Source: (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
Dr. Thomas Sowell has
been both a friend and a colleague of mine for over a half-century. On June
30, he will have completed his 90th year of life, and I want to highlight
some important features of that life.
Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930. As
part of the Great Migration northward during the 1930s and '40s, he and his
family moved to Harlem, New York. Sowell attended the prestigious Stuyvesant
High School but dropped out. In 1951, he was drafted into the military and
assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps, where he became a photographer. Photography
remains his hobby today.
After his military tour of duty, Sowell took night
classes at Howard University, where he was encouraged to apply to Harvard
University. He earned a bachelor's degree in economics and graduated magna
cum laude in 1958. The next year, he earned a master's degree from Columbia
University. Ten years later, Sowell earned a Ph.D. in economics from the
prestigious economics department at the University of Chicago.
As Sowell explains in his autobiography, "A Personal
Odyssey," for most of his time in college, he considered himself a
Marxist. After studying the effects of a variety of government regulations,
such as the minimum wage law, Sowell concluded that free markets are the
best alternative, particularly for disadvantaged people.
Sowell taught economics at several universities,
including Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst
College and UCLA. Since 1980, he has been a senior fellow of the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University, where he holds the Rose and Milton Friedman
fellowship. By the way, Nobel laureates Milton Friedman and George Stigler
were two of Sowell's tenacious mentors when he was a student at the University
of Chicago.
Most of those familiar with Sowell's writings do not have
any idea about his early research interests in the history of economic thought.
His dissertation, titled "Say's Law and the General Glut
Controversy," analyzed the work of French economist Jean-Baptiste Say. His
early research in the history of economic thought that appeared in refereed
academic journals included writings on Sir Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen,
Karl Marx, Samuel Bailey and Jean Charles Leonard de Sismondi. These and later
writings make up his 19 scholarly publications.
Most academics do not publish that many scholarly
articles in a lifetime. And, in addition, Sowell has written 56 books,
among them "Say's Law: An Historical Analysis," "Knowledge and
Decisions," "A Conflict of Visions," "Late-Talking
Children," "Basic Economics," "Discrimination and
Disparities" and most recently "Charter Schools and Their
Enemies." A full list of his publications can be found on his
website.
Sowell's writings do not end with scholarly publications
and books. He has authored 72 essays in periodicals and books, wrote 32 book
reviews and was a regular columnist for Creators Syndicate for 25 years, Forbes
magazine for eight years, Scripps Howard News Service from 1984 to 1990, and
the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner from 1978 to 1980. Sowell has had occasional
columns in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post,
Los Angeles Times, Washington Star, Newsweek, The Times (London), Newsday and
The Stanford Daily. My colleague not only writes when you and I are asleep or
enjoying ourselves, but he might write with two hands.
Sowell cares about people. He believes that compassionate
policy requires dispassionate analysis. He takes seriously the admonition given
to physicians, "primum non nocere" (first, do no harm). In many
respects, Sowell is an Austrian economist like the great Nobel laureate
Friedrich Hayek, who often talked about elites and their "pretense of
knowledge." These are people who believe that they have the ability
and knowledge to organize society in a way better than people left to their
own devices -- what Hayek called the fatal conceit. Their vision
requires the use of the coercive powers of government.
In my book, Thomas Sowell is one of the greatest
economist-philosophers of our age, and I am proud to say that he is one of my
best friends. Sowell demonstrates something that is uniquely American: just
because you know where a person ended up in life, you cannot be sure about
where he started. Unlike many other societies, an American need not start at
the top to get to the top. That is something all Americans should be proud of
and jealously guard -- the socioeconomic mobility that comes from a relatively
free society.
Walter
E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out
more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate
writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
