Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell

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Meet Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell

Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. As with many others in his neighborhood, he left home early and did not finish high school. The next few years were difficult ones, but eventually he joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and profession: economics.

After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University (1958), he went on to receive his master's in economics from Columbia University (1959) and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago (1968).

In the early '60s, Sowell held jobs as an economist with the Department of Labor and AT&T. But his real interest was in teaching and scholarship. In 1965, at Cornell University, he began the first of many professorships. His other teaching assignments include Rutgers University, Amherst University, Brandeis University and the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught in the early '70s and also from 1984 to 1989.

Sowell has published a large volume of writing. His dozen books, as well as numerous articles and essays, cover a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism, from civil rights to choosing the right college. Moreover, much of his writing is considered ground-breaking -- work that will outlive the great majority of scholarship done today.

Though Sowell had been a regular contributor to newspapers in the late '70s and early '80s, he did not begin his career as a newspaper columnist until 1984. George F. Will's writing, says Sowell, proved to him that someone could say something of substance in so short a space (750 words). And besides, writing for the general public enables him to address the heart of issues without the smoke and mirrors that so often accompany academic writing.

In 1990, he won the prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by The American Enterprise Institute.

Currently Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, Calif.

Black Rednecks And White Liberals: And Other Cultural And Ethnic Issues
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Release Date: 30 April, 2005
Media: Hardcover
Manufacturer: Encounter Books

Black identity has become a hot item in the movies, on television, and in the schools and colleges. But few people are aware of how much of what passes as black identity today, including "black English," has its roots in the history of those whites who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" centuries ago in Britain, before they ever crossed the Atlantic and settled in the South.

Saying "acrost" for "across" or "ax" for "ask" are today considered to be part of black English. But this way of talking was common centuries ago in those regions of Britain from which white Southerners came. They brought with them more than their own dialect. They brought a whole way of life that made antebellum white Southerners very different from white Northerners.

Violence was far more common in the South -- and in those parts of Britain from which Southerners came. So was illegitimacy, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. All of this would become part of the cultural legacy of blacks, who lived for centuries in the midst of the redneck culture of the South.

That culture was as notable for what it did not have as for what it had. It did not emphasize education, for example, or intellectual interests in general.

Illiteracy was far more common among whites in the antebellum South than among whites in the North, and of course the blacks held in bondage in the South were virtually all illiterate. On into the early 20th century, Southern whites scored lower on mental tests than whites in other parts of the country, as blacks continued to do.

Many aspects of Southern life that some observers have attributed to race or racism, or to slavery, were common to Southern blacks and whites alike -- and were common in those parts of Britain from which Southern whites came, where there were no slaves and where most people had never seen anyone black.

Most Southern blacks and whites moved away from that redneck culture over the generations, as its consequences proved to be counterproductive or even disastrous. But it survives today among the poorest and least educated ghetto blacks.

This is a much bigger story than can fit into a newspaper column, which is why I wrote my latest book, "Black Rednecks and White Liberals."

White liberals come into this story because, since the 1960s, they have been aiding and abetting a counterproductive ghetto lifestyle that is essentially a remnant of the redneck culture which handicapped Southern whites and blacks alike for generations.

Many among the intelligentsia portray the black redneck culture today as the only "authentic" black culture and even glamorize it. They denounce any criticism of the ghetto lifestyle or any attempt to change it.

—Thomas Sowell (May 5, 2005). "Black rednecks and white liberals" Townhall.com. retrieved from http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20050505.shtml

Affirmative Action Around the World : An Empirical Study
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Release Date: 11 March, 2005
Media: Paperback
Manufacturer: Yale University Press

This book moves the discussion of affirmative action beyond the United States to other countries that have had similar policies, often for a longer time than Americans have. It also moves the discussion beyond the theories, principles, and laws that have been so often debated to the actual empirical consequences of affirmative action in the United States and in India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and other countries. Both common patterns and national differences are examined. Much of what emerges from a factual examination of these policies flatly contradicts much of what was expected and much of what has been claimed.

Controversial Essays
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ISBN: 0817929924
Format: Hardcover, 321pp
Pub. Date: August 2002
Publisher: Hoover Institution Press

A prized compilation of Dr. Sowell's popular columns. Included essays address the following subjects: Economic Issues, Racial Issues, Political Issues, Educational Issues, Legal Issues and Random Thoughts

Basic Economics
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ISBN: 046508138X
Format: Hardcover, 384pp
Pub. Date: January 2001
Publisher: Basic Books
Edition Description: 1 ED

From one of America's best-known economists, the one book anyone who wants to understand the economy needs to read.At last there is a citizen's guide to the economy, written by an economist who uses plain English. No jargon, no graphs, no equations. Yet this is a comprehensive survey, covering everything from rent control and the rise and fall of businesses to the international balance of payments. The purpose of Basic Economics is to enable people without any economic training to understand the way the economy functions-not only the American economy, but other economies around the world. Some of the clearest demonstrations of the role of prices, for example, come from economies in which prices are not allowed to function-with consequences which show just what those functions are and what happens when they are lacking. In the end, this is not a book from which to cram facts, but one from which to gain an understanding of the economy that will enable you to form your own conclusions on the basis of tested principles, rather than on the basis of emotion or rhetoric. That is the goal of the journey, but you should also enjoy the trip along the way.

The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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Format: Paperback, 224pp.
ISBN: 0684864630
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade Paperbacks
Pub. Date: February 2002

This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies. Those consequences include the steady and dangerous erosion of fundamental principles of freedom - amounting to a quiet repeal of the American revolution.

A Personal Odyssey
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Format: Paperback, 320pp.
ISBN: 0684864657
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Trade Paperbacks
Pub. Date: February 2002

This is the gritty story of one man's lifelong education in the school of hard knocks, as his journey took him from Harlem to the Marines, the Ivy League, and a career as a controversial writer, teacher, and economist in government and private industry. It is also the story of the dramatically changing times in which this personal odyssey took place.

The vignettes of the people and places that made an impression on Thomas Sowell at various stages of his life range from the poor and the powerless to the mighty and the wealthy, from a home for homeless boys to the White House, as well as ranging across the United States and around the world. It also includes Sowell's startling discovery of his own origins during his teenage years.

If the child is father to the man, this memoir shows the characteristics that have become familiar in the public figure known as Thomas Sowell already present in an obscure little boy born in poverty in the Jim Crow South during the Great Depression and growing up in Harlem. His marching to his own drummer, his disregard of what others say or think, even his battles with editors who attempt to change what he has written, are all there in childhood.

More than a story of the life of Sowell himself, this is also a story of the people who gave him their help, their support, and their loyalty, as well as those who demonized him and knifed him in the back. It is a story not just of one life, but of life in general, with all its exhilaration and pain.

Knowledge & Decisions

Paperback, 2nd ed., 448pp.

From The Publisher:
The Publisher:
With a new preface by the author, this reissue of Thomas Sowell's classic study of decision making updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America's most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making -- a gap that threatens our very freedom because actual knowledge gets replaced by assumptions based on an abstract and elitist social vision of what ought to be.

Knowledge and Decisions, a winner of the 1980 Law and Economics Center Prize, was heralded as a "landmark work" and selected for this prize "because of its cogent contribution to our understanding of the differences between the market process and the process of government." In announcing the award, the center acclaimed Sowell, whose "contribution to our understanding of the process of regulation alone would make the book important, but in reemphasizing the diversity and efficiency that the market makes possible, [his] work goes deeper and becomes even more significant." "In a wholly original manner [Sowell] succeeds in translating abstract and theoretical argument into a highly concrete and realistic discussion of the central problems of contemporary economic policy." --F. A. Hayek

Migrations & Cultures: A World View
Paperback, 528pp.

From The Publisher:
Migrations and Cultures shows the persistence of cultural traits in particular racial and ethnic groups and the role these groups' relocations play in redistributing skills, knowledge, and other forms of "human capital" from where they originated to the four corners of the earth. Each ethnic group has carried forth a particular set of skills, attitudes, and lifestyles, whether settling in Russia, Brazil, Australia, or the United States. What are the effects of disseminating these patterns - both for the immigrants and for the host countries, in social as well as economic terms? Migrations and Cultures places the sagas of particular immigrant groups within the larger history of the nations sending and receiving these groups. The book also tells the story of the resentments engendered by the achievements of immigrant groups, even though these achievements have played a major role in the advancement of the human race in general. Whether considering the Germans, Japanese, Italians, Chinese, Indians, or Jews, Thomas Sowell brings context, insight, and reason to an inflamed debate that threatens to dissolve the social fabric of our country.

Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
(November 1985)

Related Links

Thomas Sowell Column
http://www.basenet.net/~eagle/crisis/commentary_sowell.html

http://psyscope.psy.cmu.edu/childes/infochi/Late-Talking/late-talker4.html

Troubling Facts About Vince Foster's Death
http://www.thesocket.com/~jdenney/sowell.htm

http://cecasun.utc.edu/~jclark/Sowell.htm

http://psyscope.psy.cmu.edu/childes/infochi/Late-Talking/late-talker2.html

http://www.creators.com/opinion/bio/bio-sowe.htm