Sowell, Thomas 1930–

Thomas Sowell 1930–

Economist, writer

At a Glance…

Book Explains Two Visions of Existence

Criticized Preferential Quotas

Selected writings

Sources

In 20 years of prolific writing, Thomas Sowell has expressed his controversial views concerning race, ethnicity, and economics, often earning the label of visionary among conservatives and scoundrel among liberals. Believing blacks would be better off if they advanced by their own means, the conservative economist harshly criticizes ideas that most black leaders hold as essential to the social and economic advancement of the race, including affirmative action, minimum wage laws, and government assistance laws. In 1981 Newsweek described Sowell as “the intellectual fountainhead of the black conservatives” and “[President] Ronald Reagan’s favorite black intellectual,” while black commentator Carl T. Rowan once called him an “Aunt Jemima, giving aid and comfort to America’s racists,” according to People.

Hailed as “one of the brightest men around doing social research,” by columnist William F. Buckley, as quoted by People, Sowell has taught at some of America’s most prestigious universities and was offered a Cabinet post in the Reagan administration in 1981, which he turned down. As he told Forbes, “I don’t want to make policy. There are thousands of people in Washington who can formulate policy. What’s really crucial is that they have the facts straight before doing it, which by no means is the usual case.” Sowell did join the White House Economic Policy Advisory Board in February of 1981, but resigned after one meeting, saying the trip from his Palo Alto, California, home was too much of a strain. An intensely private person, Sowell has a false name-plate on his office door at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and keeps his home number and private life a secret, including details about his two marriages.

Sowell’s life experiences illustrate the values of self-help and determination he expounds on in his writing. He was born June 30, 1930, in Gastonia, North Carolina, and when he was eight years old, he moved with his parents to Harlem, New York, where his father worked in construction. Though ranked at the top of his high school class, Sowell dropped out after ninth grade to deliver telegrams for 65 cents an hour. Working odd jobs in his teenage years was an “invaluable experience,” Sowell recalled People. Once he had to sell his only suit to buy food—a knish and an orange soda. “Since then … I’ve

At a Glance…

Born June 30, 1930, in Gastonia, NC; married Alma Jean Parr; children: two. Education: Harvard University, A.B., 1958; Columbia University, A.M., 1959; University of Chicago, Ph.D., 1968.

U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, DC, economist, 1961-62; Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, instructor in economics, 1962-63; Howard University, Washington, DC, lecturer in economics, 1963-64; American Telephone & Telegraph Co., economic analyst, 1964-65; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, assistant professor of economics, 1965-69, director of Summer Intensive Training Program in Economic Theory, 1968; Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, associate professor of economics, 1969-70; University of California, Los Angeles, associate professor, 1970-72, professor of economics, 1974-80; Urban Institute, project director, 1972-74; writer. Amherst College, visiting professor of economics, 1977; Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA, fellow, 1977; Stanford University, Hoover Institution, fellow, 1977, senior fellow, 1980—. Military service: U.S. Marine Corps, 1951-53.

Member: American Economics Association, National Academy of Education.

Addresses: Office —The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.

eaten at the Waldorf and the White House. It has never been as good.”

Sowell finished high school at night and enrolled at Howard University after a stint in the Marines. He transferred to Harvard University, where he wrote his senior honors thesis on the theories of left-wing German political philosopher Karl Marx and graduated magna cum laude in 1958. A committed Marxist when he left Harvard, Sowell gradually shifted his beliefs to the right during graduate studies at Columbia University and later at the University of Chicago. During the 1960s, Sowell’s academic sojourn took him to teaching positions at various universities with brief stops as an economic analyst at the U.S. Labor Department and American Telephone & Telegraph Company. For the better part of the 1970s, he taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, and in 1980 he became a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Sowell’s overtly conservative views, asserted in such books as 1981’s Ethnic America: A History, quickly made him a target of criticism from liberals. One of his more controversial beliefs is that poverty among minority groups is less a result of racial and societal discrimination than of a group’s values, ethics, and attitudes. If discrimination alone were to hold a segment of the population back, Sowell contends, American Japanese, Chinese, or Jewish populations would never have accomplished what they have. In Ethnic America, Sowell writes that government assistance debilitates people who could make it on their own. To illustrate, he points to hundreds of small businesses successfully established during the economic depression of the 1930s by the low-income followers of Harlem’s Father Divine and contrasts them with “the massive business failures under the government-sponsored black-capital programs of the sixties and seventies.”

Sowell further suggests that “ghettoized urban blacks are like immigrants having headed north in waves from the foreign world of the rural South only in this century,” according to Newsweek. They are now in the second generation, he says, comparable to Irish-Americans of a century ago. “Just as the Irish progressed rapidly … without government aid, so can urban blacks.” Though the economist concedes that federal legislative and judicial efforts in the 1950s and 1960s were a substantial benefit to blacks in outlawing segregation and blatant discrimination, he believes such legislation as 1964’s Civil Rights Act was counterproductive. “He is incensed by the ‘social reformers’ who ‘don’t take seriously the ideas and interests of poor people,’” observed a writer in Newsweek. “Says Sowell: ‘Maybe people are poor not because they have made bad decisions, but because other people have made bad decisions for them. The liberals and civil-rights organizations have their own grand designs to impose on blacks. And the government is there to see you have no other choice.… If you allow the people to decide, you eliminate all the middlemen, the researchers, consultants and economists who fatten themselves at the expense of the poor.’”

Such opinions have alienated Sowell from liberal black leaders, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson and Benjamin Hooks. Denouncing tenets like affirmative action and busing black children to white schools, which he feels are underlying causes of racial disharmony, Sowell has also spoken of “undoing the harm” resulting from minimum wage laws. He told U.S. News & World Report that such legislation makes it difficult for the poor to get anywhere in society. “Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the black teenage unemployment rate was a fraction of what it became by the 1970s,” he said. “When you raise the wages of unskilled labor, you lead people to substitute capital for labor, and that helps produce high unemployment.” He pointed out in Forbes the important lessons a teenager learns from having a job: “The 14-year-old shoving burgers across the counter at McDonald’s … learns to get there on time, or the manager will fire him.” Government programs “let [teens] get away with things they would never get away with in private industry. If you didn’t give in, you wouldn’t have a program. We shouldn’t train people to think that all the world is like a government program.” Sowell’s thoughts on the minimum wage have drawn criticism, notably from economist Bernard Anderson of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who told Newsweek that paying teens a sub-minimum wage would “just give the employer the incentive to fire the father and hire the son.”

Concerning the issue of busing children to forcibly integrate schools, Sowell concludes that the situation does not benefit black children, and it makes white adults angry. The U.S. Supreme Court’s integration decision reflects a paternalistic attitude toward blacks, he believes, and implies that black children can’t learn anything unless they go to school with whites. Sowell similarly scorns affirmative action and racial quotas. “Since affirmative action has come in,” Sowell commented in Forbes in 1981, “Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans and blacks don’t have any higher income than they had before, compared to whites. In some cases they have less.” In the same interview he chastised some black leaders who receive federal money to fund various social programs for blacks. He believes most blacks would prefer lower taxes to a few federally funded social programs. “I suspect that black people in general would be much more receptive to [cutting government funding] than the ‘black leadership.’ Blacks have no vested interest in high taxes. They don’t have many tax shelters. I’m sure there are far more blacks paying these incredible tax rates than there are on welfare.” Sowell further argues that black leadership represents a privileged few who view blacks as victims of racism who can only progress as far as the government will take them. “Black leaders … are providing fuel to extremist groups like the [fascist] Nazis and the [white supremacist] Ku Klux Klan through such programs as quotas and busing, which are producing no tangible benefits for blacks as a whole,” Sowell remarked in U.S. News & World Report in 1981. Ten years later, the economist’s words echoed true as radical right-wing groups attacked such programs and used them as political weapons against blacks in general.

Book Explains Two Visions of Existence

In 1987, Sowell wrote A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggle, in which he hypothesizes the origins of the political battle between right and left in terms of opposing world outlooks. Sowell defined the two views of mankind as “constrained” and “unconstrained”; the New York Times further described this theory as “two divergent visions of man and society that [Sowell] convincingly contends underlie many of the political, economic and social clashes of the last two centuries and remain very much with us today.” The unconstrained vision sees people as guided by reason and ever able to improve themselves and their surroundings. The constrained vision, on the other hand, imagines people basing their behavior on self-interest and possessing a limited ability to alter their surroundings. In short, as Time put it, “the unconstrained see humans as perfectible, the constrained as forever flawed.”

In A Conflict of Visions, Sowell uses the two concepts to illustrate the basis for political and social actions. The unconstrained—or leftists—Sowell writes, believe in government policies to improve life, and the constrained—or rightists—tout the workings of free market systems. To battle crime, seers of the unconstrained vision try to get to the cause of the problem, fighting poverty and unemployment, while those closer to the constrained vision count on the deterrence of the penal system. Furthermore, the unconstrained advocate equal income for all, and the constrained espouse equal opportunities to earn income. At the core of the idea of “social justice,” a phrase created by those with an unconstrained vision, Sowell opines, is the “notion that individuals are entitled to some share of the wealth produced by a society, simply by virtue of being members of that society and irrespective of any individual contributions made or not made to the production of that wealth.”

Sowell acknowledges that not every social theory falls easily into one category or the other. But a New York Times writer observed that “A Conflict of Visions does lay out styles of thinking that we can readily recognize today in the divisions between left and right on matters from nuclear arms to dangerous subways, illegitimate births and affirmative action. It helps us to see where, as they say, our political theorists are coming from.”

Criticized Preferential Quotas

In his 1990 book, Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, Sowell sharply criticizes the use of preferential quotas in college admissions and employment opportunities, using examples from societies around the globe. Sowell attacks affirmative action policies in the United States and particularly the motives behind them. The New York Times wrote that Sowell “reserves his greatest contempt for the ‘trendy middle class,’ which support preference for certain groups because it makes them feel more virtuous.” Preferential treatment and relaxed standards, the book argues, can keep people from reaching their full potential. On the college campus, for example, relaxed admissions standards for certain groups can be detrimental to minority students; some black students may not be properly prepared for the pressure and competition of the university setting and may find themselves in a “softer” field of concentration instead of in a more practical field at a school more suited to their abilities. The result, Sowell asserts, may be heightened interracial tensions on campus.

In many of his previous writings, Sowell disputes the use of statistical disparities as being the result of racism. 1984’s Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, for example, questions whether differences in income, jobs, and education were proof of racial discrimination, citing that blacks hit on average many more home runs than Hispanics in major league baseball, but that doesn’t prove discrimination is the reason. Though critics charged Sowell with oversimplifying the argument, he expressed a similar viewpoint in 1990 in the Wall Street Journal: “Both majorities and minorities have been over-represented and under-represented in institutions and occupations that were good, bad and indifferent. Such widespread statistical disparities make it arbitrary to treat particular disparities as weighty evidence of discrimination.”

Though his views frequently stir up controversy and are diametrically opposed to those of most black leaders, Sowell is confident, according to Newsweek, in the black community’s ability “to pull itself up by its own bootstraps.” In general, the economist is more interested in “the improvement by degrees of the black masses than in the government efforts to shoehorn a few fortunate blacks into symbolic positions,” commented a Forbes contributor. “People ask me,” Sowell noted in Forbes, “‘Don’t you get an awful lot of flak from blacks?’ No, I don’t. There is a handful of black intellectuals screaming and yelling, and there are people who have vested interests in programs I criticize, but people know I’m being straight.”

Selected writings

(Contributor) Readings in the History of Economic Thought, edited by I. H. Rima, Holt, 1970.

Economics: Analysis and Issues, Scott, Foresman & Co., 1971.

Black Education: Myths and Tragedies, David McKay Co., 1972.

Say’s Law: An Historical Analysis, Princeton University Press, 1972.

Classical Economics Reconsidered, Princeton University Press, 1974.

Affirmative Action: Was It Necessary in Academia?, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975.

Race and Economics, David McKay Co., 1975.

Patterns of Black Excellence, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Georgetown University, 1977.

(Editor) American Ethnic Groups, Urban Institute, 1978.

(Editor) Essays and Data on American Ethnic Groups, Urban Institute, 1978.

Knowledge and Decisions, Basic Books, 1980.

Markets and Minorities, Basic Books, 1980.

Pink and Brown People, and Other Controversial Essays, Hoover Institution Press, 1981.

Ethnic America: A History, Basic Books, 1981.

The Economics and Politics of Race: An International Perspective, William Morrow & Co., 1983.

Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, William Morrow & Co., 1985.

Marxism: Philosophy and Economics, William Morrow & Co., 1985.

Education: Assumptions Versus History, Hoover Institution Press, 1986.

A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, William Morrow & Co., 1987.

Compassion Versus Guilt, William Morrow & Co., 1987.

Judicial Activism Reconsidered, Hoover Institution Press, 1989.

Choosing a College: A Guide for Parents and Students, Harper & Row, 1989.

Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, William Morrow & Co., 1990.

Syndicated newspaper columnist; contributor to numerous periodicals, including Forbes, Commentary, Conservative Digest, Current, Ethics, Economic Review, Education Digest, Social Research, Oxford Economic Papers, and Economica.

Sources

Forbes, September 14, 1981; August 24, 1987.

Fortune, March 16, 1987.

Nation, October 10, 1981.

Newsweek, March 9, 1981.

New York Times, January 24, 1987; July 1, 1990.

New York Times Book Review, January 25, 1987.

People, December 28, 1981.

Time, March 16, 1987.

U.S.News & World Report, October 12, 1981.

Wall Street Journal, March 6, 1990.

—John P. Cortez