Sowell, an African-American, was born in Gastonia, North Carolina. His father died before he was born. In his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, he recalled that his encounters with whites were so limited he did not believe that yellow was a hair color. He moved to Harlem, New York City with his mother’s sister (who, at the time, he believed was his mother). Sowell attended Stuyvesant High School, but dropped out at age 17 because of financial difficulties and a deteriorating home environment. To support himself he worked at various jobs, including in a machine shop and as a delivery man for Western Union. He applied to enter the Civil Service and was eventually accepted, which prompted a move to Washington DC. He was drafted in 1951, during the Korean War, and was assigned to the US Marine Corps. Due to prior experience in photography, he worked in a photography unit.

After discharge, Sowell passed the GED examination and enrolled at Howard University. He transferred to Harvard University, where in 1958 he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics. He received a Master of Arts in Economics from Columbia University in 1959, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from the University of Chicago. Sowell initially chose Columbia University because he wanted to study under George Stigler. After arriving at Columbia and learning that Stigler had moved to Chicago, he followed him there.

Sowell has taught Economics at Howard University, Cornell University, Brandeis University, and UCLA. Since 1980 he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds a fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman.

Sowell has stated that he was a Marxist “during the decade of my 20s." His experience working as a federal government intern during the summer of 1960 caused him to reject his so-called Marxism in favor of free market economic theory. His intern work asserted a correlation between the rise of mandated minimum wages for workers in the sugar industry of Puerto Rico and the rise of unemployment in that industry. Studying the patterns led Sowell to allege that the government employees who administered the minimum wage law cared more about their own jobs than the plight of the poor.

Sowell is both a syndicated columnist and an academic economist.

Besides scholarly writing, Sowell has written books, articles, and syndicated columns for a general audience in such publications as Forbes Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and major newspapers. He is a regular contributor to GOPUSA, a conservative web and email newsletter run by Endeavor Media Group, LLC. He primarily writes on economic subjects, generally advocating a free market approach to capitalism. Sowell, who claims to be a former Marxist, opposes Marxism, providing a critique in his book Marxism: Philosophy and Economics. He also argues that, contrary to popular perception, Marx never held to a labor theory of value.

Sowell also writes on racial topics and is a critic of affirmative action and race based quotas. While often described as a black conservative, he prefers not to be labeled, and considers himself more libertarian than conservative.

In another departure from economics, Sowell wrote The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late, a follow-up to his Late-Talking Children. This book investigates the phenomenon of late-talking children, frequently misdiagnosed with autism or pervasive developmental disorder. He includes the research of...among others...Professor Stephen Camarata, Ph.D., of Vanderbilt University and Professor Steven Pinker, Ph.D., of Harvard University in this overview of a poorly understood developmental trait. It is a trait which he says affected many historical figures. He includes famous late-talkers such as physicists Albert Einstein, Edward Teller and Richard Feynman; mathematician Julia Robinson; and musicians Arthur Rubenstein and Clara Schumann. The book and its contributing researchers make a case for the theory that some children develop unevenly (asynchronous development) for a period in childhood due to rapid and extraordinary development in the analytical functions of the brain. This may temporarily “rob resources” from neighboring functions such as language development. The book contradicts Simon Baron-Cohen’s speculation that Einstein may have had Asperger syndrome (see also people speculated to have been autistic).

Sowell has also written A Conflict of Visions where he speaks about the origins of political strife.

Columns

Sowell has a nationally syndicated column distributed by Creators Syndicate that appears in various newspapers, as well as online on websites such as Townhall, WorldNetDaily, OneNewsNow and the Jewish World Review.

Sowell comments on issues he considers to be problematic in modern-day society, which include liberal media bias; judicial activism (while staunchly defending originalism); partial birth abortion; the minimum wage; socializing health care; affirmative action; government bureaucracy; militancy in U.S. foreign policy; the U.S. war on drugs.

Sowell supports free market and pro-growth economics. In one column he criticized as socialism for the rich, certain policies which he describes as benefiting the wealthy at the expense of the poor.

Sowell also favors decriminalization of all drugs.

The major themes and philosophies of Sowell’s writing range from social policy on race, ethnic groups, education and decision-making, to classical and Marxist economics, to the problems of children perceived as having disabilities. Sowell has also extended his research from the United States to the international sphere, finding supporting data and patterns from several cultures and nations. He has demonstrated that similar incentives and constraints often result in similar outcomes among very different peoples and cultures.

Five themes in his work cut across specific topics:

1. The importance of empirical evidence, not only in a narrow technical sense but as reflected in the broad record of history.
2. The competing basic visions of policy makers, and their role in the interactions of elites versus the ordinary masses.
3. An importance of trade-offs, constraints and incentives in human decision making.
4. The significance of human capital...attitudes, skills, and work.
5. The importance of systemic (orderly, structured) processes for decision-making...from free markets to the rule of law.

These five keys place the economist’s writings in the greater context of historical synthesis and human decision-making, rather than being simply those of a conservative pundit or “race” writer on particular contemporary social issues. Sowell’s work is also a significant answer to critiques of economics arguing that the discipline has failed to come to grips with real world problems and is occupied too much with technical models and details, while paying little attention to historical processes.

Importance of empirical evidence

Empirical evidence and objective analysis of relevant factors is sorely lacking in claims surrounding race, culture and society

In his writings Sowell has repeatedly emphasized the need for empirical evidence and objective assessments of data, as opposed to the sweeping generalizations, wishful thinking, and distorted or false evidence provided by numerous writers in the field of social policy and economics. Sowell contends that in no field are these distortions greater than when the topic of race is discussed. Sowell maintains that common assumptions and stirring rhetoric about poverty, slavery, discrimination, economic progress or education do not hold up when measured against hard data.

What counts in assessing a social or economic policy is not the stated intentions of promoters, but the incentives created and the actual end results produced

In his book Marxism: Philosophy and Economics Sowell shows that this was the outlook of Marx. He applies this bottom-line approach to other social policies, ranging from IQ Tests to affirmative action. In numerous cases, he demonstrates that the stated aims of promoters had little relation to the actual results produced. Regarding affirmative action, for example, the goals of proponents...that it was a temporary measure, that it helped those categories of minorities less fortunate, that it would promote social harmony, et cetera...have not been satisfied when the empirical evidence is analyzed. Sowell contends that too often, social policy is made on the basis of sweeping assumptions, arbitrarily selected statistical data, and ideological dogma, without sufficient evidence.

Numerous factors determine income and education levels among American ethnic groups, and between genders, not the overgeneralized, “all-purpose” explanations of racism, or sexism

In books such as Markets and Minorities, Ethnic America, and Race and Culture, Sowell demonstrates the importance of geography, degree of urbanization, cultural structures, field of work, and other factors more relevant than racism. He believes that those who make charges of racism seldom present credible empirical evidence. As for the pay gap between men and women, for example, Sowell’s book Civil Rights argues that most of this gap is based on marital status, not glass-ceiling discrimination: Earnings for men and women of the same basic description (education, jobs, hours worked, marital status) were essentially equal. That result would not be predicted under explanatory theories of sexism.

Internationally, empirical evidence shows that colonialism, imperialism, and claims of genetic superiority are all theories failing to explain technological or economic differences among nations.

Sowell’s trilogy Race and Culture, Migrations and Culture, and Conquests and Cultures exemplifies his broad analytical approach to historical processes, cutting across centuries of history, and many different peoples. He compares nations and minority groups within nations, particularly migrants. On an international scale, cultural factors are very important. Some countries heavily subjected to imperialism and colonialism are themselves among the most prosperous. For example, he notes that once backward Britain survived centuries of Roman colonialism and imperialism, it emerged centuries later as the most powerful empire on earth.

Sowell maintains that trendy explanations of racism and imperialism, or their reverse...simplistic claims of genetic superiority...are often used to explain significant historical patterns, when mundane factors such as geography can be much more relevant and useful in understanding an issue. The presence of navigable rivers, good harbors favorable for transportation and trade, mountain ranges that capture water for later irrigation, fertile land, climate patterns that facilitate the movement of productive plants and animals, and other like factors all heavily influenced nations’ or people’s successes over the span of history. Western tropical Africa for example, is particularly deficient in a number of such geographic advantages. Sowell shows that for centuries, non-white nations like China were more advanced than those of Europe until comparatively recently. He also argues that the European West borrowed and adapted freely from other nations and regions...from the writing systems and domesticates of Southwest Asia to the numerous inventions and innovations of China (gunpowder, compass, etc.) and various other strands in-between. Within national settings, students of East Asian origin in the West frequently outperform their white counterparts and score higher on IQ tests. These patterns undercut simplistic white supremacist theories of inherent genetic superiority. In 1983’s Economics and Politics of Race Sowell predicts that the long cycles of history may yet again reshuffle the success of nations and peoples.

On race and intelligence (as measured by IQ), whole groups and nations have raised their IQ scores over time, undermining various theories of intelligence related to minorities such as Jews and blacks.

In Intelligence and Ethnicity, Sowell demonstrates how IQ scores have risen among many groups (see: Flynn effect). He notes that a number of white ethnic groups tallied poor scores as they began entry into the American urban economy. Jews, for example, scored dismally on Army intelligence tests during WWI, leading to assumptions that they were second-rate citizens. Jewish IQ scores have risen steadily, and now they rank near the top. Similarly, IQ scores of East Asians were unimpressive in early measurements, but they rank high today. Sowell shows that black IQ progress has been concealed by the practice of statistical redefinitions, or norming, of beginning measurement baselines. Thus an IQ score that might have been considered normal or average in 1960, is today considered below par. By recalculating from the original baselines, he demonstrates that not only blacks but entire nations have shown significant rises in IQ over time. He notes that the roughly 15-point gap in contemporary black—white IQ scores is similar to that between the national average and the scores of particular ethnic white groups in years past. Indeed similar gaps have been reported within white populations, such as Northern Europeans versus Southern Europeans. Sowell references some of these points in his criticism of the book The Bell Curve.

In short, Sowell argues, IQ gaps are hardly startling or unusual between, or within, ethnic groups. What is distressing, he claims, is the sometimes hysterical response to the very fact that IQ research is being done, and movements to ban testing in the name of self-esteem or fighting racism. He argues that few would have known of black IQ progress if scholars like James Flynn had not undertaken allegedly racist research.

What some portray as authentic black culture is actually a carryover from a highly dysfunctional white southern redneck culture.

According to Sowell, in his 2005 Black Rednecks and White Liberals, what many see as pathologies of contemporary black culture actually derive from a dysfunctional historical white-southern “cracker” culture.

What the [white] rednecks or crackers brought with them across the ocean was a whole constellation of attitudes, values, and behavior patterns that might have made sense in the world in which they had lived for centuries, but which would prove to be counterproductive in the world to which they were going ... and counterproductive to the blacks who would live in their midst for centuries before emerging into freedom and migrating to the great urban centers of the United States, taking with them similar values.

The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, a lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists. Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture among people from regions of Britain where the civilization was the least developed.

Several scholars support Sowell’s observations. Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture (1988) is a thorough historical study of the values and behavioral patterns of white Southerners, and is backed by many other scholarly studies which have turned up very similar patterns even when they differed in some ways as to the causes. Scholar Hackett Fischer’s Albions Seed,(1989) for example, eschews the Celtic theory advanced by McWhiney, but shows many of the same cultural patterns for the whites, both in Britain and the American South.

What is different about the current era, Sowell claims, is that better educated, more productive whites are no longer as willing to challenge or condemn the counterproductive behaviors deriving from the holdovers of white cracker culture among blacks. This stands in sharp contrast to the white northern educators that went to educate ex-slaves in the post-Civil War South, who insisted on strong discipline and work, and helped lay the foundations for black education. Instead, Sowell contends, today’s white liberals too often justify, glorify, and subsidize these negatives as the “authentic expression” and behavior of the black masses. Sowell holds that the backward behavior pattern of southern whites has carried over to a generation of negative “blacknecks” who are in no way representative of the authenticity of the black community over its long, difficult climb from slavery and discrimination to freedom and equality in the United States.

Competing visions and intellectuals

Many modern ideological struggles can be traced to two visions: the vision of the anointed and the vision of the constrained realist

Sowell lays out these concepts in his A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed. These two visions encompass a range of ideas and theories. The vision of the anointed relies heavily on sweepingly optimistic assumptions about human nature, distrust of decentralized processes like the free market, impatience with systemic processes that constrain human action, and absent or distorted empirical evidence. The constrained or tragic vision relies heavily on a reduced view of the goodness of human nature, and prefers the systematic processes of the free market, and the systematic processes of the rule of law and constitutional government. It distrusts sweeping theories and grand assumptions in favor of heavy reliance on solid empirical evidence and on time-tested structures and processes.

Intellectuals are “idea” workers, who often presume special wisdom and insight outside their area of expertise to guide others, while being unaccountable for results

In his 2009 book Intellectuals and Society, (Basic Books: 2009) Sowell argues that intellectuals, defined as people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas (writers, historians, academics, etc.) usually consider themselves as anointed, endowed by superior intellect or insight to guide power-brokers and the masses. This makes them different from other highly educated, cerebral workers in applied occupations such as engineering, medicine, or military service. Sowell claims that modern society needs a healthy skepticism of intellectuals, because not only are many of their theories wrong if judged empirically, but also intellectuals are often unaccountable for results, and thus are more reckless in their claims and more dangerous in their influence. They pay little penalty if they are wrong, unlike for example applied knowledge workers like surgeons or military officers. Thus peace intellectuals helped create a climate that dangerously weakened the resolve and armed strength of many major democracies prior to WWII. On balance, Sowell argues, these unaccountable idea workers have made the world a worse place in the 20th century. Several features mark such intellectuals, Sowell maintains, sometimes cutting across stereotypical categories like left or right.

• Preference for control of third parties and imposition of their preferences over the decision-making and preferences of the broad masses
• Claimed or assumed leadership or special insight by themselves- a sense of their own specialness.
• Lack of real world accountability for the actual outcomes and results of their theories and notions.
• Special knowledge within narrow areas but ignorance without
• Creation of political and social climates that can cause disaster or hinder beneficial action
• Verbal virtuosity and clever phrasing substituting for evidence or logic.
• Ego-involvement and personalization of issues, leading to demonization of opponents, self-congratulation and self-flattery as a basis for social policy.

Trade-offs, constraints and incentives

Ordinary citizens might benefit from analyzing issues and public policies in terms of costs, benefits and trade-offs, where scarce resources have alternative uses, rather than rely on lofty rhetoric from political leaders, activists and special interests.

In Basic Economics and Applied Economics, Sowell lays out the fundamentals of the discipline so that the layman can understand them, as well as his essential way or model for approaching problems. There are no free lunches, Sowell emphasizes, only trade-offs at various levels. This transactional approach to social and economic policy is one of the hallmarks of Sowell’s writings:

Lofty talk about “non-economic values” too often amounts to very selfish attempts to impose one’s own values, without having to weigh them against other people’s values. Taxing away what other people have earned, in order to finance one’s own fantasy ventures, is often depicted as a humanitarian endeavor, while allowing others the same freedom and dignity as oneself, so they can make their own choices with their own earnings, is considered to be pandering to “greed.” Greed for power is more dangerous than greed for money and has shed far more blood in the process. Political authorities have often had “revolutionary values” that were devastating to the general population.

Government action is too often perceived as beneficial, just and noble, when in fact it often hurts those it is purportedly trying to help.

As far back as 1975’s Race and Economics and continuing through his Affirmative Action Around The World and Basic and Applied Economics series, Sowell repeatedly shows that much government action in the social and economic domains has not only failed to achieve desired or claimed results but in many cases has created worse conditions than those previously existing. Examples given to bolster Sowell’s arguments range from rent control (which decreases the supply of housing) to busing for racial balance (schools in some areas under busing are just as segregated or worse than before) and crime control, zoning laws, and education.

Sowell also takes strong issue with the notion of government as a helper or savior of minorities, arguing that the historical record shows quite the opposite...from the lower level Jim Crow laws created and enforced by state and local regimes, to welfare subsidies at the federal level that have promoted family dependency and breakdown. The Montgomery Bus Company of the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott in the 1950s, for example, had originally pleaded with local segregationist officials not to impose Jim Crow on the bus lines. Before, such lines served both black and white customers with little problem. This plea was rejected, and the hand of government once again interfered with and hindered free markets that mutually benefited customers of all races. Unlike the free market, where the dollars held by blacks and whites have equal value, the governmental sphere in a massive number of historical instances imposed unequal values...with black votes having less value than white ones...and so Jim Crow expanded. Sowell maintains that, time and time again, the hand of government has negatively intervened to snuff out mutually desirable free market transactions between blacks and whites, raising business costs, dampening profits, and creating huge inefficiencies to local economies. The wasteful duplication of facilities and customer-service areas in the name of segregation are but one example of the waste and inefficiency imposed by government, reputed benefactor of minorities. Sowell draws upon a mass of historical data to question both the priorities and logic of those who call for even more government intervention and spending to “solve” the problems of minorities.

On several measures, black progress was much more positive prior to the significant rise of the welfare state, and prior to the era of affirmative action.

Another of Sowell’s themes is to show the painful but steady rise of blacks in the US against heavy odds before massive intervention by government programs, a rise that contradicts some popular assumptions.

Social problems

In Affirmative Action Around the World (2004) and Civil Rights Sowell demonstrates that on several measures, black progress was actually better before the era of the expanding welfare state and affirmative action era of the 1970s, and even the Civil Rights Act of 1964, than in the contemporary era. In the decades immediately after the Civil War for example, blacks posted higher employment rates and lower divorce rates than whites. As regards family stability and out-of-wedlock births, black rates prior to WWII were hardly perfect, (19% in 1940 and 22% in 1960) but were still far lower than the 70% out-of-wedlock births afflicting the black community at the beginning of the 21st century. In every census between 1890 and 1940, blacks posted higher marriage rates than whites. Sowell also shows that numerous other European groups showed patterns of high dysfunction as they migrated to urban areas. He argues that this historical record undermines claims about hopelessly deficient black family patterns due to an alleged legacy of slavery or genetic handicaps, and maintains that the dependency induced by the welfare state undermined much that was stable and commendable about black family and community life, above and beyond the difficulties of rural to urban migration. The weakening of crime controls by judges and political elites during the 1960s fostered an atmosphere of lawlessness in the black community that also contributed to a negative harvest of social problems. As regards murder, for example, a crime that is not much influenced by fluctuations in victim reporting, rates doubled in the 1960s as plea bargaining, lighter sentences, “revolving door” early releases, restrictions on police procedures and probations increased. Although the weakening of controls was sometimes undertaken in the name of fairness for minorities, no community was harder hit by such rising rates than the black community.

Education

Black education was badly hurt by Jim Crow laws and practices; nevertheless Sowell demonstrates in Inside American Education (1993) and Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (1972) that even on this measure, blacks often showed progress that would be almost inconceivable in many of today’s inner city schools. While black education lagged heavily behind that of whites in the segregation era, several black schools were to emerge that produced excellent performances. All-black Dunbar High School in Washington D.C. prior to the 1960s, for example, achieved performance levels equal to or exceeding that of surrounding white schools. The average IQ at Dunbar was 111 in 1939, and again in 1950, and attendance records in some years showed lower levels of absenteeism than that of surrounding white schools in the District of Columbia. Dunbar also produced a impressive number of black firsts in many fields from naval officers, to the first black federal judge, military general, and cabinet member, and with alumni ranging from jazzman Duke Ellington to the black pioneer in the use of blood plasma. Nor could this be due to creaming of the crop to create a tiny elite of black students, Sowell contends. Attendance records suggest Dunbar’s student body was quite representative of the black community it served, and fully one-third of all black students in D.C. passed through its doors in some decades.

Dunbar is not the only example. A record of achievement is documented in several schools across the country. In several New York schools (Harlem) before WWII, black student test scores achieved basic parity with comparable working class white schools on the lower East side...sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but never miles behind as is the case in numerous ghetto schools of the contemporary era. Nor are such patterns necessarily a recent phenomenon. As far back as WWI, black soldiers from various Northern States like New York, Pennsylvania, etc. scored higher on Army intelligence tests than southern whites from various southern states like Mississippi, Alabama and others.

In his 1986 Education: Assumptions versus History, Sowell discusses several all-black public and private schools that achieved high performance standards like Dunbar. Ironically, some of these high-performing black schools declined after the Brown desegregation. Dunbar for example was torn down and rebuilt as a neighborhood school in a neighborhood that had descended into crime, poverty and decay. Similar patterns occurred with many other once thriving black institutions. Schools that once boasted high test scores, numerous academic awards, service to the community, and the development of black professionals became marked by low test scores, locations in decaying neighborhoods, lack of parental support and discipline problems. Policies such as busing for racial balance did little to stem this decline. There is little interest in such past achievements, Sowell argues, because the historical record would call into question prevailing policies and dogmas focused on racial headcounts, trendy black English, diversity, bigger budgets and more spending. The record also highlights counterproductive cultural attitudes towards education among some of today’s blacks as demonstrated by various research on the anti-intellectual “acting white” phenomenon, Sowell claims. Today’s Dunbar, he notes, has much finer physical facilities than the old school before its decline in the 1960s, but produces much more dismal academic results. More students went on to college from Dunbar during the Great Depression than they do in the contemporary ghetto school of today.

Long-standing trend of black progress

Sowell also challenges the notion that black progress is due to progressive government programs or policies. In The Economics and Politics of Race, (1983), Ethnic America (1981), Affirmative Action (2004), and other books, Sowell shows that in the five years prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act black gains in employment and education were actually higher than in the five years after. Black progress in employment and education was a long-standing trend from the WWII era, almost two decades before the 1964 law, and before the era of affirmative action in the mid 1970s. Black gains in education and employment after 1964, Sowell maintains, continued this upward movement in the booming postwar economy. The passage of the race-neutral Civil Rights Act of 1964 complemented this upward swing and, by removing unjust legal barriers, provided significant equal opportunity. Sowell sharply contrasts equal opportunity (fair treatment across the board regardless of race) with the disguised or open race quotas and headcounts of affirmative action.

Long-standing advance in reducing poverty is also a hallmark of black effort, Sowell maintains, contradicting assorted claims of black inability. Prior to the 1964 Act, when few welfare or transfer payment programs as such were in place, a majority of blacks had actually pulled themselves above the poverty line despite open hostility from many whites and open segregation and discrimination in job and housing markets. On several other measures, from youth employment to crime, blacks posted a much better showing prior to the expansion of the welfare state, or the affirmative action era, than after.

White ethnic groups show many of the same problems historically.

Sowell also argues that many problems identified with blacks in modern society are hardly unique in terms of American ethnic groups, nor in terms of a rural proletariat swept by disruption as it became urbanized. Heavy patterns of pathology are for example seen in the white peasant migrants to the dismal urban slums that sprung up during the Industrial Revolution in Britain and elsewhere. He maintains that US blacks only became a largely urban people after WWII, when the booming war economy produced a third great migration north, allowing millions of blacks to escape the harsh, oppressive conditions of the South. While southern cities also saw some migration, it was this massive wartime move north that was much more significant, and the arrival of the rural black proletariat into difficult urban conditions broke down many of the social mores and community controls that had maintained its stability in the past.

Sowell notes that social problems occurring after such migrations are nothing new with other white ethnic groups, who had the advantage of entering, acculturating and adjusting to the urban economy in toto several decades earlier than blacks. The black migrants faced race discrimination above and beyond other ethnic groups but fundamentally experienced the same social pathologies others did in becoming urbanized. Difficulties with crime, schooling, substance abuse etc are thus not uniquely "black" problems but are well represented in other urbanizing groups from peasant background. In Ethnic America, (1981) for example, Sowell shows that white ethnic groups like the Irish were marked by many of the same patterns as blacks who migrated from rural backgrounds to the big urban centers, including high levels of violence and substance abuse. As regards out-of-wedlock births, the rate in some New York areas with heavy white Irish settlement was over 50%, comparable to what would develop in later black ghettos in the same city.

Sowell sums of some of these claims in his Pink and Brown People and Other Controversial Essays (1981), warning against what he calls the fallacy of presentism:

"Those who cannot swallow pseudo-biology can turn to pseudo-history as the basis for classification. Unique cultural characteristics are now supposed to neatly divide the population. In this more modern version, the ghetto today is a unique social phenomenon.. American ghettos have always had crime, violence, overcrowding, filth, drunkenness, bad school teaching, and worse learning. Nor are blacks historically unique even in the degree of these things. Crime and violence were much worse in the nineteenth-century slums, which were almost all white. The murder rate in Boston in the middle of the nineteenth century was about three times what it was in the middle of the twentieth century. All the black riots of the 1960s put together did not kill half as many people as were killed in one white riot in 1863.. Squalor, dirt, disease? Historically, blacks are neither the first nor last in any of these categories. There were far more immigrants packed into the slums (per room or per square mile) than is the case with blacks today - not to mention the ten thousand to thirty thousand children with no home at all in the nineteenth-century New York...

Even in the area where many people get most emotional- educational and IQ test results- blacks are doing nothing that various European minorities did not do before them. As of about 1920, any number of European ethnic groups had I.Q.'s the same or lower than the I.Q.'s of blacks today. As recently as 1940, there were schools on the Lower East Side of New York with academic performances lower than those of schools in Harlem. Much of the paranoia that we talk ourselves into about race is a result of provincialism about our own time as compared to other periods in history."

The true beneficiaries of affirmative action are not the less fortunate but those already advantaged

In his 2004 Affirmative action Around the World Sowell holds that affirmative action covers most of the American population, particularly women, and has long since ceased to be directed towards blacks, although blacks are often invoked as primary beneficiaries, and that the main beneficiaries are not the less fortunate but those already able to well help themselves:

As in other countries, however, these policies spread far beyond the initial beneficiaries. Blacks are just 12 percent of the American population, but affirmative action programs have expanded over the years to include not only other racial or ethnic groups, but also women, so that such such policies now apply to a substantial majority of the American population...

...the top 20 percent of black income earners had their income share rising at about the same rate as that of their white counterparts, while the bottom 20 percent of black income earners had their income share fall at more than double the rate of the bottom 20 percent of white income earners. In short, the affirmative action era in the United States saw the more fortunate blacks benefit while the least fortunate lost ground in terms of their share of incomes. Neither the gains nor the losses can be arbitrarily attributed to affirmative action but neither can affirmative action claim to have advanced lower-income blacks when in fact those fell behind."

Sowell shows that immigrants suffering no past discrimination in the United States have also sometimes been classified as “approved minorities” and have also benefited from Affirmative Action. The affluent Fanjul family from Cuba for example, with a fortune exceeding $500 million, received contracts set aside for minority businesses. European businessmen from Portugal received the bulk of the money paid to minority owned construction firms between 1986 and 1990 in Washington D.C. Asian businessmen immigrating to the United States have also received preferential access to government contracts. Sowell also argues that while affirmative action began as a program primarily intended to benefit blacks, a huge majority of minority- and female-owned businesses are in fact owned by groups other than blacks, including Asians, Hispanics, and women.

In addition, the vast majority of minority firms appear to gain little from government set-asides. In Cincinnati, for example, 682 minority forms appeared on the city’s approved list but 13% of these companies received 62% of preferential access and 83% of the money. Nationally, one-fourth of one percent of minority-owned enterprises are certified to receive preferences under the Small Business Administration, but even within this tiny number, 2% of the firms received 40% of the money.

The history of black achievement prior to the affirmative action era is too often lost and overlooked, Sowell holds, and contradicts some right-wing claims that blacks have not pulled themselves up, or that seek to tar black progress as a function of affirmative action. The same history also contradicts some liberal claims that government programs like race quotas are responsible for black progress, when the facts show that the main beneficiaries of such programs are often non-blacks, and that there has been a long-standing trend of black advance before such programs.

Human capital

Human capital is the most durable, most precious of all, trumping both physical and financial capital, and overcoming the most adverse circumstances.

Over and over again in Sowell’s works the theme of human capital appears. Human capital is the sum total of values, attitudes, skills, work effort and cultural inheritance and patterns, often extending back for centuries. Human capital can be individual...education, self-discipline, savings, hard work...but more important to Sowell’s work, it is also mass capital, the combined product of millions, not the select preserve of a few.

Human capital and oppressed minorities

Human capital has permitted ethnic minorities to bounce back and triumph over the harshest, most brutal treatment by majorities. Sowell’s works (Economics and Politics of Race (1993), Ethnic America(1981), Affirmative Action around the World (2004), and Race and Culture (1994). etc.) are laced with such illustrations, across several nations of the world, and across several centuries. Jews in Europe or the Middle East, for example, often harshly persecuted for centuries and denied a basis in agriculture, used their skills in urban economies to not only survive, but to ultimately end-run their enemies. Overseas Chinese are another such group, enduring harsh treatment from the colonial and modern era of Southeast Asia to the mining towns of 19th Century California, where rampaging white mobs did not give them “a Chinaman’s chance.” Today their native born descendants as a group surpass the US white average on a number of counts, from income and education to IQ and academic test results. Japanese-Americans show a similar pattern despite such obstacles as racist land laws designed to freeze them out of farming occupations or the internment camps of WWII.

Human capital in patterns reaching back centuries

In several works, Sowell traces the triumph of human capital and the human spirit across nations and historical periods. Industrious German farmers who took over wasteland scorned by others and turned it into productive farms did so not only in the United States, but in places as far afield as Russia and Argentina. Japanese farming skill and discipline repeated itself from the produce fields of California to Brazil. Italian stone and vineyard workers dominated certain related trades from the streets of New York to the fields of distant Argentina. None of this is by accident, but reflects human capital earned the hard way across the span of centuries, in multiple nations, across multiple generations. The importance of human capital...mass capital attained by ordinary men and women through generations of experience and sacrifice...is, for Sowell, much more important to human well-being than the theories of racial supremacists or utopian activists. Such capital is the foundation of human liberty and civilization. Some critics claim that the sharp, sometimes sarcastic tone found in some of Sowell’s works such as Inside American Education reflects his exasperation and frustration at the waste of human capital occurring in many minority, particularly black communities.

Systemic processes

Systemic processes mated to the common wisdom and practical action of the ordinary people are superior to the grandiose presumptions of intellectual, political and bureaucratic elites.

In several works...his Knowledge and Decisions, A Conflict of Visions, and The Economics and Politics of Race among them...Sowell stresses the importance of systemic processes like free markets, the rule of law, and constitutional government. Such systemic processes are orderly, structured, and sequential. They are not perfect, nor can they be, since humans themselves are flawed. Instead, on the balance, they provide the best framework whereby imperfect humans can achieve large measures of freedom in not only the political sphere but the economic one as well. Such processes are continually refined and improved incrementally over time. Improvements over time to common law judicial systems like that of the United States, for example, did not quickly come about by sweeping decrees from those with allegedly superior wisdom, but rather by a long, painful process extending back to the Magna Carta and beyond. Likewise US blacks pulled themselves from poverty not because of government programs or policies, but often in spite of government, largely using the processes of free markets. Blacks broke segregation in many white neighborhoods, for example, not because of the goodness of the government or the goodwill of whites, but because their combined dollars outbid or induced even racist whites to sell them property in reserved areas.

On balance, Sowell maintains, systemic processes are superior to the dictates or condescension of those on high who presume to know better than ordinary people. A product of the hard-scrabble streets himself, Sowell also stresses the practical action and wisdom of the broad masses within those methodical frameworks, versus the presumptions, confiscations and social engineering of elites. The ordinary masses deserve freedom as much as “their betters.” Such elites, he argues, are only too ready to claim freedom for their own trendy notions and self-aggrandizing profit, while denying similar freedom to the small man on the street to manage his own resources and make his own decisions. A deep skepticism towards intellectual and bureaucratic elites runs through much of Sowell’s work. This is perhaps summed up best at the end of Knowledge and Decisions (1983):

Historically, freedom is a rare and tragic thing. It has emerged out of the stalemates of would-be oppressors. Freedom has cost the blood of millions in obscure places and historic sites ranging from Gettysburg to the Gulag Archipelago. That something that cost so much in human lives should be surrendered piecemeal in exchange for [trendy] visions or rhetoric seems grotesque. Freedom is not simply the right of intellectuals to circulate their merchandise. It is, above all, the right of ordinary people to find elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their “betters.”

Many of Sowell's remarks have been criticized by liberal groups such as Media Matters. These include Sowell's claims that Obama's speech to students is similar to the "Hitler Youth" and that the Democratic party uses race baiting and that this could lead to Rwanda-like "slaughters".

The work of many economists such as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and University of California, Berkeley professor and former International Monetary Fund adviser Barry Eichengreen often contradict Sowell's claims of government interference in issues such as price gouging and protectionism (respectively). In addition, many studies show that welfare systems often reduce poverty , contrary to Sowell's claim that welfare generates poverty. (see Welfare's effect on poverty)

Articles and interviews

• “10 Questions With Thomas Sowell”, John Hawkins, Right Wing News. Sowell on flat-tax vs. progressive tax, rent-control, balanced budget amendments, protectionist tariffs, poverty and welfare, profit-restriction, illegal immigration, a weak dollar vs. a strong dollar, affirmative action, and reparations.
• 'Q&A' Interview (April 17, 2005)
• 'Booknotes' Interview (June 10, 1990)
• 'Uncommon Knowledge' discussion of affirmative action
• Thomas Sowell- Columns on Jewish World Review website
• “Race and IQ” Detailed discussion of Race and IQ including techniques that have masked the improvement of black IQ scores.
• “Choosing a College” ... discusses benefits and costs including college quality, size, specialty, intellectual rigor, social, political and sexual environment of today’s campuses. Recommends hard-nosed parental analysis (including campus visits) that ignores PR fluff and focuses on the bottom line
• “Affirmative Action around the World” - critical analysis of Affirmative Action and its failures worldwide.
• Salon interview with Sowell
• Audio interview with National Review Online
• Sowell on Economic Facts and Fallacies: Audio interview
• Sowell en español

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