Thomas Sowell Popular Books

Thomas Sowell Biography & Facts

Thomas Sowell ( SOHL; born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, social philosopher, and political commentator. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002. Sowell was born in segregated Gastonia, North Carolina, to a poor family, and grew up in Harlem, New York City. Due to poverty and difficulties at home, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and worked various odd jobs, eventually serving in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. Afterward, he took night classes at Howard University and then attended Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958. He earned a master's degree in economics from Columbia University the next year and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. In his academic career, he held professorships at Cornell University, Brandeis University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked at think tanks including the Urban Institute. Since 1977, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy. Sowell was an important figure to the conservative movement during the Reagan era, influencing fellow economist Walter E. Williams and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He was offered a position as Federal Trade Commissioner in the Ford administration, and was considered for posts including U.S. Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, but declined both times. Sowell is the author of more than 45 books (including revised and new editions) on a variety of subjects including politics, economics, education and race, and he has been a syndicated columnist in more than 150 newspapers. His views are described as conservative, especially on social issues; libertarian, especially on economics; or libertarian-conservative. He has said he may be best labeled as a libertarian, though he disagrees with libertarians on some issues, such as national defense. Early life Sowell was born in 1930 into a poor family in segregated Gastonia, North Carolina. His father died shortly before he was born, leaving behind Sowell's mother, a housemaid who already had four children. A great-aunt and her two grown daughters adopted Sowell and raised him. His mother died a few years later of complications while giving birth to another child. In his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, Sowell wrote that his childhood encounters with white people were so limited that he did not know blond was a hair color. He recalls that his first memories were living in a small wooden house in Charlotte, North Carolina, which he stated was typical of most black neighborhoods. It was located on an unpaved street and had no electricity or running water. When Sowell was nine years old, he and his extended family moved from North Carolina to Harlem, New York City, for greater opportunities, joining in the large-scale trend of African-American migration from the American south to the north. Family quarrels forced him and his aunt to room in other people's apartments. Sowell qualified for Stuyvesant High School, a prestigious academic high school in New York City; he was the first in his family to study beyond the sixth grade. However, he was forced to drop out at age 17 because of financial difficulties and family quarreling. He worked a number of odd jobs, including long hours at a machine shop, and as a delivery man for Western Union. He also tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1948. Sowell was drafted into the armed services in 1951 during the Korean War and was assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps. Although Sowell opposed the war and experienced racism, he was able to find fulfillment as a photographer, which eventually became his favorite hobby. He was honorably discharged in 1952. Higher education and early career After leaving military service, Sowell completed high school, took a civil service job in Washington, DC, and attended night classes at Howard University, a historically black college. His high scores on the College Board exams and recommendations by two professors helped him gain admission to Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He earned a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University the following year. Sowell had initially chosen Columbia University to study under George Stigler, who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Economics, but when he learned that Stigler had moved to the University of Chicago, he followed him there and studied for his doctorate under Stigler upon arriving in the fall of 1959. Sowell has said that he was a Marxist "during the decade of my 20s". One of his earliest professional publications was a sympathetic examination of Marxist thought vs. Marxist–Leninist practice. What began to change his mind toward supporting free market economics, he said, was studying the possible impact of minimum wages on unemployment of sugar industry workers in Puerto Rico, as a U.S. Department of Labor intern. Workers at the department were surprised by his questioning, he said, and he concluded that "they certainly weren't going to engage in any scrutiny of the law". Sowell received his Doctor of Philosophy in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. His dissertation was titled "Say's Law and the General Glut Controversy". Academic career From 1965 to 1969, Sowell was an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. Writing 30 years later about the 1969 seizure of Willard Straight Hall by black students at Cornell, Sowell characterized the students as "hoodlums" with "serious academic problems [who were] admitted under lower academic standards", and noted "it so happens that the pervasive racism that black students supposedly encountered at every turn on campus and in town was not apparent to me during the four years that I taught at Cornell and lived in Ithaca." Sowell has taught economics at Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst College, and the University of California, Los Angeles. At Howard, Sowell wrote, he was offered the position as head of the economics department, but he declined. 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, his mentor. The Hoover appointment, because it did not involve teaching, gave him more time for his numerous writings. In addition, Sowell appeared several times on William F. Buckley Jr.'s show Firing Line, during which he discussed the economics of race and privatization. Sowell has written that he gradually lost faith in the academic system, citing low academic stan.... Discover the Thomas Sowell popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Thomas Sowell books.