
Unfortunately, charter school opponents have made headway in recent years. They limit the number and locations of charter schools. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama both supported charter schools, but Democrats have moved sharply to the left on education issues, and the Biden administration has become more skeptical of charter schools. All of which makes Sowell's book as particularly timely and relevant today as anything he has written.
Race and Social Justice
One of the reasons I wanted to write this biography is that much of Sowell’s scholarship remains relevant to our policy debates today. We are still discussing economic inequality, affirmative action, social justice, critical race theory, slavery reparations, the effectiveness of minimum wage laws, and the pros and cons of immigration, all of which Sowell's work touches upon. Frankly, I find that so many people today know about Ta-Nehisi Coates (a black writer who claims that American society is riddled with white supremacy), Ibram Kendi (a Boston University professor and anti-racist), and Nikole Hannah-Jones (New York Times reporter and promoter of the 1619 Project) but didn’t know Thomas Sowell, it was frustrating to me. To be honest, Sowell's scholarship dwarfs these others. It is not just the number of his publications but also the scope, depth and rigor of his analyses. He anticipated and refuted many of their arguments decades ago, in some cases before the people making them today were even born.
Sowell is best known primarily for his writings on racial controversies. But most of his books are not about the subject of race, and even if Sowell had never written a word about race, he would have stood out as a leading scholar of race.
Sowell said that of his own books, his favorite is "A Clash of Visions," in which he attempts to explain what drives our ideological disputes about liberty, equality, and justice. . He traces these different "visions," or views of human nature, back at least two centuries, from thinkers such as William Godwin, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to John Rawls and today’s advocates of so-called “social justice.”
The conflicting views he describes in his book are a constraining or tragic view of human nature and an unconstrained or utopian view. People with more restrictive views of the human condition view humans as hopelessly flawed. They saw the inherent limits to human progress. We might want to end war, poverty or racism, they say, but that might not happen. Therefore, our focus should be on building institutions and procedures that help society deal with problems that we can never eradicate or foresee.
On the other side, you have the unconstrained or utopian view of human nature, which rejects the idea that there are limits to what humans can achieve. It is the belief that nothing is unachievable and that no trade-offs are necessary. According to this view, humans, by harnessing appropriate rationality and willpower, we can not only manage problems like war, poverty, racism, or pandemics, but solve them entirely.
Based on their accepted views, Sowell explains why two people, equally well-informed and equally well-intentioned, could come to opposite conclusions on a range of issues, including taxes, rent control, schools choice, military spending, government power, and judicial activism, to name a few.
When Kant said that "from the crooked wood of man, nothing straight was ever made," he was displaying a restricted view. When Rousseau said, "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains," he was expressing an unfettered view. When Oliver Wendell Holmes (1861-1865 U.S. Supreme Court Justice) said that his job as a judge was to make sure the game was played according to the rules, whether he liked those rules or not, it was a constraint point of view. When Earl Warren (1953-1969 Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) said that his job as a judge was to do what he believed was right, regardless of the law, it was an unfettered view. This is the philosophical framework that explains Sowell's writings on nearly every topic.
Racial Conflict
Beginning in the 1970s, Sowell turned his attention to racial controversies. He said he did it out of a sense of duty.
There are things that need to be said, and too few people are willing to say them. Sowell's criticism of the direction of the civil rights movement at the time ultimately led to him being "canceled," in today's popular parlance, a victim of cancel culture. Black elites especially didn't want to deal with him because of his opposition to affirmative action, and they convinced others in the mainstream media not to take his views seriously and not to look to him for a black perspective on the issues of the day.
Sowell has long argued that the problems black people face today are far greater than what white people have done to them in the past. It’s easy to understand why black activists want to focus on white racism. This helps them raise funds and stay relevant. It's no secret that politicians use the same tactics - it helps them win votes. But Sowell thinks it’s not at all obvious that focusing on white racism helps the black underclass. You could spend your entire day pointing out the moral flaws of other people, groups, institutions, and society as a whole, every day. The question is whether this helps those who need it most.
Many of today's social activists of all stripes go about their work under the assumption that the only real problem facing the black underclass is white racism. A good example of this is the recent focus on policing in black communities. Do racist police officers exist? Of course there is. Do some police officers abuse their power? Of course there is. But are poor black neighborhoods so violent because of bad cops? Would reducing police resources improve the situation? According to the Chicago Sun-Times, there were 492 homicides in Chicago in 2019, only three of which involved police officers. So if police use of deadly force is an issue in Chicago, it's clearly a minor issue. Young black men in Chicago or Baltimore or St. Louis may indeed leave their homes every morning in fear of being shot, but not by the police.
Last year, in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed by four police officers, a policy proposal was put before voters that would defund and completely reform the police. Police enforce the law. But the measure was not only defeated but also met with fierce opposition from black residents in an area with high crime rates. And the black residents of Minneapolis are not anomalies, they are typical. In a Gallup poll released in 2020, 81% of black people nationwide said they wanted police presence in their communities to remain the same or increase. Another Gallup poll released a year ago specifically asked black and Hispanic residents in low-income neighborhoods what they thought about policing. Fifty-nine percent of black and Hispanic respondents said they wanted police to spend more time in their communities. In a 2015 poll after Michael Brown was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, a majority of black respondents said police treated them fairly and said they "wanted police to have a greater presence in their local communities." Blacks vastly outnumber whites, two to one.
This is not a recent phenomenon. In a 1993 Gallup poll, 82% of black respondents said the criminal justice system is not harsh enough on criminals, 75% wanted more police on the streets, and 68% said we should build more prison so that a longer sentence can be imposed. Efforts to defund the police are being pushed by activists and liberal elites who claim to represent low-income minorities. But they mostly speak for themselves. This is a problem Sowell pointed out long ago.
Sowell is often asked how it feels to be at odds with so many other black people. He would inevitably correct the premise of the question. "You're not saying I'm contrary to most black people," he responded. "What you're saying is that I go against what most black intellectuals, most black elites, think. But black intellectuals don't represent most black people, just like white intellectuals don't represent most white people."
This is still the case today. For example, most black people support voter ID laws and school choice, while most black elites—academics, NAACP, Black Lives Matter activists, etc.—are staunchly opposed to these propositions.
In contrast, most blacks oppose racial preferences in college admissions (i.e., lowering standards for black candidates), and as noted, opposition to defunding the police is something that black elites favor. Sowell pointed out these differences decades ago, and they have only grown larger since then. His writings on the history of intellectuals emphasize again and again that intellectuals are a special interest group. They have their own self-serving agenda and their own priorities and should be understood as such.
Liberal elites generally control the media and Hollywood. They control academia. They run foundations that hand out awards and bonuses to intellectuals. Sowell refused to engage with them or soften his stance. This cost him in terms of prestige and fame. He's paid his dues, which is one of the reasons he's not as famous as the guys I mentioned earlier. I tell people all the time, if you think Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones represent the views of the majority of black people, you need to know more black people.
About Critical Race Theory
Sowell is now 91 years old. The book he published last year was his 36th book and his fifth since turning 80. Not bad for a black orphan from the Jim Crow South who was born into extreme poverty during the Great Depression. , did not finish high school and did not earn a college degree until the age of 28 (Sowell did not finish high school, joined the Marine Corps during the Korean War, returned to the United States after the war, and briefly worked in Washington while attending night classes at Howard University, due to With outstanding grades and excellent scores in standardized examinations, he was able to enter Harvard University and received his undergraduate degree with highest honors in 1958, majoring in economics. The following year, he received a master's degree in economics from Columbia University. Since his mentor Stigler had decided to transfer He went to the University of Chicago, where he immediately followed his advisor (his other doctoral thesis advisor was Professor Milton Friedman). He did not write his first book until he was 40 years old. But even setting aside this impressive personal journey, Sowell is a rare breed. He is an honest intellectual. He is a man who is always seeking the truth, whether or not it makes him popular. He has always been willing to follow facts and evidence wherever they lead, even if they lead to results that are viewed by the mainstream as politically incorrect. These qualities are not necessarily what make you an outstanding scholar, but they are becoming more and more important in current academic and mainstream society.
Consider our current debate over critical race theory. These ideas have surfaced in some niche seminars at universities. Now they are making their way into our workplaces through “diversity training.” They're making their way into our elementary schools through the New York Times' 1619 project, which seeks to place slavery at the center of America's founding. This is ridiculous. Slavery has existed for thousands of years, in societies around the world, and long before the founding of the United States. More African slaves were sent to the Islamic world than to the Americas, and slavery still exists today in Sudan and Nigeria.
What is unique about America is not slavery. It's liberation, the speed with which we went from slavery to Martin Luther King to a black president. The economic and social progress black Americans have made in just a few generations is unparalleled in history.
As Sowell points out, the idea that America prospered because of slavery is also unfounded. Individual slave owners prospered, of course, but that is different from saying the nation benefited. In fact, the areas of the country that held slaves were some of the poorest, both during and after slavery. Likewise, in Brazil, which imported many more slaves than the United States, the areas where slavery was concentrated were among the poorest during and after slavery. To look at another example, slavery has been practiced in Eastern Europe much longer than in Western Europe - but Western Europe has always been richer. Millions more African slaves were sent to North Africa and the Middle East than came to the West.
If slave labor produced economic prosperity, why did these areas remain so poor for so long? And later, when the Middle East did start to get richer, it wasn't because of slavery -- it was because of the discovery of oil.
In another 1619 Project article, the author writes: "For the most part, black Americans resisted alone." This shockingly ignorant assertion simply equates Quakers with The role of other organizations in the 18th century, the role of abolitionists and the newly formed Democratic Party during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the role of the NAACP, founded by both white and black Americans in the early 20th century role erased from history. It also ignores the role of non-blacks in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, which was driven by alliances with whites, Jews, Catholics and others who opposed racial discrimination.
But objections to Project 1619 on these grounds are almost irrelevant. The entire purpose of the program is to present slavery as a catch-all explanation for today’s racial inequality. The argument was that black academic performance lagged because of slavery and Jim Crow. They lagged in employment because of slavery and Jim Crow. Because of this horrific history, they've fallen behind in income and home ownership and everything else. This is part of the political left’s ongoing attempt to blame black people’s current problems on white people’s past. Ultimately, this is an attempt to downplay the role of culture and individual responsibility in driving social inequality. Black people are innocent and white people are evil. White people who object to this narrative are labeled racists. Blacks who rejected this were dismissed as fools or opportunists.
The real facts about slavery are well known among serious historians. But where are these serious historians now? A few people came forward, like Gordon Wood (historian, professor at Brown University, born in 1933) and James McPherson (historian, retired professor at Princeton University, born in 1936). But why so few? Why don’t the chairs of every history department at every major university push back on this 1619 Project nonsense? The country's top scholars should stand up and criticize such "theories" without hesitation and with great fanfare. Why are so many people silent? Serious scholars have written countless books about our nation's founding, and not one of those books was written by Nicole Hannah-Jones. Why are serious historians so afraid of confronting a journalist who has never written a book, or even any academic paper -- let alone a history of slavery?
The reason they are so scared is that it is politically incorrect to argue with her. They will be called racists and sexists. This may harm their academic careers. This is the kind of intellectual cowardice we see too much of, and both are precisely what makes Sowell's life and work so special: courage. Sowell wasn't afraid. This kind of thing should be commonplace among academics and intellectuals, as well as among journalists, but it is clearly not the case now. Sowell has spent his career prioritizing truth over popularity or political correctness. We need a hundred people like him!