Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell (born June 30, 1930, Gastonia, North Carolina, U.S.) is an American economist and social commentator and also one of the leading intellectual figures of Black conservatism. A prolific writer, he has authored more than 40 books, and for many years he penned a nationally syndicated newspaper column. He studied under economist Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, home to one of the most prominent economics departments in the United States. Moreover, Sowell organized the Fairmont Conference of 1980, arguably the first national gathering of Black conservatives, and he significantly influenced future U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.

Life and career

Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930—during the early days of the Great Depression. His father died before he was born, and he was raised by his father’s Aunt Molly. He wrote in his 2000 memoir, A Personal Odyssey, that the first place he could remember living was a wooden house in Charlotte, North Carolina, that had no electricity or hot running water. In 1939, after his grandaunt separated from her husband, Sowell moved with her to Harlem in New York City, and they took an apartment off 146th Street. At first he struggled in his classes at school, and the other kids often singled him out. “Although we were all black kids in Harlem,” he wrote, “I was from the South and talked ‘funny.’ ” But at the end of the term, he received a commendation card from the school’s principal stating that he was the “most improved student.”

A few years later Sowell’s grades and test scores were high enough to land him a spot at Stuyvesant High School, one of the most competitive and prestigious public high schools in New York City. However, he quit school at the age of 16 and took a job at Western Union and delivered telegrams in the Chelsea neighborhood, which he later described as “grim and sometimes dangerous.” Following a period of service in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War, Sowell began attending Howard University under the G.I. Bill. Though he had not followed a traditional path to higher education, his strong performance on military aptitude tests enabled him to qualify for admission. He later transferred to Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in economics. Sowell went on to receive a master’s degree in economics from Columbia University.

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Ideas and impact

Sowell has said that during his 20s he was devoted to the work of Karl Marx. Nevertheless, in 1959 he enrolled in a Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Chicago, which had what was regarded as one of the most conservative economics departments in the United States. “What made this not matter,” he later wrote, “was that we were both devoted to intellectual standards and intellectual argumentation, quite unlike the question-begging smugness too common at Harvard.” His doctoral adviser at the university was Friedman, a leading economist at the school. However, the most pivotal moment in Sowell’s ideological shift occurred outside the classroom. While conducting research on the sugar industry in Puerto Rico for the U.S. Department of Labor, he encountered evidence suggesting that federal minimum wage laws might be contributing to increased unemployment. According to Sowell, his colleagues showed little interest in pursuing this line of inquiry. “It was the beginning,” he later reflected, “of the erosion of my faith in government programs.”

During the 1960s and ’70s Sowell held teaching positions at several universities, including Cornell, Brandeis, and, ultimately, the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received tenure. In 1980 he left academia to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank closely associated with U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan’s administration, where Sowell shifted his focus entirely to writing books and commentary. This was also the year that he arranged the Black Alternatives Conference, more popularly known as the Fairmont Conference, in San Francisco.

Since 1971 Sowell has written dozens of books, including Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), Discrimination and Disparities (2018), and Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy, which has gone through five editions. One of the most persistent themes in Sowell’s work has been the argument that well-intentioned government policies, such as minimum wage laws and affirmative action—rather than systemic racism—are the primary contributors to persistent poverty among African Americans. This line of reasoning exemplifies what political economist Albert O. Hirschman described in his 1991 book The Rhetoric of Reaction as the “perversity thesis”—the idea that policies designed to improve social conditions may ultimately exacerbate the very problems they aim to solve.

Although Sowell has been supported and promoted by conservative think tanks and mass media, he has often been disparaged by other Black intellectuals. For example in a 1982 essay in Dissent, scholar Jerry G. Watts argued that Sowell’s prominence stemmed less from the substance of his writing than from his usefulness to conservative policy agendas: “The cause of Sowell’s rise to prominence is not…to be found in his books.” He went on to say, “Unfortunately Sowell is too blinded by economic dogma to realize that social-welfare measures were not altruistic liberal inventions but responses pressed on the government by the populace.” Echoing Watts’s concerns, historian and economist James B. Stewart criticized Sowell for framing African American inequality primarily in terms of cultural shortcomings. In his review of Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Stewart argued that Sowell portrayed Black communities as burdened by dysfunctional values while giving insufficient attention to the historical and structural forces—such as slavery and systemic racism—that shaped those conditions. The result, Stewart suggests, is an analysis that overstates personal responsibility while understating broader social realities.

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Even so, Sowell has remained a major presence in the media in the decades since. In 2003 Pres. George W. Bush awarded him the National Humanities Medal, and Thomas, who has described Sowell as a major intellectual influence, accepted it on his behalf. Sowell continued his Creators Syndicate newspaper column until 2016 and has remained active as an author, publishing numerous books into his 90s, including Charter Schools and Their Enemies, which came out in 2020.