Thomas Sowell: Why He Matters

By age 93, most people — if they even make it that far — would be well within their rights to take it easy and to reflect on a life well lived. Well, most people aren’t Thomas Sowell. Last month, Sowell appeared on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge to promote his new book, Social Justice Fallacies. Both the interview and the book show how the intellectual giant has profoundly affected public policy and economics for decades and doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

Understanding Thomas Sowell’s incredible reach requires first understanding the man himself. A former high-school dropout and United States Marine, Sowell would eventually graduate from Harvard University as a devout Marxist. Having initially enrolled at Columbia University in part to study under economist George Stigler, he followed Stigler to the University of Chicago, where he was taught both by Stigler and by Milton Friedman. A summer internship in the Department of Labor was enough for Sowell to become skeptical of his statist sympathies when he saw firsthand the anatomy of bureaucracy. He recalls in his memoir that “government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of the interests of those for whom a program has been set up.” Appearing on Fox News’ Life, Liberty, & Levin last week, Sowell said that, “when the facts kept going in the wrong way, I realized that this [Marxism] was not going to do what it claimed it was going to do.”

About the Author

Tanner Nau

Tanner Nau is a Reporting Fellow at National Review, based in Washington, D.C. He previously worked at The Free Press.

Featured Tags

By age 93, most people — if they even make it that far — would be well within their rights to take it easy and to reflect on a life well lived. Well, most people aren’t Thomas Sowell. Last month, Sowell appeared on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge to promote his new book, Social Justice Fallacies. Both the interview and the book show how the intellectual giant has profoundly affected public policy and economics for decades and doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

Understanding Thomas Sowell’s incredible reach requires first understanding the man himself. A former high-school dropout and United States Marine, Sowell would eventually graduate from Harvard University as a devout Marxist. Having initially enrolled at Columbia University in part to study under economist George Stigler, he followed Stigler to the University of Chicago, where he was taught both by Stigler and by Milton Friedman. A summer internship in the Department of Labor was enough for Sowell to become skeptical of his statist sympathies when he saw firsthand the anatomy of bureaucracy. He recalls in his memoir that “government agencies have their own self-interest to look after, regardless of the interests of those for whom a program has been set up.” Appearing on Fox News’ Life, Liberty, & Levin last week, Sowell said that, “when the facts kept going in the wrong way, I realized that this [Marxism] was not going to do what it claimed it was going to do.”