Free Republic

“Discrimination and Disparities” is a 2018 book by Thomas Sowell. While it addresses racism and class bias, it delves into many other disparities and forms of discrimination. It discusses the literal social and economic costs of disparities and actual discrimination while explaining how most disparities are not due to actual discrimination. What are the points in favor and against this Thomas Sowell book? What can you learn from this book that hasn’t been addressed in his many other works?

“Economic Facts and Fallacies” by Thomas Sowell came out in 2008, but like many of Thomas Sowell’s other books on economics, it remains a classic. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this book? How does it compare to his other major works?

Measured by his contributions to economics, political theory, and intellectual history, Thomas Sowell ranks among the towering intellects of our time. Yet, rare among such thinkers, Sowell manages never to provoke, in the reader, the feeling of being towered over. As Kevin Williamson observed, Sowell is “that rarest of things among serious academics: plainspoken.” From 1991 until 2016, his nationally syndicated column set the bar for clear writing, though the topics he covered were often complex. “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional...

Thomas Sowell is a truth seeker who grew up in Harlem and is one of the wisest men of our times. In his new book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies — published on June 30, 2020, his 90th birthday — he exposes the hypocrisy of our politicians, teachers’ unions, and public school bureaucrats. To do so, Sowell compares New York City’s charter schools to its public ones. For example, Success Academy (47 New York City schools) and KIPP Academy (15 NYC schools), both public charter schools, have established the best K-12 schools in Harlem and have demonstrated the ability to...

Mark Levin, host of “Life, Liberty & Levin,” described the 2020 election on Sunday as one of the most important in American history. Beyond looking at the candidates, Levin said the election pits the ideologies behind the 1619 project against the 1776 project, “and you can see where the Democrats have tied into the 1619 project, and many of the Republicans are trying to defend the founding in the 1776 project.” Speaking with economist Thomas Sowell, Levin asked if he saw the election that way. “What I see is if the election goes to Biden then there is a good...

Fifty-five-plus books on the table and more on the way. Charter Schools and Their Enemies, another bestseller, is hot off the press. The Thomas Sowell corpus stands as one of the rare and most impressive monuments of massive and meticulous research ever erected on this earth by one person. He came up from 1930s poverty-stricken Jim Crow North Carolina, a high school dropout, a stint with the United States Marine Corps, scraping and clawing his way through the streets of post-Renaissance Harlem and then the halls of Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), and now he has four...

Dr. Thomas Sowell has been both a friend and a colleague of mine for over a half-century. On June 30, he will have completed his 90th year of life, and I want to highlight some important features of that life. Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930. As part of the great black migration northward during the 1930s and '40s, he and his family moved to Harlem, New York. Sowell attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School, but dropped out. In 1951, he was drafted into the military and assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps, where he became a...

Dr. Thomas Sowell has been both a friend and a colleague of mine for over a half-century. On June 30, he will have completed his 90th year of life, and I want to highlight some important features of that life. Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1930. As part of the Great Migration northward during the 1930s and '40s, he and his family moved to Harlem, New York. Sowell attended the prestigious Stuyvesant High School but dropped out. In 1951, he was drafted into the military and assigned to the U.S. Marine Corps, where he became a photographer....

Some of us of a certain age have been asking the same question for a long while now. Since when are Americans so compliant, so acquiescent, so, so…fearful? Historians of the future will have a hard time figuring out how so many organized groups of strident jackasses succeeded in leading us around by the nose and morally intimidating the majority into silence. — Thomas Sowell (@ThomasSowell) June 22, 2020 Worse than silent really, complicit. Whether we are talking about COVID or BLM, facemasks or prostration, people can’t wait to get onboard the train. Good training for your lives under Islam...

Thomas Sowell, Jason Riley, Bob Woodson, Walter E Williams and Shelby Steele look at the promises and delivery of politicians representing the ethnic grievance industry.

People sometimes ask if I have tried to convince black “leaders” to take a different view on racial issues. Of course not. I wouldn't spend my time trying to persuade the mafia to give up crime. Why should I spend time trying to convince race hustlers to give up victimhood? * * * * * * * * * * A higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was Republicans whose “Philadelphia Plan” in the 1970s sought to break the construction unions' racial barriers that...

In his book Intellectuals and Society, Thomas Sowell takes America's "public intellectuals" on a well deserved trip to the woodshed. He makes many interesting claims, including this one: "The unarticulated cultural distillations of mass experience over the generations are often summarily dismissed as mere prejudices [by public intellectuals]." "The unarticulated cultural distillations of mass experience over the generations." What is Sowell referring to? Why, common sense, of course. In fact, every book and every article Sowell has written is replete with common sense. Sowell is a true master of common sense. I have written two books with "common sense" in...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Thomas Sowell. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Thomas Sowell is one of America's greatest intellectuals, having authored several books on economics and self-reliance. His quote comes from a recent opinion on the recent US riots. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the...

The mask is essentially useless: The mask is not an adequate defense against the COVID-19 virus... The virus checks in at somewhere between 0.06 and 0.14 microns, meaning it’s too small for any commercially available mask to effectively filter it out. The pores on an N95 mask, which are the best masks you’re reasonably going to find, and the vast, vast majority of you are not going to have N95 masks but rather cloth masks, which perform far less well, are 0.3 microns ... Staten Island a mob of “karens” forced a woman from a store for not wearing a...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Thomas Sowell. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Thomas Sowell is an American economist and social theorist who promotes private enterprise and conservative policies at all levels of the economy. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the puzzle into the white squares on...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Thomas Sowell. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Thomas Sowell is an American economist and social theorist who understands how liberal policies destroy communities and countries alike. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the puzzle into the white squares on the bottom half...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Thomas Sowell. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Thomas Sowell is one of America's greatest intellectuals, having authored several books on economics and self-reliance. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the puzzle into the white squares on the bottom half (answer grid) belowEach...

Last week's column discussed Dr. Thomas Sowell's newest book "Discrimination and Disparities," which is an enlarged and revised edition of an earlier version. In this review, I am going to focus on one of his richest chapters titled "Social Visions and Human Consequences." Sowell challenges the seemingly invincible fallacy "that group outcomes in human endeavors would tend to be equal, or at least comparable or random, if there were no biased interventions, on the one hand, nor genetic deficiencies, on the other." But disparate impact statistics carries the day among academicians, lawyers and courts as evidence of discrimination. Sowell gives...

“Even the best things come to an end,” wrote Thomas Sowell in a December, 2016, column headlined “Farewell.” At the age of 86, the great economist had decided to stop writing his column and “spend less time following politics and more time on my photography.” Since then, Sowell has been rather quiet, but current political trends have prompted him to re-emerge. “Socialism is a wonderful sounding idea,” Sowell recently told Fox Business. “It’s only as a reality that it’s disastrous.” A former Marxist, Sowell began to see the difference between reality and rhetoric. “When you see people starving in Venezuela...

Seventy-one years ago this month -- in January 1948 -- a black, 17-year-old high school dropout left home. The last grade he had completed was the 9th grade. He had no skills, little experience, and not a lot of maturity. Yet he was able to find jobs to support himself, to a far greater extent than someone similar can find jobs today. I know because I was that black 17-year-old. And, decades later, I did research on economic conditions back then. Back in 1948, the unemployment rate for 17-year-old black males was just under 10 percent, and no higher than...