"Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell," by Jason Riley

 As much a biography, this book by Jason Riley is a treatise on intellectual thought over the past six decades, for it his mind that truly distinguishes Thomas Sowell. Sowell is an exemplar of the value of empiricism when formulating ideas that become good policy, of which, sadly, there is too little today. 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell,” Jason L. Riley

October 10, 2021

 

“The kind of idealized unity, projected by political leaders and

intellectuals, has seldom existed among any racial and minority

anywhere. Nor has the economic progress of racial or ethnic groups

been much correlated with their closeness to, or remoteness from, such unity.”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        Thomas Sowell (1930-)

                                                                                                                 As quoted by Jason Riley in Maverick

 

Thomas Sowell was born into rural poverty in North Carolina in 1930. His father died before he was born and his mother a few years later, giving birth to a younger brother. With an aunt, he moved to Harlem. Two years after being admitted to New York’s Stuyvesant High School he dropped out. At eighteen he joined the Marines. After his service he acquired his GED and entered Howard University. Following freshman year, he transferred to Harvard. He earned a masters at Columbia and a PhD in economics at the University of Chicago. After giving up teaching at age fifty, he has spent the last forty-one years at the Hoover Institute. He has written at least thirty books on subjects ranging from economics, race, education, to politics and intellectual thought. It has been his intense research and life-long pursuit of facts, which usually produce conclusions that do not conform to what is expected of a black American male. 

 

The author, Jason Riley, was born in Buffalo, New York in 1971. He graduated from State University of New York in Buffalo in 1993. After stints at Buffalo News and USA Today, he joined The Wall Street Journal in 1994. In 2005, he joined the editorial board and since 2016 has had a weekly op-ed column. He is also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.  With this biography, he has authored four books, including Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (2014), a book Thomas Sowell applauded.

 

In this, Riley spends little time on Sowell’s personal history, relying on his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, published in 2000 (and written up by me in August 2020.) “The goal,” Jason Riley wrote in his introduction, “…is to place what he and others consider his (Sowell’s) most important observations into context, and then trace the intellectual traditions from which those insights derive and the orthodoxy they often challenge.” While Thomas Sowell is an economist – his PhD thesis was an analysis of Say’s Law – his interests extend far beyond economics. While studying under Milton Friedman and George Stigler at the University of Chicago, he remained a Marxist, but that changed in 1960 when he became an intern at the U.S. Department of Labor, studying Puerto Rico’s unemployment in the sugar industry. A study of the data convinced him that the cause for unemployment was due to a mandated minimum wage. 

 

The book, which is 248 readable pages, is divided into nine chapters, with titles like “Higher Education, Lower Expectations,” Sowell’s Knowledge,” “Civil Rights and Wrongs,” and “Culture Matters.” Sowell is an intellectual and empiricist. Riley quotes from the preface to Sowell’s book Race and Culture: “…what is most needed is an understanding of existing realities, the history from which the present evolved, and the enduring principles constraining our options for the future.” It is the reliance on empiricism, rationalism and skepticism that has always distinguished Thomas Sowell, whether he is writing on economics, race, education or culture. For example, in an essay written in 2000, “Success Concealing Failure,” when U.S. universities bragged that Americans win more Nobel prizes than any other nation, Sowell pointed out an unpleasant truth: “While Americans won the lion’s share of Nobel Prizes in 1999, not one of these winners was actually born in the United States.”

 

Riley points out Sowell’s belief that well-intentioned people (“useful idiots,” as Lenin described them) strive to help blacks and other minorities. Yet the results, as both Sowell and Riley have noted, are often the opposite of what was intended. Sowell says it is unclear whether Civil Rights leaders’ and politicians’ intentions are unintended, as both groups have built careers on the concept that blacks can only succeed with the help of programs like Affirmative Action – a policy Sowell finds insulting to the millions of individual blacks who succeeded without assistance. If it were true, how does one explain the success of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., a black-only high school, where black students out-scored white students in segregated schools in the 1950s? School success is a function of ability and effort on part of the student and insistence on learning on part of the teacher. Can a gifted black youngster in the nation’s capital today receive as good a high school education as one could sixty-five years ago? 

 

Sowell is concerned about current trends toward wokeism. In an essay, “Lessons not Learned” published twenty years ago, he wrote, “…we and our children are being trained to be sheep and to respond automatically to words that strike an emotional chord…The very tactics of those totalitarian movements – intimidation, demonization and disregard of all rules in favor of politically defined results – have become hallmarks of political correctness today.” And political correctness has become more ubiquitous over the past two decades. 

 

While this is not a biography in the traditional sense, Jason Riley enters the mind of a man about whom Steven Pinker once wrote, “…is one of the most brilliant thinkers in the world today.” Like most black conservatives, Sowell is denigrated by much of mainstream media and progressive politicians because the conclusions he reaches do not accord with those who feel that all blacks should speak with one voice. Riley’s contribution is to better understand this man, and that it is the individual – not the gender, tribe or race – that is important. We are not born equal. We do not have equal abilities or aspirations, but our Constitution provides for equal rights and equal protection under the law. We must strive for inclusion, diversity of ideas and equal opportunities; but equal outcomes are dreams of the naïve, which deceitfully serve only those who seek power. Ironically, and perhaps counter-intuitively, Sowell has greater confidence in the innate ability of blacks than do many of those who claim to help them. “Sowell wants to make his readers smarter, not tell them what to do,” Riley writes.

 

Maverick is an important book. It illuminates a brilliant thinker; it explains why current, perhaps well-intentioned, but racially discriminatory policies, like critical race theory, hurt those they are supposed to help, and it describes a man who rose to prominence, despite enormous odds, based on his abilities and his willingness to follow where his knowledge and research led, regardless of what public opinion might say.