Stream contributor Thomas Sowell graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1958, received his master’s in economics from Columbia University in 1959 and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.
In the early ’60s, Sowell held jobs as an economist with the Department of Labor and AT&T. His real interest was in teaching and scholarship, so in 1965, at Cornell University, Sowell began the first of many professorships. Sowell’s other teaching assignments include Rutgers University, Amherst College, Brandeis University and the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught in the early ’70s and also from 1984 to 1989.
Thomas Sowell has published a large volume of writing. His dozen books, as well as numerous articles and essays, cover a wide range of topics, from classic economic theory to judicial activism, from civil rights to choosing the right college. Moreover, much of his writing is considered ground-breaking — work that will outlive the great majority of scholarship done today.
Though Sowell was a regular contributor to newspapers in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and did not begin his career as a newspaper columnist until 1984. Sowell’s journalistic writings include a nationally syndicated column that appears in more than 150 newspapers from Boston to Honolulu. Some of these essays have been collected in book form, most recently in Ever Wonder Why? and Other Controversial Essays published by the Hoover Institution Press.
In 1990, he won the prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by The American Enterprise Institute. Currently Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California.
Election year politics generate much rhetoric and confusion. And the media often adds its spin. But, fortunately, there are some books around that deal with reality and can cut through the nonsense. Most of these books were not written during…