Who is Thomas Sowell?
Thomas Sowell was born in 1930 and raised in Harlem. He served in the Marine Corps, then studied economics at Harvard, Columbia and Chicago. At Chicago he earned his 1968 doctorate under George Stigler. By his own account he held Marxist views in his twenties, but a government internship in 1960, spent studying minimum wages, moved him toward free markets. He taught at Cornell, UCLA and other schools before becoming a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution in 1980. His more than 40 books cover economics, race, culture and education. His syndicated column ended in 2016. No elected office has ever been his.
Political views
- In general he prefers free markets. He is against legal minimum wages, which he says cost low-skilled workers and minorities their jobs.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- He says the growth of welfare programmes since the 1960s did damage, partly by replacing what families once did.Source: hoover.org
- He is critical of affirmative action and racial quotas, which in his view can hurt the students they aim to help.Source: hoover.org
- In his view, no one cause, be it discrimination, exploitation or genetics, accounts for the economic gaps between groups.Source: hoover.org
- He supports charter schools. Teachers' unions and school bureaucracies, he says, are failing poor children.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- He is in favour of decriminalising every drug.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- On the 2025 tariffs he was critical. He compared them with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs and cautioned that a worldwide trade war might follow.Source: hoover.org
Legacy
Sowell has fans among classical liberals, libertarians and conservatives. They value the originality and range of his work, his use of history and of evidence from other countries, and his plain-spoken writing about economics. The National Humanities Medal came to him in 2002. Friedrich Hayek admired the way he made abstract theory concrete for policy debate. Critics reply that his books rarely deal with the central academic research and skip data that points the other way, and they use his minimum wage writing as an example. Some also object to his handling of discrimination, including discrimination against women in the workforce. Historian Michael Ondaatje writes that Sowell had become unwelcome in many Black communities by the 1980s.
In their own words
“Everybody loses because everybody follows suit, and all that happens is that you get a great reduction in international trade.”