![]() Navy discharged all blacks after World War I and didn’t relent until 1932 when it accepted them only for kitchen jobs. There were no blacks in the Marine Corps during World War II. Sowell also notes the absence of black people in the military. President Woodrow Wilson, for example, re-segregated the U.S. governments, federal, state, and local, put a lot of barriers in the way of black advancement. ![]() One was that over the decades after slavery, U.S. I used it, along with Gary Becker’s The Economics of Discrimination, in a half-semester labor course I taught at the University of Rochester in 1977. One of my two favorite Sowell books is the first one I read, Race and Economics, published in 1975. Like my students at the Navy School, I got to know him through his written work. student at UCLA and he was an economics professor there, I didn’t know him well. When I handed out my biography to students the first day of the class I taught at the Naval Postgraduate School (from 1984 to 2017)-with my Hoover Institution affiliation on it-a question I got from many was, “Do you know Thomas Sowell?” They mispronounced his last name, evidence that they knew about him from reading him rather than hearing about him.Īlthough I overlapped with Sowell in the early 1970s while I was an economics Ph.D. His intellectual process, plus his ability to write quickly, have resulted in dozens of books and hundreds upon hundreds of newspaper columns that have helped many of us learn. The one constant on display through all these topics is an irrepressible mind digging through the data in order to understand the complex reality underneath. ![]() His scholarship covers a wide range of issues: income inequality, ethnic differences in economic performance, economic geography, poverty and economic growth, the destructive effects of the welfare state, the effects of affirmative action, the role of knowledge and information in decisions, incentives within the political system and within academia, and, more recently, the performance of charter schools. I say that not as a junior colleague of Sowell (I am a mere 69), but as someone who has studied his work for 44 years. An economist at the Hoover Institution, Sowell is possibly the most fascinating and productive scholar in the world.
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