Thomas Sowell: life, ideas and books

Life

Thomas Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1951 to 1952, earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard in 1958 and a master's at Columbia in 1959, and received his doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968, where he studied under George Stigler. He taught at Cornell, Brandeis, UCLA, Amherst, Howard and Rutgers and joined the Hoover Institution at Stanford in 1977.

He has written more than forty-five books and a long-running syndicated newspaper column, which he ended in December 2016. His honours include the National Humanities Medal in 2002 and the Bradley Prize in 2004. He declined positions in government, including federal posts offered to him.

Ideas

Sowell's economics emphasises incentives, trade-offs and unintended consequences, and, following Hayek, the dispersed knowledge that no central authority can possess. In A Conflict of Visions (1987) he contrasted a "constrained" view of human nature, which stresses limits and tested institutions, with an "unconstrained" view that trusts reasoned design, and in The Vision of the Anointed (1995) he criticised what he saw as elite social policy.

He has written on the economics of race, culture and history, on education and on judicial activism, and is critical of affirmative action. Politically he describes himself as skeptical of ideology.

Major works

• Knowledge and Decisions (1980).
• A Conflict of Visions (1987).
• The Vision of the Anointed (1995).
• Basic Economics (2000).
• Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005).

Why conservatives read him

Sowell is among the most widely read conservative and libertarian economists, valued for clear prose and for evidence-based arguments against policies with good intentions and poor results. His work is a staple on markets, schooling, race and public policy, and it has influenced other economists and jurists, including Walter E. Williams and Justice Clarence Thomas.