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This whole notion that the black family

has always been disintegrating, that is nonsense.

His studies go up to 1925.

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

The great bulk of black families were intact

two-parent families up through 1925

and going all the way back through the era of slavery.

So it is now only within our own time

that we suddenly see this inevitable tragedy

which the welfare system says it's going to rush in to solve.

It's been 40 years since the show aired,

and Thomas Sowell's writings continue to illuminate.

Whether the topic is race, crime, immigration,

or so many other subjects, his scholarship

remains as relevant as ever.

Racists may prefer one race to another,

but they prefer themselves to everybody else.

Thomas Sowell is a trained economist.

He's a sociologist who has written books

about virtually every culture that's ever existed.

He is a photographer.

He is America's greatest contemporary living philosopher.

I'm Jason Riley.

I'm a journalist and author.

For more than two decades,

I have closely studied the life and work of Thomas Sowell.

His story is both fascinating and illuminating.

Tom makes a very, very good point that general principles

affect everybody, whether they're black, brown, or purple.

Tom is fearless not just in advancing unpopular opinions,

but in venturing into areas of scholarship

that had been untrodden.

Tom Sowell is known for his views

on economics, history, race, and politics.

But I've also discovered some lesser-known

aspects of his life --

his research and his writings about late-talking children,

and the fact that he is a highly regarded

world-traveling photographer.

Over the next hour, we'll examine the life and career

of Dr. Thomas Sowell,

how he rose from humble beginnings

to attend and teach at some of the nation's

leading institutions

and became one of our foremost social commentators.

You were a Marxist at one time in your life.

What was your wake-up to what was wrong

with that line of thinking?

Uh, facts.

You're about to meet one of the greatest minds

of the past half-century.

[ music ]

Funding for this program

has been provided by...

[ music ]

Because I was a Marxist at the time,

and they were appalled, and I thought --

you know, they have very high intellectual standards,

and I'm not going to find ideological soul mates.

I was still a Marxist.

I took a summer job in the government,

got an intern in economics.

And it was seeing the government from the inside

that turned me around.

The vision of the left,

and I think many conservatives underestimate this,

is really a more attractive vision in itself.

The only reason for not believing in it

is that it doesn't work.

But you don't see that at the outset

if all you're looking at is just a theory.

If the world were the way the left conceives it to be,

it would be a better world

than the way the right conceives it to be.

It just happens that the world is not that way.

For me, Thomas Sowell

is that rarest of species --

and honest intellectual.

He's spent a career

putting truth above popularity.

He's explored the answers to questions

others were afraid to even ask.

He's followed the facts where they lead

and accepted the findings,

however unpopular or politically incorrect.

Thomas Sowell fervently stands

by his well-researched beliefs,

and he does not hesitate to let someone know

if he thinks they're wrong.

I've spent dozens of hours interviewing Tom

and hundreds more selecting stories

he's told over the years to others

to help us understand what makes Thomas Sowell unique.

[ music ]

Sowell's body of work is quite vast.

It's covered everything from economics and history

to culture, migration, and racial inequality.

The main thing that he's done, in my opinion,

is to cause people to rethink their assumptions

about all sorts of things.

Not just economics,

but about race, about politics,

about how we get along.

Tom is absolutely fearless.

I mean, he's forceful in his opinions.

He will not compromise any of his opinions

for the sake of social politeness.

How do you take the measure of a man,

especially if he's someone who's impacted our thinking

about politics and economics for more than half a century?

Do you do it through his deeds or influence?

Or by what he says or writes?

Perhaps Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

said it best --

"The ultimate measure of a man

is not where he stands

in moments of comfort and convenience,

but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

The media -- the television and the print media,

they've wised up.

You can't argue with Tom,

so you might as well hide what he's doing.

And that's what they're doing.

They're just ignoring what he's written

because there's no way that they can argue with Tom Sowell.

[ music ]

What distinguishes Thomas Sowell's scholarship?

First, intellectual honesty -- asking the right questions,

gathering the relevant data,

and following the facts to their logical conclusion,

even if that conclusion turns out to be unpopular.

Second, the importance of incentives

and the reality of trade-offs

in addressing our social problems.

Third, the belief that a group's upward mobility

derives primarily from its development of human capital.

And finally, Sowell has an abiding respect

for social processes and existing institutions

and the role they play in decision-making.

So where do Tom Sowell's ideas come from?

What formed the foundation of a man who would go on

to become one of the country's foremost public intellectuals?

That story began

600 miles to the south of Midtown Manhattan

more than eight decades ago.

[ music ]

Thomas Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina,

on June 30, 1930.

The Great Depression was just getting underway,

and like many blacks in the South at the time,

his family had no electricity,

no central heating,

and no hot running water.

Sowell's father died before Tom was born

and his mother, a maid, died in childbirth

just a few years later.

He was adopted by his great aunt

and raised by her and her two daughters.

So he was raised by three women.

My whole career would not have been possible

without the particular family in which I was raised,

which was not composed of educated people.

I mean, nobody in that family had ever graduated

from high school,

and most had not graduated from grade school.

But they were interested in education

and they were interested in me.

Tom was raised by a great aunt and her adult children.

The family moved to New York City's

Harlem neighborhood,

a migration that exposed him to better schools

and more opportunities than were available to blacks

in the segregated South.

"My great fear is that a black child

growing up in Harlem today will not have as good a chance

to rise as people of my generation did,

simply because they will not receive

as solid an education, in an era

when such an education is even more important."

[ music ]

[ music ]

When Thomas Sowell was 8 years old,

his family moved from North Carolina

to New York City, and settled here,

at 720 St. Nicholas Avenue

in the neighborhood of Harlem.

[ music ]

The building looks pretty much the same

as it did more than 80 years ago

when the Sowells moved in.

[ music ]

Young Tommy, as he was called,

ventured out into a big city

for the very first time.

He rode double-decker buses

and learned to cross busy streets all by himself.

[ Train wheels clacking ]

We were much poorer than the people in Harlem

or most anywhere else today.

It was my last year or two at home

that we finally had a telephone.

We had a radio. We never had a television.

But in another sense,

in the sense of the things you need to get ahead,

I was enormously more fortunate than most black kids today.

While coming of age in Harlem,

Sowell discovered the magic of education,

thanks to family friend named Eddie Mapp.

[ Children shout playfully ]

[ music ]

In Harlem, there was a kid named Eddie

that members of the family had run into

before I ever arrived from North Carolina.

[ music ]

He came from a highly educated family,

and they immediately saw the implications

if they could get him to mentor me.

[ music ]

Eddie brought Tom here, to the Harlem Public Library,

taught him how to find books that interested him,

taught him how to check them out.

And I saw all these books,

and I had no idea why we were there

when I don't have any money to buy one book.

And so, what am I gonna do with all these, you know,

hundreds of books up on the shelf?

[ music ]

Crossing the threshold to this new world

was the first step on a path

Young Tommy might not otherwise have taken.

And he very patiently walked me through the whole thing.

And again, I was very reluctant to take out a library card

'cause I didn't know what all this is about,

but he talked me into it,

then I borrowed a couple of books.

And really, had I not encountered him,

the entire rest of the story

could not have been the way it was.

I mean, at some point I would have learned

what a public library was, but by that point,

it would be too late.

When you start getting in the habit of reading

when you're eight years old, that's a different ball game

than if you had to wait till you're a teenager,

and it's too late now.

Thanks to that same friend, Eddie,

a young Tom Sowell was pointed in the right direction

regarding his schooling.

The grade school he attended in Harlem was a good one.

But when it came time for junior high school,

the one in Tom's neighborhood was not so great.

When I finished elementary school,

and they assigned me to a junior high school

in a very bad neighborhood,

he told me that you can get transferred.

And I got transferred to a much better school.

Had I gone to that other school, again,

the story would have been entirely different.

He would become a firm believer in allowing parents

to choose the best school possible for their children,

whether it be private schools, religious schools,

or even the option that sparks intense debate among lawmakers

and educators today -- charter schools.

[ music ]

"There are few things more dishonorable

than misleading the young."

The abysmal quality of education

available in the ghettos today

is one that I really don't think

the worst possible private school could match.

40 years ago, I received a far better education in Harlem

than the people who are living in Harlem today

have available to them.

[ music ]

It's 8:00 a.m. at the Success Academy school

in Harlem, New York.

This is a charter school, an example of educational choice

for people trying to better themselves

despite the circumstances they were born into.

For Tom, this is education done right.

Professor Sowell has been a leader in supporting

all forms of school choice, and I very fundamentally agree

that we need more choices, not fewer.

I think we particularly need that

for our most vulnerable populations.

Back in 1978, when there was a push

for a voucher scheme, the "New Republic" objected.

In their words, "The least educated,

the least ambitious, and the least aware

would be left in the public schools."

Professor Sowell grew up in Harlem.

I grew up in Harlem, and the schools there

have been a disaster for half a century.

And so you have generations of kids

who have not gotten the education that they deserve

and are entitled to.

[ music ]

Charter schools are public, tuition-free schools

that are open to all students,

and able to operate independently

from the traditional school district.

They are given the autonomy

to design a curriculum tailored to the needs of their students.

But they must also meet academic standards

set by state and local officials.

Unlike traditional public schools, however,

charter schools that don't meet these standards

can actually be shut down.

With respect to education, Tom would say

it doesn't make any difference how much money

you put into education,

but if there are not some basic factors

that you must take into account,

that is, in order for a kid to get a good education,

somebody must make him go to bed on time.

Somebody must make him do his homework.

Somebody must make him mind the teacher.

Somebody has to get him up in the morning.

And if those things are not done,

I don't care how much money you put into education,

you're not going to get very good results.

And that is precisely what we see.

For decades, Sowell has been a strong supporter of charters

and other education options for families

trapped in underperforming schools.

There are, as you've said, many blacks today

who are still being given

totally inadequate education... Yes.

...and cannot be expected to get very far for that reason.

What would be your remedy for that?

I would allow their parents

to have a choice of where to send them to school,

whether that choice is called a voucher scheme,

open enrollment, tuition tax credit,

any kind of scheme of that sort

that would put that power in the hands of their parents,

mainly because that would mean that

the schools would have to be responsive to them.

As it is now, the school is a monopoly.

They need not be responsive.

It is hard for me to understand what harm is going to be done

by allowing parents to have a choice

as compared to having self-interested bureaucrats

have a monopoly.

"The things that they thought were going to help,

did not help.

And in many cases made things much worse."

[ music ]

Thomas Sowell is a very private person...

[ music ]

...despite having so much of his work put before the public.

He's reluctant to give interviews,

and has been known to make journalists wait years

before sitting down to talk about his life and work.

But a colleague of mine took the time to get Tom

to appear on his show.

I'm Dave Rubin. I'm the host of "The Rubin Report."

Set's right back behind me here in my home.

I do a long-form interview show.

Everybody was saying,

you've got to talk to Thomas Sowell.

You've got to talk to Thomas Sowell.

And we tried for about three or four years to hunt him down.

And finally we were able to interview him.

One of the things that I found out that was

sort of amazing about your history,

you briefly mentioned it right before we started;

you were a Marxist

at one time in your life.

Most people will find this hard to believe, but it is true.

But it's not that unusual.

Most of the leading conservative thinkers of our time

did not start off as conservative.

You've got a couple like Bill Buckley and George Will.

But I mean, Milton Friedman was a liberal and a Keynesian.

Ronald Reagan was so far left,

at one point the FBI was following him.

Do you remember sort of what you were thinking,

what appealed to you at that time about Marxism?

Yes. I mean, there was no alternative being discussed.

I treated my interview with him as Thomas Sowell 101.

I wanted it to be for the new generation of young people

who watch YouTube, who listen to podcasts.

My first job was as a Western Union messenger.

[ music ]

I would take the Fifth Avenue bus.

It would go all the way up Fifth Avenue

past all these Lord & Taylor

and all these fancy places.

And then across 57th Street.

Down Riverside Drive.

And then, as I came across this long viaduct

that turned into 135th Street,

suddenly, there were the tenements,

[ music ]

and I'd wonder, why is this?

It's so different.

And nothing in the schools or most of the books

seemed to deal with that, and Marx dealt with that.

There's an absolutely beautiful moment

where I ask him about his own political evolution.

So then what was your wake-up to what was wrong

with that line of thinking?

Uh, facts.

[ Laughs ]

I love that moment.

I mean, I knew the second he did it,

I was like, we got our clip. That's as good as it gets.

And it gets to, what does this man care about most?

Does he care about how he feels about things?

How he wants the world to be? Or how is the world as it is?

Because that's what he's saying, "I care about facts."

The world is a certain way, and now,

using that as the baseline,

we can try to figure out how to make things better.

[ music ]

Drafted in 1951, Tom joined the Marines,

where he taught pistol shooting and took photographs.

[ Patriotic music plays ]

[ music ]

In fact, Sowell was part

of the Marine Corps Combat Camera Division.

Combat Camera is responsible

for the historical documentation.

It may not necessarily make it out to the local paper,

but somewhere down the line,

someone might be able to pull up an image

and say, okay, this happened during this timeframe.

The imagery is used as good reference to anything

we may need in the future

or something that's happening right now.

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

[ music ]

Although Thomas Sowell left the Marines long ago,

his legacy lives on today

with some members of the Combat Camera Corps,

who as young men discovered Sowell's work.

When I was a young person, I used to like to

stay home from school occasionally,

liked to play hooky or pretend I was sick and stay home.

But unlike most kids who'd, you know, cut class

and do whatever, I would watch videos of Thomas Sowell

on Milton Friedman's show "Free To Choose,"

and he would just wipe the floor

with people from the other side of the aisle

that didn't seem to know what they were talking about.

These were very smart people, but Thomas Sowell

is so much smarter and so much more intelligent

and so much more articulate

that he would just make them seem like bumbling idiots,

and I just thought that was awesome.

When the private sector fails to create jobs

at a fast enough rate,

you find that people are unemployed

and drift into needing help.

I think it is overly broad to say

that we turn people into helpless children.

I don't remember talking to anyone who's ever

been on welfare who didn't think

they were being treated like children

while they were on it.

[ Ticking ] [ Soft music playing ]

The lessons Sowell learned in the Marines

would stay with him for the rest of his life,

especially his love of photography,

which would become Tom's artistic outlet

while he pursued a life filled with studying facts and data.

[ music ]

Photography did have connections

to his vision of reality.

[ music ]

Tom once commented to me that to be a photographer,

you have to master trade-offs.

All of the little adjustments that you fiddle with

in the camera never involve

making everything better or everything worse.

It's a matter of trading one thing off to another.

If you close down the diaphragm,

then you get lots and lots of stuff in focus near to far.

On the other hand, you're cutting down

the amount of light.

And a theme in Tom's work on society

is that all policies involve trade-offs.

And Tom often loses patience at people with sweeping visions.

Here's how we can improve society.

Here's a solution to a problem.

And Tom points out in his political writings

there are no solutions, there are only trade-offs.

Just like photography.

[ music ]

[ music ]

The University of Chicago is hallowed ground

for Thomas Sowell.

Here is where some of the most influential

economic philosophies of modern times were formed.

It's called The Chicago School of Economics.

And it's where Tom would be mentored by intellectual giants

like George Stigler and Milton Friedman,

both of whom would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.

I was a graduate student here from 1960 to '64.

The thing I learned as a graduate student

was economics is straightforward

and simple when you grasp its underlying logic,

and secondly, that logic can be applied

seriously to understand

many different things about the world.

At Chicago, if it was true,

it was true because you could prove it was true.

It was true because you had the evidence,

you had the logic and so forth.

They explored the specific ways

in which the market does and doesn't work.

The idea, you know, that people are rational on the whole

and that if you allow those people to operate

in the marketplace, you will generally get better results.

[ Students chattering ]

[ music ]

The Chicago School of Economics is where Tom says

he understood the importance of discipline

and the importance of getting hard data.

In fact, he talks more positively about his experience

at University of Chicago than at Harvard,

where he says a lot of people, in his opinion,

went on emotion.

Tom was a Marxist when he took a course

with Milton Friedman, and at the end of the course,

he remained a Marxist.

But what he appreciated was that

at the University of Chicago,

economics was a full-contact sport

where you had to defend your position rigorously,

otherwise you got wasted.

And so at least Tom Sowell said he came out understanding

the importance of hard data.

I was still a Marxist after taking Milton Friedman's course.

But I -- Did you --

But one summer in the government

was enough to let me say,

now, this -- government is really not the answer.

I mean, that is... [ Laughs ]

Milton Friedman didn't cure you,

but the federal government did.

The federal government did.

Never say the federal government doesn't do anything.

[ music ]

My first professional job,

I was a summer intern at the U.S. Department of Labor.

One of my biggest concerns was about minimum wages.

At first, I thought, well, this is good

because all these people are poor

and they'll get a little higher income,

and so that'll be helpful.

And then as I studied economics,

I began to see, well, there's a downside.

They may lose their jobs completely.

So that is that.

When I was at the Labor Department,

I tried to talk about that to them

and eventually I came up with some test of it.

And when I came up with how we might test this,

I was waiting to hear congratulations,

you see, that I had this, and I could see these people

were stunned, they said, oh, this idiot has stumbled

on something that will ruin us all.

[ music ]

And I realized the U.S. Department of Labor

had its own agenda and interests,

and that did not necessarily mean

that whether poor people lost their jobs for minimum wage

or got higher pay was their highest priority.

[ music ]

Tom Sowell looked at the data, and the data found that

minimum wage hikes cause people who are unskilled to lose jobs.

He found out that people in the government

didn't give a rip whether or not it worked or didn't work.

They were simply implementing the policy.

And that's what shocked him and caused him

to begin to rethink lots of his assumptions.

So it wasn't academia that caused him

to become more conservative.

It was real life working for the government.

[ music ]

I was now beginning to understand things

that I hadn't understood before.

[ music ]

Tom, they said, got his PhD here in 1968.

He actually taught in the years leading up to that at Cornell,

which feeds back also to this

just tumultuous times in the 1960s

in the country. Huge demonstrations at Cornell

actually shut down the university for some time.

[ music ]

In 1965, Thomas Sowell took a teaching position at Cornell.

Like many other colleges, it became a focal point

for anti-war and anti-discrimination

protests and demonstrations.

When armed black students took over a building on campus,

Sowell had little sympathy for school administrators.

Blacks had been recruited to Cornell under lower standards

to diversify the student body, and Sowell observed

that many of these same students were now causing trouble

and feeding racial divisions.

For Sowell, it was an example of the unintended consequences

of affirmative action.

Tom's tenure at Cornell

had a very profound impact on him,

particularly surrounding the campus protests.

I think it left a very, very bitter taste in his mouth.

Yes, I think it did.

He discovered that many black students at Cornell,

their SAT scores were above the average

but they are having problems at Cornell.

And that's when he first came up with the idea

of people being mismatched.

That is, black students who would do very well

at other schools,

but were recruited in the name of affirmative action

to schools where they were in over their heads.

The average black student at MIT

is in the bottom 10% of MIT students in math.

But he is in the top 90% of all American students in math.

Something like 1/4 of all the black students going to MIT

do not graduate.

You're talking about a pool of people

whom you are artificially turning into failures

by mismatching them with the school.

Tom had moved to UCLA

to escape the turmoil at Cornell,

and then jumped into the turmoil at UCLA.

I was sitting in my office at UCLA one day

when the Black Student Association Delegation

marched into his office.

I heard all of this.

And one of them said, "Well, how you doing, brother?"

Tom...

"Just a minute.

I am not your brother.

I am Mr. Sowell,

and you will address me that way."

Boy, was that a shock to those folks.

Here was their natural ally laying down the law.

"You're going to treat me

the way I'm going to treat you

as another human being face-to-face,

and if you don't like that, you can leave."

[ music ]

I first met Tom in 1969 when I was a student at UCLA.

I just walked in his office one day

and I said that, "I understand that

you and I have similar ideas on matters of economics."

And we started talk from there.

You and Sowell used to joke about how few

black conservatives there were in the country

back in the '70s and '80s.

Has much changed since then, and what was it like back then?

There were relatively few blacks that we knew of

that were kind of free-market, limited government.

It was Bill Buckley who made the suggestion

that the EPA does not allow

Tom Sowell and I had to fly on one plane together

because we're an endangered species.

Tom's done something in his career

that one of his mentors, Milton Friedman,

felt was important to do also,

and that is share his knowledge of economics

with non-economists, with non-intellectuals.

The true test of whether someone understands

a subject -- the true test comes when he can explain it

to someone who does not know a darn thing about it.

And Tom has the gift of being able to do that,

to be able to explain potentially complex ideas

in economics to the ordinary person.

I haven't been able to find a single country in the world

where the policies that are being advocated for blacks

in the United States have lifted any people out of poverty.

I've seen many examples around the world of people

who began in poverty and ended in affluence.

Not one of them has followed any pattern at all

like what is being advocated for blacks in the United States.

Many groups have remained in poverty

for a very long time trying to follow those patterns.

At one time, black Americans did not have

the constitutional guarantees as everybody else.

Now we do, but because the civil rights struggle

is over and won, and we're not facing the kind of

gross racial discrimination of the past

does not mean that there are not major problems.

I'm fairly sure that Tom would say

that the 75% rate

of illegitimacy among blacks is a devastating problem,

but it's not a racial problem.

It's not a legacy of slavery.

The crime that -- I believe Tom would say as well --

that the crime we see in many black communities

is a devastating problem,

but it has nothing to do with racial discrimination.

"If you have always believed that everyone should play

by the same rules

and be judged by the same standards,

that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago,

a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today."

[ music ]

Thomas Sowell may be an intellectual,

but it would be a mistake

to believe that only academics and economists

believe in what Tom has to say.

I've never heard, never damaged

I am most certainly handed single...

In a small recording studio

just outside of downtown Dallas, a young rapper hones his craft.

It feels good to be back in his booth

And shout out to you

You backin' me then you backin' the truth

You actually knew, and I ain't have to tell you

So sit back, let it soothe...

[ Continues rapping ]

Eric July is a man on a mission.

Handed singly, top tier, meaning you not...

Eric is out to make great music

and to educate people like himself about his hero.

And I'm something like a great howl

Anywhere Thomas Sowell is,

he's the smartest person in the room.

[ Rap metal music playing ]

I would most definitely just tell him

that he's been my biggest inspiration, hands down.

I see you standing with your hand out

What you sayin' now and are you hearin this?

You need to look at your affiliates.

Eric fronts the rap metal band BackWordz,

and uses his music to get a message across

with politically charged lyrics,

many of them inspired by Thomas Sowell.

He has emerged as an influential young voice

who is outspoken in his support for individual freedom

and less government intervention.

[ Rapping indistinctly ]

You see somebody like Sowell who has been doing

what he has been doing, getting out there

and speaking what he has been speaking,

overcoming the odds that he had to certainly overcome,

and his growth,

and you also feel like you can conquer the world.

It just goes to show from a generational standpoint

how he's been able to influence somebody, you know, like me.

People are probably tired of hearing me talk about it

because I'm always referencing Thomas Sowell.

People ask me, "Well, you used to be this.

What happened?"

I'm like, well, that enlightenment period,

it had to do with Thomas Sowell.

Most people have not recognized the fact

that if you go back into the '20s...

...you find that married couple families

were much more prevalent among blacks then than today.

As late as 1930, blacks had lower

unemployment rates than whites.

So all these things that we complain about

and attribute to the era of slavery,

those things should have been worse in the past

than in the present, but in fact,

they're worse in the present than in the past.

And I think if you want to look for a turning point,

it would be since the 1960s.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

And what happened in the 1960s?

[ music ]

You began to have not only the welfare state,

you began to have the mind-set that goes with the welfare state

so that there was no stigma any longer attached,

for example, to being on relief

or welfare.

Those types are welfarism and how they have affected

black, you know, communities and black families,

it's tough.

It's a hard pill to swallow.

Just how welfarism does incentivize people to fail.

It's the state saying that, so as long as you fail,

you know, you'll get this money.

You'll get this money, we'll take care of you,

housing, whatever you need.

But the minute you get above this line,

you know, the minute you get, you see this amount of success,

we're going to strip it all away from you.

[ Children shouting playfully ]

[ music ]

[ music ]

In 1980, Thomas Sowell came here

the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Upon accepting the offer, his teaching days were over.

[ music ]

Thousands of students would miss out on having

Professor Sowell as a teacher,

but millions of intellectually curious readers

would benefit from Thomas Sowell's work here.

[ music ]

I don't think Tom Sowell ever really liked being a teacher.

I don't think I ever like standing in front of people

and being a professor.

When Hoover offered him the opportunity

to basically pay him to be Tom Sowell,

he took it, and he can write what he wants to write

when he wants to write, as much or as little,

but he's always been very, very productive.

And I think the independence and the freedom is what he liked.

So you're good friends with Thomas Sowell.

Yeah.

Have been for a while.

How would you describe Tom to someone

who's never met him before?

I'd say Tom is an empiricist.

And by that, I mean Tom looks at evidence

and then he makes a diagnosis

and then he offers a therapy for the perceived problem.

And then he offers a prognosis, and he's not interested as much,

if at all, on how people interpret that

or what are the ramifications

in contemporary political terms of his argument.

You point out that depending on

where you come from in a foreign country

also makes a considerable difference

because you carry your ethos on your back, don't you?

Yes, that if you look at the Chinese

who came to the United States, let's say, before World War II,

a very large percentage of those came from one district

in one province in Southern China.

The people who have come in since World War II

have largely not come from that same area.

They've come in with a different set of experiences

and backgrounds and values.

Many of them are the poverty-stricken Chinese

that you see in the Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco

working the very long hours, getting the very low pay,

living in the slums, packed into the rooms,

you know, several people to a room and so on,

again, it would be hard to make the argument

that this is simply a matter of the way

the American employer sees it.

The American employer is probably totally unaware

that there are two different kinds of Chinese.

It's only the people who work with the data

who make those separations.

"It takes considerable knowledge

just to realize the extent of your own ignorance."

[ music ]

Thomas Sowell may be an academic by training,

but he is not one to rely solely on books.

To gather material for his extensive writings

on culture and migrations, for example,

he became a boots-on- the-ground researcher

who traveled the world.

As an amateur photographer,

he often documented these trips through the lens of his camera.

[ Camera shutter clicking ]

[ music ]

His purpose was to try and understand

the role of cultural differences

both within nations and between them,

and not only today, but throughout history.

[ Camera shutter clicks ]

[ music ]

Sowell's travels led to pioneering studies

and several books that detail

the cultural patterns and development

of different groups around the world.

He went around the world and analyzed

virtually every culture present and past

to find out their strengths and weaknesses --

why some survived, why some perished.

One of Tom's discoveries was that

much about the fate of different human civilizations

and cultures can be explained ultimately by their geography.

Too often the influence of geography on wealth

is thought of narrowly, in terms of natural resources

that translate directly into wealth,

such as oil in the Middle East or gold in South Africa.

But important as such differences are,

geography influences

even more profound cultural differences

among the peoples themselves.

Why did Europe conquer Africa instead of vice versa?

Well, there are a number of ways in which civilizations

become complex, primarily through the aggregation

and exchange of ideas.

Sophisticated cultures are ones that sit

in the middle of a catchment area

where innovations from other cultures can be aggregated

and kind of greatest hits collections,

and so geography that allows movement of people

and ideas with rivers,

with highways, intersections of highways, port cities

tend to become more culturally sophisticated.

A lot of his research, as you mentioned,

has focused on why some groups excel

and others do not.

But that curiosity is not necessarily appreciated

by a lot of people

who seem to to approach it from the standpoint

that if a culture isn't rising,

it's someone else's fault.

Yes.

Someone else is keeping them down, or, you know,

if America is up here, it is at the expense of this group

or this country or this region.

He doesn't take that approach.

What Tom did when he talked about comparative cultures,

he went to this quite narrow and unheralded group of scholars

that talked about economics,

and then he took that data,

superimposed it onto history questions.

So when people who were critical of Tom would say,

"Well, he hasn't read this particular historical work,"

or, "He wasn't quite appreciative of this great novel

or this great history or this."

They didn't understand that what he lost

as being an economic historian,

he gained in really trying to explain

how cultures were successful

or how much dominance they had in trade

by actually looking at economics.

And most historians, you know,

they think that economics is a dismal science,

and they're not trained to do that.

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity:

there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy

all those who want it.

The first lesson of politics

is to disregard the first lesson of economics."

[ music ]

I wanted to explore how Sowell’s concepts on free markets have

influenced business leaders today.

A perfect example can be found in Salt Lake City, Utah, at Overstock.com.

One of the most successful online retailers in the world.

Aaron Hunsaker, an Overstock employee, has been heavily influenced

by Thomas Sowell’s ideas.

He credits much it’s success to the free-market economic principles

championed by Thomas Sowell.

I discovered Thomas Sowell like every good thinker discovers things in the

modern-day, on YouTube.

I was watching a Milton Friedman video, and I see Thomas Sowell

speaking with Milton Friedman, and I was like, wow, this guy

is really, really smart.

And he gave a real rigorous, as rigorous as you could be on TV, but a

real rigorous answer to a question, and I really appreciated that.

And I just kind of went down the YouTube wormhole with Thomas Sowell,

and then I saw that he’d written like, you know, ten or a thousand books or

something like that, he has tons of books.

And I just started to explore him, and the more I explored Thomas Sowell, he

talked a lot about incentives in institutions, government institutions.

I come from kind of a punk rock hardcore background, and I had an

incentive to be more left and angry because it makes better music.

You don't hear a whole lot of music about, oh, well, if I work really

hard, and we base it off meritocracy, things will be great.

But upon kind of digging into Thomas Sowell’s thought process, I realized

that it is far more punk rock to base things off of individual

freedoms and thought.

I see him as someone who has constantly strived to be consistent.

And to those that want to be consistent, you have to study

geography; you have to study history; you have to study political

philosophy; you have to study journalism; you have to study all of

these subjects as a whole and see how you can put together a view that makes

them consistent with each other.

That’s why I think Thomas Sowell is so well-versed and such

a Renaissance man.

I grew up in an era when people, particularly blacks,

were a lot poorer than today,

faced a lot more discrimination than today,

and in which the teenage pregnancy rate

was a lot lower than today.

I don't believe there is a predestined amount

of teenage pregnancy,

a predestined amount of husband desertion.

Gutman has done a study of the black family

showing that this whole notion that the black family

has always been disintegrating, that is nonsense.

"Some things are believed

because they are demonstrably true,

but many other things are believed

simply because they have been asserted repeatedly."

[ music ]

In the 1990s, Sowell took up a new area of research

the phenomenon of late-talking children.

For Tom, it was personal.

I met Tom Sowell through language.

I am a cognitive scientist. I study language.

I wrote a book on language,

and I got a letter out of the blue from Professor Sowell.

His son was a late talker,

but contrary to some of the diagnosis

that he got from so-called experts,

he didn't believe that his son was retarded or autistic,

just that his language was late in developing.

He just did not talk.

This meshed with my own understanding

of the relationship between language and thought,

namely they're not the same thing.

So I wrote to Tom saying, "Your intuition about your son

is consistent with my understanding."

Tom Sowell sought out answers.

Eventually, his son John not only began to speak,

but to excel.

Sowell wrote about this remarkable journey

in his landmark book, "Late-Talking Children."

Tom discovered that there was a syndrome,

that many famous scientists, engineers, mathematicians

would also have acute spatial ability

and numerical ability,

but were late in developing the ability to speak.

One of those impacted was Los Angeles-based writer

Jennifer Van Laar, whose own young son, Sam,

wasn't talking at all.

When Sam was about 18 months old,

he wasn't really talking.

He -- just babbling.

No word that we could make out to be an English word.

So I started looking online and saw late-talking children,

and then Dr. Thomas Sowell, and said,

oh, I definitely want to read what he has to say

because I respect him as an intellectual.

I had already noticed in Sam

that he would build different block towers

with different patterns repeating over and over.

He would have movies that he just loved watching

over and over, and one of them was "Charlotte's Web."

Another one was "Shrek."

And so I would come and find ABC blocks on the floor

or on the refrigerator spelling out --

and he'd even write out "Lucasfilm."

[ Laughs ]

Which is pretty big for a three-year-old to be able to do.

So the fact that Sowell's book talked about bright children,

I thought, I don't think he's dumb.

Let's look into this.

So went to go see Dr. Camarata, to get an evaluation.

And they gave us a full plan of what we could do to help him

to be able to acquire language and be successful in school.

[ music ]

When Sam started piano and he had been so advanced

in that first year, at the end of the year

they had a recital, and he still wasn't talking

in more than one sentence,

maybe two, but he got up and he introduced his piece,

and it was "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."

[ "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" playing ]

It made me cry.

[ music ]

I sent the video of that to the Camaratas

and said how proud I was of him and thanked them for the help

they had given us, and they asked

if they could send it to Dr. Sowell.

[ music ]

Said, go ahead, and then they e-mailed back

and said that Sowell had really loved

watching the video of Sam.

[ music ]

[ Song ends ]

[ Applause ]

Just the fact that he would care about this five-year-old

said a lot to me about who he sees himself as.

"The course of history is determined

by what people do with their opportunities."

[ music ]

Sowell has written a great deal

about the importance of human capital

in a group's advancement.

The development of skills and habits

and attitudes in advancing a group economically.

And a good example of what he's talking about

can be found on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan

at the Steinway piano company.

[ Playing classical piece ]

[ music ]

President and CEO Ron Losby

explains how the history of Steinway

aligns with Thomas Sowell's theories.

We still follow the tenet that Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg

started the company with,

and that is to build the best piano possible.

They were living in Seesen

in the Harz Mountain area of Northern Germany.

At that time, there was a lot of political upheaval in Germany,

and they had the guild system.

I think you would call it the apprentice system today.

And it had really strict rules.

And Heinrich was just so full of ideas

on how to build the best piano that he possibly could

that he was impatient, and he didn't want to wait

until he graduated from this system.

On his own, Heinrich created a few pianos.

And while they were favorably received,

the economic restrictions in Germany at the time

made him realize that if he was to succeed,

he would have to take his skills elsewhere.

[ music ]

It gave him the impetus

to come to the New World, New York City,

where there was less restriction,

there was less, you know, regulation.

[ music ]

Heinrich changed the family's last name

to the more American-sounding Steinway.

They created an instrument that within 10 years,

they became the most successful, most profitable,

the best piano company built in America.

Very often people talk

as if some group has taken control of some industry

and they wonder, how did that happen?

And in most cases, they created the industry.

The industry didn't exist before they got there.

That's how they took control of it.

[ music ]

Heinrich's decision to relocate to America

is a good example of one of Thomas Sowells core beliefs --

that individuals carry with them their skills

no matter where they go, and can succeed

if permitted to do so

without cumbersome government regulations.

"It's amazing how much panic one honest man can spread

among a multitude of hypocrites."

[ music ]

Listen to this list.

"The Thomas Sowell Reader," 2011.

"Intellectuals and Race," 2013.

A new edition of your classic work

"Basic Economics," in 2014.

"Wealth, Poverty and Politics," 2015.

And now, 2018, "Discrimination and Disparities."

And do you know what I just did?

I just listed the books you've published

since turning 80.

[ Laughs ]

[ music ]

Thomas Sowell's essays and weekly columns

have appeared in more than 300 newspapers and periodicals,

including "The New York Times," "The Wall Street Journal,"

"Forbes," and "Fortune" magazines.

While many found Sowell's empirically based arguments

insightful, oftentimes they created a backlash,

especially among those in academia.

You once told me that Tom's not interested

in making people happy or angry.

He's interested in telling people what the data show.

What the data shows, and he is counter --

He can be a contrarian in the sense

that often areas that are unpopular

or they're plagued with false knowledge or misconceptions,

he gravitates toward those

because that intrigues him to see

if that's actually the popular opinion, is actually true.

And often it's not he finds it's not.

And then the results tend to bother people

that he's so dispassionate about it.

And then, as an African-American intellectual,

he is supposed to fit a preconceived

intellectual, academic, ideological position,

and it's not that he doesn't, he's just on interested in it.

He doesn't make friends or enemies

based on tribal considerations or popular consensus.

On December 27, 2016,

Thomas Sowell published his weekly newspaper column.

I'd read his column for decades and always look forward to it,

but this one was different.

Thomas Sowell was saying goodbye.

[ music ]

Within minutes, the internet lit up

with thousands of comments

about Tom retiring from writing his column.

most of the postings were along the lines of,

Say it isn't so.

[ music ]

I did that after spending some time

in Yosemite with a couple of photo buddies,

and I realized that in those four days

we hadn't watched a single news program.

We hadn't seen a single newspaper.

I said, this is the life.

I don't need to be watching --

Because most of the foolish things

that are said on these programs

were said 20 and 30 and 40 years ago

and refuted 20 and 30 and 40 years ago.

By you quite often.

But you're happier when you're not reading the news.

Absolutely.

But at the same time,

you're also happier when you're working on a book.

Yes, when I can go out there and get the hard data

and find out what's really happening.

In dozens of books and numerous television appearances

and thousands of columns,

Sowell has championed his philosophy of free markets

and personal responsibility,

while weathering the storms of challenge and controversy.

Sowell has spent his adult life proudly sharing

his political and economic beliefs.

For some, he's a clear thinker full of common sense.

Others say he lacks empathy.

What no one can doubt is the courage

of this maverick intellectual.

If you could offer one sentence of counsel to some sophomore

or junior who's watching this today...

It's not over till it's over, as Yogi Berra said.

And I would say to this young person,

if we, through some miracle, get through this,

please take to heart the lesson of what happens

when you vote on the basis of rhetoric and symbolism

instead of using your mind.

It doesn't matter how smart you are

unless you stop and think.

In your early days at Harvard,

you were either going to make it or not going to make it,

and you shut yourself up and made yourself make it.

Many people in trying to insulate young people

from adversity, insulate them

from the things that give them strength.

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