Thomas Sowell: A Man Who Always Says Something of Substance.

. By T.V. Antony Raj

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Thomas Sowell an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, author, and a National Humanities Medal winner, endorses laissez-faire economics, and writes from a conservative and libertarian viewpoint. At present, he is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, California.

Born in North Carolina, Thomas Sowell grew up in Harlem. Like many others in his neighborhood, he did not finish high school and left home early. After enduring a few difficult years, he joined the Marine Corps and during the Korean War became a photographer. On leaving the service, while working as a part-time photographer, he entered Harvard University, to study economics.

After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1958, Thomas Sowell acquired his masters in economics from Columbia University in 1959. He also received a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968.

In the early ’60s, Thomas Sowell worked as an economist at the Department of Labor, and at AT&T. However, his real interest was in teaching. In 1965, Sowell began his first professorship at Cornell University. In the early ’70s and from 1984 to 1989, he taught at Rutgers University, Amherst College, Brandeis University, and at the University of California at Los Angeles.

With much of his writing considered groundbreaking, Thomas Sowell has to his credit a dozen books and many articles and essays, covering a range of topics: classic economic theory to judicial activism; civil rights to choosing the right college.

Though Thomas Sowell began his career as a newspaper columnist in 1984, he had regularly contributed to newspapers in the late ’70s and early ’80s. He proved that anyone could say something of substance in a short space of 750 words.