Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell (1964)

Thomas Sowell (born June 30, 1930 in Gastonia , North Carolina ) is an American economist and Fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution . He became known u. a. through his criticism of affirmative action from a black's point of view.

Life

Sowell was born in North Carolina in a place with almost all African American populations. As a child he became a half-orphan, a great aunt adopted him and moved with him to New York. There he grew up in Harlem . As a teenager he was exposed to the violence of gangs of thugs, with his aunt he was in constant conflict. After dropping out of school, he joined the military and subsequently worked as a photographer. Through the second educational path, he obtained the university entrance qualification. After starting at Howard University , he graduated in business administration with a bachelor's degree with Magna cum Laude from Harvard University in 1958, followed by a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1959. In 1968 he received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago .

In addition to some non-academic activities such as in the US Department of Labor (1961–1962) or AT&T (1964–1965), Sowell was a professor at Cornell University , Brandeis University and UCLA until 1980 . Sowell says of himself that he was a Marxist "during my 20s"; one of his earliest publications was a benevolent examination of Marxist thinking vs. Marxist-Leninist practice. However, his insights as a trainee with the federal government in the summer of 1960 led him to reject the Marxist economy in favor of the theory of the free market economy. In the course of his work, Sowell uncovered a link between increases in mandatory minimum wages for workers in the Puerto Rico sugar industry and the rise in unemployment in that industry. The research led Sowell to theorize that the government employees who administered the minimum wage law cared more about their own jobs than about the plight of the poor. He has been a Fellow of the Hoover Institution since 1980 . In 1998 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society .

Sowell also works as a columnist; his columns are predominantly published by conservative media such as the National Review .

Books (selection)

literature

  • Mark Blaug (Ed.): Who's who in economics. 3. Edition. Elgar, Cheltenham [u. a.] 1999, ISBN 1-85898-886-1 , pp. 1052-1053

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Philipp Plickert: The Sunday Economist Black and White? It's too easy. The respected Afro-American economist Thomas Sowell is against the zeitgeist. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung from August 16, 2020 . August 16, 2020, p. 18 .
  2. https://sites.google.com/site/raysawhill/home/interviews/thomas-sowell Interview with Thomas Sowell from 1999, interview leader: Ray Sawhill
  3. ^ Member History: Thomas Sowell. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 27, 2018 (with biographical notes).