Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World

has always been disintegrating, that is nonsense.

His studies go up to 1925.

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.

Funding for this program

has been provided by...

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

The building looks pretty much the same

as it did more than 80 years ago

when the Sowells moved in.

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.

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.

In Harlem, there was a kid named Eddie

that members of the family had run into

before I ever arrived from North Carolina.

He came from a highly educated family,