Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in… More

Excerpt: There is a wealth of instructive reading in “The Thomas Sowell Reader,” on the modern world and its discontents, on dogs and baseball, on life as a black child coming of age in New York, on John Stuart Mill’s essay “On liberty,” and much… More

Excerpt: Thomas Sowell wrote a fabulous book, The Quest for Cosmic Justice, which everybody who wishes to understand the essential impossibility of creating a world of “fair” outcomes should read. The essential problems with trying to correct inequities… More

Excerpt: If a mad scientist were to repair to his laboratory to design a machine that would make white liberals uncomfortable, that machine would be Thomas Sowell, whose input is data and whose output is socioeconomic criticism in several grades, ranging from… More

Excerpt: Then there is Thomas Sowell, the economist and political philosopher. He prefers an older way of looking at American politics–a much older way. In his classic 1987 work, A Conflict of Visions, Sowell identifies two competing worldviews, or… More

Excerpt: Agree or disagree with such writers as Florence King, Richard Brookhiser, James Buchanan, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Francis Fukuyama, Milton Friedman, Kenneth Minogue, James Q. Wilson and Roger Scruton, you’re almost certain to find more stimulation… More

Excerpt: Thomas Sowell wrote in ”Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?” (1984) that two assumptions of the civil rights movement had persisted for decades despite their failure to stand up as general principles. The first is that racial… More