George Stigler

This Is Not a Comforting Book: How Justice Can End Up Promoting Injustice (1999)

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Thomas Sowell (/soʊl/; born June 30, 1930) is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author. He is currently Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. Sowell was born in North Carolina, but grew up in Harlem, New York. He dropped out of high school and served in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. He received a bachelor's degree, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1958 and a master's degree from Columbia University in 1959. In 1968, he earned his Doctorate in Economics from the University of Chicago. Sowell has served on the faculties of several universities, including Cornell University and University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked for think tanks such as the Urban Institute. Since 1980, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He writes from a libertarian conservative perspective, advocating supply-side economics. Sowell has written more than thirty books (a number of which have been reprinted in revised editions), and his work has been widely anthologized. He is a National Humanities Medal recipient. Sowell received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.[8] His dissertation was titled Say's Law and the General Glut Controversy.[11] Sowell had initially chosen Columbia University to study under George Stigler (who would later receive the Nobel Prize in Economics). When he learned that Stigler had moved to the University of Chicago, he followed him there.[12] From 1965-1969, Sowell was an assistant professor of economics at Cornell University. Writing of the 1969 violent takeover by black Cornell students of Willard Straight Hall thirty years later, Sowell characterized the students as "hoodlums" with "serious academic problems [and] admitted under lower academic standards", and noted "it so happens that the pervasive racism that black students supposedly encountered at every turn on campus and in town was not apparent to me during the four years that I taught at Cornell and lived in Ithaca."[13] Sowell has taught economics at Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst College, and UCLA. Since 1980 he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds a fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman, his mentor.[8][14] In addition, Sowell appeared several times on William F. Buckley's show Firing Line, during which he discussed the economics of race and privatization.[15] In 1987, Sowell testified in favor of federal appeals court judge Robert Bork during the hearings for Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. In his testimony, Sowell said that Bork was "the most highly qualified nominee of this generation" and that judicial activism, a concept that Bork opposed, "has not been beneficial to minorities."[16] Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University. In a review of a 1987 book, Larry D. Nachman in Commentary magazine described Sowell as a leading representative of the Chicago school of economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell