You were a Marxist at one time in your life.
What was your wake-up to what was wrong with that line of thinking?
Uh, facts.
For me, Thomas Sowell is that rarest of species, an honest intellectual.
I’m Jason Riley. I’m a journalist and author.
For more than two decades, I have closely studied
the life and work of Thomas Sowell.
Tom Sowell is known for his views on economics, history, race, and politics.
But I’ve also discovered some lesser-known aspects of his life.
You’re about to meet one of the greatest minds of the past half-century.
What distinguishes Thomas Sowell’s scholarship?
First, intellectual honestly; asking the right questions, gathering the
relevant data, and following the facts to their logical conclusion, even if
that conclusion turns out to be unpopular.
Second, the importance of incentives and the reality of trade-offs in
addressing our social problems.
Third, the belief that a group’s upward mobility derives primarily
from its development of human capital.
And finally, Sowell has an abiding respect for social processes and
existing institutions and the role they play in decision making.
So, where did Tom Sowell’s ideas come from?
What formed the foundation of a man who would go on to become one of the
country’s foremost public intellectuals?
That story began 600 miles to the south of Midtown Manhattan
more than eight decades ago.
Thomas Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, on June 30, 1930.
The Great Depression was just getting underway, and like many blacks in the
South at the time, his family had no electricity, no central heating,
and no hot running water.
Sowell’s father died before Tom was born, and his mother, a maid,
died in childbirth just a few years later.
He was adopted by his great-aunt and raised by her and her two daughters.
My whole career would not have been possible without the particular family
in which I was raised, which was not composed of educated people.
I mean, nobody in that family had ever graduated from high school, and most
had not graduated from grade school.
But they were interested in education, and they were interested in me.
When Thomas Sowell was eight years old, his family moved from North Carolina
to New York City and settled here at 720 Saint Nicholas Avenue
in the neighborhood of Harlem.
Young Tommy, as he was called, ventured out into a big city for the very first time.
He rode double-decker buses and learned to cross busy streets all by himself.
We were much poorer than the people in Harlem and most anywhere else today.
It was my last year or two at home that we finally had a telephone.
We had a radio; we never had a television.
But in another sense, in the sense of the things you need to get ahead,
I was enormously more fortunate than most black kids today.
While coming of age in Harlem, Sowell discovered the magic of education
thanks to a family friend named Eddie Mapp.
Eddie brought Tom here to the Harlem Public Library, taught him how to find
books that interested him, taught him how to check them out.
He came from a highly educated family, and they immediately saw the
implications if they could get him to mentor me.
And I saw all these books and I had no idea why we were there when I didn’t
have money to buy one book and so what am I going to do with all these,
you know, hundreds of books up on the shelf.
And he very patiently walked me through the whole thing, and again,
I was very reluctant to take out a library card because I didn’t know
what all this was about.
But he talked me into it, and I borrowed a couple of books.
And really, had I not encountered him, the entire rest of the story could not
have been the way it was.
When you start getting in the habit of reading when you’re eight years old,
that’s a different ballgame than if you had to wait ‘til you were
a teenager, and it’s too late now.
Thanks to that same friend Eddie, a young Tom Sowell was pointed in the
right direction regarding his schooling.
The grade school he attended in Harlem was a good one.
But when it came time for junior high school,
the one in Tom’s neighborhood was not so great.
When I finished elementary school, and they assigned me to a junior high
school in a very bad neighborhood, he told me that you can get transferred.
And I got transferred to a much better school.
Had I gone to that other school, again, the story would’ve been entirely different.
He would become a firm believer in allowing parents to choose the
best school possible for their children, whether it be private schools,
religious schools, or even the option that sparks intense debate
among lawmakers and educators today, charter schools.
Drafted in 1951, Tom joined the Marines, where he taught
pistol shooting and took photographs.
The lessons Sowell learned in the Marines would stay with him for the
rest of his life, especially his love of photography, which would become
Tom’s artistic outlet while he pursued a life filled with studying facts and data.
Photography did have connections to his vision of reality.
Tom once commented to me that to be a photographer, you have to master trade-offs.
All of the little adjustments that you fiddle with in the camera never
involve making everything better or everything worse.
It’s a matter of trading one thing off for another.
And a theme in Tom’s work on society is that all policies involve
trade-offs, and Tom often loses patience at people with sweeping
visions; here’s how we can improve society, here’s a solution to a problem.
And Tom points out in his political writings; there are no solutions;
there are only trade-offs, just like photography.
The University of Chicago is hallowed ground for Thomas Sowell.
Here is where some of the most influential economic philosophies
of modern times were formed.
It’s called the Chicago School of Economics, and it’s where Tom would be
mentored by intellectual giants like George Stigler and Milton Friedman.
You know, in Chicago, if it was true, it was true ‘cause you could prove it was true.
It was true ‘cause you had the evidence, you had the logic, and so forth.
They explored the specific ways in which the market does and doesn’t work.
The idea, you know, that people are rational on the whole and that if you
allow those people to operate in the marketplace,
you will generally get better results.
My first professional job I was a summer intern at the
U. S. Department of Labor.
One of my biggest concerns was about minimum wages.
At first, I thought, well, this is good because all these people are poor
and they’ll get a little higher income, and so that’ll be helpful.
And then as I studied economics, I began to see well, there’s a downside,
they may lose their jobs completely so, there’s that.
When I was at the labor department, I tried to talk about that to them, and
eventually, I came up with some test of it, and when I came up with how we
might test this, I was waiting to hear congratulations, you see, that I had this.
And I could see these people were stunned.
They’d say, oh, this idiot has stumbled on something that will ruin us all.
And I realized the U.S. Department of Labor
had its own agenda and interests, and that did not
necessarily mean that whether poor people lost their jobs from minimum
wages or got higher pay was their highest priority.
I was now beginning to understand things I hadn’t understood before.
I mean, I was still a Marxist after taking Milton Friedman’s course.
But one summer in the government was enough to let me say now this,
government is really not the answer.
Milton Friedman didn’t cure you, but the federal government did.
The federal government did.
Never say the federal government doesn’t do anything.
In 1980, Thomas Sowell came here, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
When Hoover offered him the opportunity to basically
pay him to be Tom Sowell, he took it.
And he could write what he wants to write, when he wants to write, as much
or as little, but he’s always been very, very productive.
And I think the independence and the freedom is what he liked.
In dozens of books and numerous television appearances, and thousands
of columns, Sowell has championed his philosophy of free markets and
personal responsibility while weathering the storms of challenge and controversy.
Sowell has spent his adult life proudly sharing
his political and economic beliefs.
For some, he’s a clear thinker full of common sense.
Others say he lacks empathy.
What no one can doubt is the courage of this maverick intellectual.
If you could offer one sentence of counsel to some sophomore or junior
who’s watching this today…
It’s not over ‘till it’s over, as Yogi Berra said.
And I would say to this young person, if we through some miracle get through this,
please take to heart the lesson of what happens when you vote on the basis
of rhetoric and symbolism and instead of using your mind.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are unless you stop and think.