Thomas Sowell is the only living human I care about meeting before he dies.
The best known “black conservative” of his era, and in my opinion one of the top ten social scientists, Sowell has influenced contemporary American discourse in a hundred ways — especially for those of us on the right. Most notably, he outlined the unconstrained and constrained visions of human behavior, the latter of which holds that knowledge is diffuse and widely dispersed rather than concentrated among self-anointed cliques of experts, and he introduced “quantitative culturalism” as an alternative to both biological determinism and the idea (see Ibram X. Kendi’s 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist) that racism is the cause of all inter-group disparities. Sowell made — at book length — the point that the mere existence of racism does not explain all, or most, such gaps between racial groups.
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