Tom Sowell, a Fearless Contrarian, Puts Down the Pen
The 86-year-old economist asked questions others didn’t and wrote the answers in plain English.
Thomas Sowell once described Milton Friedman as “one of the very few intellectuals with both genius and common sense,” noting that Friedman “could express himself at the highest analytical levels to his fellow economists in academic publications and still write popular books . . . that could be understood by people who knew nothing about economics.” Mr. Sowell fits that description as well, which is why so many of his readers were saddened by his recent decision to retire his syndicated column.
Mr. Sowell’s first column appeared in 1977. Now 86 years old, he can’t be faulted for wanting to spend “less time following politics and more time” on his hobbies, as he wrote last week. But what it means in practice is that many readers are losing perhaps the best professor they’ve ever had, even if they never went to college. Although Mr. Sowell left academia decades ago—since 1980 he has been a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution—he has never stopped teaching through his newspaper columns and many books, most of which are aimed at general readers instead of his fellow intellectuals.
As a professor of economics in the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Sowell wrote for respected academic journals in the U.S. and abroad. In 1971 he published an economics textbook full of graphs and equations and references to the elasticity of demand. Like Friedman, however, he also felt the need to explain his discipline to a wider audience. His jargon-free “Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy,” first published in 2000 and now in its fifth edition, is his best-selling book. Today he may be more popular for his scholarship on race and ethnicity, but he explains in his memoir that “the books that made the key differences in my career”—“Say’s Law” and “Knowledge and Decisions”—“were both books on non-racial themes.”
Mr. Sowell writes in “plain English,” as he likes to put it, which in and of itself distinguishes him from most intellectuals, who seem allergic to accessible prose. He wants you to understand what he’s saying, not to be impressed with his vocabulary. He trained in economics at the University of Chicago, where professors stressed empiricism and measurement through statistics, so data carry weight with him. The numbers don’t lie, and Mr. Sowell is a numbers guy. He goes where the data lead him, and he accepts the findings, however discomfiting or politically incorrect. His readers appreciate the intellectual honesty and integrity. If you don’t have the data to back up what you’re saying, or if you’re trying to massage the evidence to get a result you prefer, better to avoid arguing with Mr. Sowell.
This empiricism is central to his analysis of social policy, too. Few other commentators bring his sobriety to discussions of race and ethnicity. Mr. Sowell focuses on what a policy has actually done, not on its intentions. If progressive urban planning is so beneficial to blacks, why is San Francisco’s black population today less than half of what it was in 1970? Are racial disparities—in incomes, say—the norm or the exception, and should we assume their existence is evidence of racial bias? What better explains black-white gaps in the U.S.: the legacy of slavery or the legacy of the welfare state? Mr. Sowell has spent decades exploring the answers to questions that others are afraid to even ask.
Not everyone will miss Mr. Sowell’s essays, of course. He regularly took on establishment civil-rights leaders who claim to be acting in the interests of blacks but are really advancing their own agendas—which usually involve hanging on to power, money and relevance. But anyone interested in differentiating between the needs of the black underclass and the needs of the NAACP will sorely miss Mr. Sowell’s contrarian contributions to ongoing debates.
I discovered Mr. Sowell as an undergraduate student in the early 1990s. During a discussion about racial preferences, a friend said I sounded like someone named Tom Sowell, to which I responded, “Who?” My friend then wrote down the name of a book, “Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?” I retrieved it from the school library that afternoon and read it that same evening. I returned to the library the following day, checked out the remainder of its Sowell collection, and spent the next couple of weeks immersed in his writings.
“Some books are written for the pleasure or the zest of it,” Mr. Sowell once explained. “Other books are written as a painful duty, because there are things to be said—and because other people have better sense than to say it.”
I’m as sorry as the next fan to see the column go, Mr. Sowell, but you’ve more than done your duty.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal