Sydney Williams Burrowing into Books “A Personal Odyssey” by Thomas Sowell
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“Although marching to your own drummer has its downsides, both personally and professionally, it also made me no stranger to controversy.” Thomas Sowell 1930 A Personal Odyssey, 2000
This memoir was written twenty years ago, so some will have read it. I had not. Sowell is a man I have long admired for his independent thinking on many issues. Trained as an economist, he writes as well on education and race, and of how politics, protests and policy prescriptions influenced his thinking.
Like Odysseus’ return from Troy, we follow him from birth and young boyhood in rural North Carolina, through his school years in Harlem, and his leaving home at age seventeen. We follow him into the Marine Corps, and we learn of his years in college and graduate school, of marriage and children. We read of his years of teaching, writing and thinking, and, finally to his Ithaca, Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where he researches and writes – a passage through trials to triumph.
He was born in 1930. His father died before he arrived and his mother, who could not afford to feed and care for him, had to give him up to his father’s Aunt Molly. The poverty in which he lived was bleak. His first home: “Like most of the houses in the area, ours had no such frills as electricity, central heating, or hot running water…The toilet was a little shed on the back porch.” At age nine, his family moved to New York City, to a shared apartment in Harlem. In 1944, his intelligence got him admitted to Stuyvesant High School where he first spent time with white children. But he quit before graduation. He worked and went into the Marine Corps: “Never in my life did race mean less than during those two months at Parris Island. The Drill Instructors saw their job as making everybody miserable, and they did so without regard to race, color, creed or national origin.”
Honorably discharged, he passed exams allowing him to enter Howard University, but soon realized that there “was no way for my mind to develop in the stultifying atmosphere there.” He transferred to Harvard, from which he graduated Magna Cum Laude. From there it was on to Columbia where, under Arthur Burns, he wrote his master’s thesis on Marx’s business cycle theory. He received a PhD from the University of Chicago, with Milton Friedman as his advisor. His thesis was on Say’s Law, which says that production is the source of demand. In one of Friedman’s courses he was assigned Friedrich Hayek’s essay, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” which “showed the role of a market economy in utilizing the fragmented knowledge scattered among vast numbers of people.”
As a black man, civil rights were important. Everyone, he knew, should be equal before the law. “But,” he wrote, “to expect civil rights to solve our economic and social problems was barking up the wrong tree...” He saw quality education as providing the best route out of poverty but did not see that as the plan of civil rights activists. “In education, the agenda was racial integration in general, including busing. Discussions of first-rate all-black schools were a distraction from that agenda.” Busing, in the 1970s, had become a symbolic action. “My research on affirmative action likewise convinced me that it was counterproductive for its avowed purpose, except for a relatively few affluent individuals.” In last Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim wrote, “Thomas Sowell and others have shown that choice and competition would benefit black children far more than doubling or tripling funds for public schools, but white liberals and black civil-rights leaders studiously ignore it.”
What struck this reader is his common sense and his wish for other blacks to have the advantages he had. He credits his success to genetics and to the environment in which he has lived. A mathematics gene was common in the family, as were other characteristics: “Some remarkable similarities in personality traits also showed up as between me and my siblings, even though we were raised in separate households hundreds of miles apart.” Environment was important. He left the south “before I would have fallen irretrievably far behind in inferior schools,” and then passed through public schools in New York, “at a time when they were better than they had been for the European immigrant children of a generation earlier and far better than they would be for black children of a later era.”
His story is personal; we meet his son John, a brilliant child but a late talker, a condition that prompted his writing Late-Talking Children, one of the more than thirty books he has written. Summing up his life thus far, he added: “With all that I went through, it now seems in retrospect almost as if someone had decided there should be a man with all the outward indications of disadvantage, who nevertheless had the key inner advantages needed to advance.”
Sowell is an icon of conservatives, but he is not political. He notes how he developed a “…lifelong immunity to Potomac fever.” Asked to join the Reagan Administration, he demurred. His last membership in a political party was as a Democrat; he became an Independent in 1972. He does not have, he wrote, “…the political skills or temperament to accomplish anything that would justify the aggravation that going to Washington would involve.” He is an intellectual, with an interest in truth based on facts, not policies based on politics of identity. While his common sense would be refreshing in Washington, his wisdom is available to all who can read. This book is a good place to start.
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