Walter Williams: life, ideas and books

Life

Walter E. Williams was born in Philadelphia in 1936. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics at California State College in Los Angeles in 1965 and his master's and doctorate at UCLA, where he received the Ph.D. in 1972. He taught at Los Angeles City College, Cal State Los Angeles and Temple University, and he was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution in 1975 and 1976.

In 1980 he joined the economics faculty of George Mason University, where he chaired the department from 1995 to 2001 and held the John M. Olin distinguished professorship. He wrote a syndicated column for decades and guest-hosted a national radio programme. He died in December 2020 in Fairfax, Virginia, shortly after teaching a class.

Ideas

Williams was a free-market economist in the classical liberal and libertarian tradition, and he named Bastiat, Mises, Hayek and Friedman among his formative influences. He argued that minimum-wage laws and the Davis-Bacon Act harm low-skilled workers, and especially minorities, by pricing them out of jobs. In The State Against Blacks (1982) he maintained that government licensing, regulation and labour laws had been a greater obstacle to Black economic progress than private prejudice.

He also opposed federal anti-discrimination laws as applied to private business, citing freedom of association, opposed gun control, and was a critic of the Federal Reserve. His autobiography Up From the Projects (2010) tells the story of his own rise from public housing in Philadelphia.

Major works

• The State Against Blacks (1982).
• America: A Minority Viewpoint (1982).
• South Africa's War Against Capitalism (1989).
• More Liberty Means Less Government (1999).
• Liberty Versus the Tyranny of Socialism (2008).
• Up From the Projects (2010).
• Race and Economics (2011).

Why conservatives read him

Williams's columns and books made the case for markets in plain language, and he is often named alongside his friend and fellow economist Thomas Sowell as one of the two best-known Black free-market voices of the period. Sowell's work and Williams's work complement each other, one more historical and the other more polemical, and both draw on the Chicago school of Milton Friedman and the Austrian tradition of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

He is a more libertarian figure than many on the traditional right, and he frequently dissented from conservative positions on drugs, civil liberties and foreign policy. In 2009 the Mises Institute ranked him third among the most important Hayekian public intellectuals in America, and Reason has called him one of the country's leading libertarian voices. Critics disputed his claims about the sources of racial economic gaps, and readers should weigh his evidence against the work of economists who reach other conclusions.