The importance of Thomas Sowell

Jason Reilly does a marvelous job of expelling the importance of Thomas Sowell in today's culture wars, with his writings on history, education, economics and more. Sowell, 91, has written 36 data-driven, evidence-rich books that run counter to much of today's progressive narrative and the mainstream media continue to ignore him despite his wealth of knowledge.Thanks to Hillsdale College and Imprimis for providing Riley with a platform. The entire piece is well worth a read. Some key excerpts can be found below.

When I was researching my biography of economist Thomas Sowell, I kept coming across Sowell’s own descriptions of scholars he admired, and I was often struck by how well those descriptions applied to Sowell himself.

For example, after the death of Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler, who was one of Sowell’s professors at the University of Chicago, Sowell wrote:

In a world of self-promoting academics, coining buzzwords and aligning themselves on the side of the angels of the moment, George Stigler epitomized a rare integrity as well as a rare intellect. He jumped on no bandwagons, beat no drums for causes, created no personal cult. He did the work of a scholar and a teacher—both superbly—and found that sufficient. If you wanted to learn, and above all if you wanted to learn how to think—how to avoid the vague words, fuzzy thoughts, or maudlin sentiments that cloud over reality—then Stigler was your man.

And here is Sowell describing another of his professors at Chicago, Milton Friedman:

[He] was one of the very few intellectuals with both genius and common sense. He 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.

I’m hard-pressed to come up with better ways than those to describe Thomas Sowell. When I think about his scholarship, that’s what comes to mind: intellectual integrity, analytical rigor, respect for evidence, skepticism toward the kind of fashionable thinking that comes and goes. And then there’s the clarity. Column after column, book after book, written in plain English for general public consumption.

In 2020, at the age of 90, Sowell published his 36th book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies. I hope he’s not done writing books, but if he is you could hardly find a more suitable swan song for a publishing career that has now spanned six decades.

Some of the material and data Riley cites on the nature of Black lives today are surprising, if not disturbing, to the mainstream narrative:

Beginning in the 1970s, Sowell turned his attention to racial controversies. He did so, he says, out of a sense of duty. There were things that needed to be said and too few others who were willing to say them. Sowell’s criticisms of the direction of the civil rights movement at the time eventually got him “cancelled,” to use today’s term. Black elites in particular wanted nothing to do with him because he opposed affirmative action, and they convinced others in the mainstream media not to take his views seriously or turn to him for a black point of view on issues of the day.

Sowell has long argued that the problems blacks face today involve far more than what whites have done to them in the past. It’s no mystery why black activists want to keep the focus on white racism. It helps them raise money and stay relevant. And it’s no mystery why politicians use the same tactics—it helps them win votes. But Sowell argued that it’s not at all clear that focusing on white racism is helping the black underclass. You can spend all day, every day pointing out the moral failings of other people, groups, institutions, and society in general. The question is whether that helps the people who most need help.

Many of today’s activists go about their business with the assumption that the only real problem facing the black underclass is white racism. A good example of this is the recent focus on policing in black communities. Do racist cops exist? Absolutely. Do some cops abuse their authority? Of course. But are poor black communities as violent as they are because of bad cops? Will reducing police resources improve the situation? According to the Chicago Sun-Times there were 492 homicides in Chicago in 2019, and only three of them involved police. So if police use of lethal force is a problem in Chicago, it’s clearly a secondary problem. Young black men in Chicago or Baltimore or St. Louis may indeed leave the house each morning worried about getting shot—but not by police.

Last year, there was a ballot measure put to voters in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, that would have defunded the police. Not only was it defeated, it was most strongly opposed by black residents in high-crime areas. And the black residents of Minneapolis are not outliers. They’re typical. In a Gallup poll released in 2020, 81 percent of blacks nationwide said they wanted police presence in their neighborhood to remain the same or to increase. Another Gallup poll released a year earlier asked black and Hispanic residents of low-income neighborhoods in particular about policing. Fifty-nine percent of both black and Hispanic respondents said they wanted police to spend more time in their communities. In a poll from 2015, the year after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, a majority of black respondents said that police treat them fairly, and far more blacks than whites, by a two-to-one margin, said they “want a greater police presence in their local neighborhoods.”

Nor is this a recent phenomenon. In a 1993 Gallup poll, 82 percent of black respondents said the criminal justice system doesn’t treat criminals harshly enough, 75 percent of blacks wanted more cops on the streets, and 68 percent said we ought to build more prisons so that longer sentences can be given. Efforts to defund the police are being pushed by activists and liberal elites who claim to be speaking on behalf of low-income minorities. But they are mostly speaking for themselves. This is something Sowell pointed out a long time ago.