Economist Thomas Sowell Quotes

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As economist Thomas Sowell has noted, middleman minorities typically arrive in their host countries with education, skills, or a set of propitious attitudes about work, such as business frugality and the willingness to take risks. Some slave away in lowly menial jobs to raise capital, then swiftly become merchants, retailers, labor contractors, and money-lenders. Their descendants usually thrive in the professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, or finance.
Iris Chang (The Chinese in America: A Narrative History)
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert; but for every fact there is not necessarily an equal and opposite fact. —Thomas Sowell, American economist
Massimo Pigliucci (Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk)
Thomas Sowell, the preeminent economist and social theorist, put it in stark terms. “One of the sad signs of our times,” he wrote, “is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized
Dan Crenshaw (Fortitude: Resilience in the Age of Outrage)
The economist Thomas Sowell has spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups in the United States and internationally. And his findings show that political activity generally has not been a factor in the rise of groups from poverty to prosperity.
Jason L. Riley (Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed)
Economists tend to rely on “revealed preference” rather than verbal statements. That is, what people do reveals what their values are, better than what they say.
Thomas Sowell (Discrimination and Disparities)
A non-Essentialist approaches every trade-off by asking, “How can I do both?” Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating question, “Which problem do I want?” An Essentialist makes trade-offs deliberately. She acts for herself rather than waiting to be acted upon. As economist Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
Some years ago, in my syndicated column, I challenged anyone to name any economist, of any school of thought, who had actually advocated a “trickle down” theory. No one quoted any economist, politician or person in any other walk of life who had ever advocated such a theory, even though many readers named someone who claimed that someone else had advocated it, without being able to quote anything actually said by that someone else. 2
Thomas Sowell ("Trickle Down Theory" and "Tax Cuts for the Rich")
In fact, Bush’s tax cuts increased the amount of revenue collected by more than 30 percent from his first year as president to his last, just as Reagan’s and Kennedy’s tax cuts increased federal revenue after they were passed. As economist Thomas Sowell argued, “Obama knew then that tax rates and tax revenues do not automatically move in the same direction. In other words, he is lying when he talks as if tax rates and tax revenues move together.
Jack Cashill ("You Lie!": The Evasions, Omissions, Fabrications, Frauds and Outright Falsehoods of Barack Obama)
Economists who looked at the real consequences of a centrally planned economy came to a very different conclusion: that" there are too many economic relationships, and it is impossible to take them all into account and carefully coordinate them.
Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
Despite the massive intellectual feat that Marx's Capital represents, the Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed. This neither denies nor denigrates Capital as an intellectual achievement, and perhaps in its way the culmination of classical economics. But the development of modern economics had simply ignored Marx. Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical tools to which Marx contributed nothing, and have recourse to Marx only for ideological, political, or historical purposes. In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a blind alley, however historic it may be as the centerpiece of a worldwide political movement. What is said and done in its name is said and done largely by people who have never read through it, much less followed its labyrinthine reasoning from its arbitrary postulates to its empirically false conclusions. Instead, the massive volumes of Capital have become a quasi-magic touchstone—a source of assurance that somewhere and somehow a genius "proved" capitalism to be wrong and doomed, even if the specifics of this proof are unknown to those who take their certitude from it.
Thomas Sowell (Marxism: Philosophy and Economics)
Needless to say, the anointed much prefer to quote family and household statistics on income, claiming “economic stagnation,” the “disappearance of the middle class,” and miscellaneous other rhetorical catastrophes. “For all but the top 20 percent,” an op-ed column in the New York Times said, “income has stagnated.” Moreover, this alleged fact was “widely acknowledged” by “politicians, economists and sociologists.”72 That so many such people echoed the same refrain—without bothering to check readily available census data to the contrary—says more about them than about income. Moreover, not all such use of household or family income data can be attributed to statistical naivete.
Thomas Sowell (The Vision Of The Annointed: Self-congratulation As A Basis For Social Policy)
What we need,” I said, “are statistics on the amount of sugar cane standing in the field before the hurricanes came through Puerto Rico.” There was a stunned silence, as if they were afraid I had stumbled onto something that could turn out to be embarrassing for the Labor Department. “Well, it’s not that easy,” one of the Labor Department economists said. “We don’t have those statistics.” “I’ll bet the Department of Agriculture has them,” I said. “That’s still not the same as if we had them in the Department of Labor,” I was told. “Why can’t we get them from the Department of Agriculture?” I asked. “That’s easier said than done. First of all, we would have to make a request, going all the way up through channels to the Secretary of Labor. Then he would have to seek approval from the Secretary of Agriculture, who would then have to forward the request down the chain of command in the Department of Agriculture, to see if the data are available and can be released.” “Well,” I said, “John F. Kennedy says that a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Let me file the request.” That was 1960. I have yet to receive an official reply to my request.
Thomas Sowell (A Personal Odyssey)
As economist Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
For example, political scientist Manning Marable said of conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, “Ethnically, Thomas has ceased to be an African American.” Columnist Carl Rowan of the Washington Post wrote of black economist Thomas Sowell, “Vidkun Quisling in his collaboration with the Nazis surely did not do as much damage as Sowell is doing.” And Spike Lee said that Michael Williams, a black appointee in the Bush administration, was such a traitor to his race that he deserved to be “dragged into an alley and beaten with a Louisville slugger.”39
Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
Thomas Sowell, the preeminent economist and social theorist, put it in stark terms. “One of the sad signs of our times,” he wrote, “is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.
Dan Crenshaw (Fortitude: Resilience in the Age of Outrage)
I was reminded of this two years later when we shot The Rubin Report with the legendary economist and author Dr. Thomas Sowell while on location at Stanford University in April 2018. Sowell is a conservative who just so happens to be black, as well as a mentor to Elder, so it felt like the perfect opportunity to acknowledge the lesson I’d learned—and reaffirm it once more. So when I asked him what caused his own transition from far-left Marxist to modern-day libertarian, his answer was perfectly summarized when he simply quipped: “Facts.
Dave Rubin (Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason)
Thomas Sowell was born in North Carolina and grew up in Harlem. He moved out from home at an early age and did not finish high school. After a few tough years … read morehe joined the Marine Corps and became a photographer in the Korean War. After leaving the service, Sowell entered Harvard University, worked a part-time job as a photographer and studied the science that would become his passion and profession: economics. Sowell received his bachelor’s degree in economics (magna cum laude) from Harvard in 1958. He went on to receive his master’s in economics from Columbia University in 1959, and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. In the early ’60s, Sowell held jobs as an economist with the Department of Labor and AT&T. But his real interest was in teaching and scholarship. In 1965, at Cornell University, Sowell began the first of many professorships. His other teaching assignments have included Rutgers, Amherst, Brandeis and the UCLA. In addition, Sowell was project director at the Urban Institute, 1972-1974; a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, 1976–77; and was an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, 1975-76. Dr. Sowell has published a large volume of writing, much of which is considered ground-breaking. His has written over 30 books and hundreds of articles and essays. His work covers a wide range of topics, Including: classic economic theory, judicial activism, social policy, ethnicity, civil rights, education, and the history of ideas to name only a few. Sowell has earned international acclaim for his unmatched reputation for academic integrity. His scholarship places him as one of the greatest thinkers of the second half of the twenty century. Thomas Sowell began contributing to newspapers in the late ’70s, and he became a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist 1984. Sowell has brought common sense economic thinking to the masses by his ability to write for the general public with a voice that get to the heart of issues in plain English. Today his columns appear in more than 150 newspapers. In 2003, Thomas Sowell received the Bradley Prize for intellectual achievement. Sowell was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2002. In 1990, he won the prestigious Francis Boyer Award, presented by The American Enterprise Institute. Currently, Thomas Sowell is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. —Dean Kalahar
Dean Kalahar (The Best of Thomas Sowell)
In the world of words, the hardest facts can be made to vanish into thin air by a clever catchword or soaring rhetoric. In a public discourse where slogans and images have too often replaced facts and logic, words have indeed become for some what Hobbes called them, centuries ago—the money of fools,114 often counterfeit money created by clever people. Our educational system, which might have been expected to develop students’ ability to “cross-examine the facts,” as the great economist Alfred Marshall once put it, has itself become one of the fountainheads of insinuations and obfuscations.
Thomas Sowell (Discrimination and Disparities)
None of these facts requires extraordinary research in esoteric places. One need only read Mellon’s book Taxation to see what he advocated, and look at the published records of the Internal Revenue Service to see what happened. Both of these sources are available in libraries or on the Internet. That renowned historians and economists failed to check these readily available sources is just one sign of what can happen in an academic monoculture where the promotion of a social vision takes precedence over the search for facts—and where there are few people with fundamentally different views who would challenge what was said.
Thomas Sowell (Discrimination and Disparities)
Christian doctrine cautions against greed. So does present-day economist Thomas Sowell: "I have never understood why it is 'greed' to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money." Using the power of government to grab another person's property isn't exactly altruistic. Jesus never even implied that accumulating wealth through peaceful commerce was in any way wrong; he simply implored people to not allow wealth to rule them or corrupt their character. That's why his greatest apostle, Paul, didn't say money was evil in the famous reference in 1 Timothy 6:10. Here's what Paul actually said: "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs" (emphasis added). Indeed, progressives themselves have not selflessly abandoned money, for it is other people's money, especially that of "the rich," that they're always clamoring for.
Anonymous
But, as the late Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler put it, “the typical university catalog would never stop Diogenes in his search for an honest man.”25
Thomas Sowell (Inside American Education)
De acuerdo con la revista de negocios Forbes, «otros fabricantes de automóviles ni siquiera se pueden acercar a Toyota en los costes de fabricación de automóviles» y esto se muestra en los resultados. «Toyota ganó 1.800 dólares por cada vehículo vendido, General Motors 300 dólares y Ford perdió 240», según Forbes. «Toyota tiene una ganancia neta mucho mayor a la ganancia combinada de las tres grandes compañías de Detroit», según la revista The Economist.
Thomas Sowell (Economía básica: Un manual de economía escrito desde el sentido común)