 I've been able to find a single country in the world where the policies of 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. That's the economist and social critic Thomas Sowell critiquing affirmative action back in 1981. In an age in which espousing unpopular ideas can destroy the careers of journalists and academics, Sowell's candor and insistence on following the facts wherever they lead are more worthy of appreciation than ever. Sowell was born in rural North Carolina in 1930 to an uneducated family without electricity or running water. He was orphaned and raised by a great aunt. When he was eight, his family moved to Harlem and at one point he was living in a shelter for homeless boys keeping a knife under his pillow for protection. He didn't finish college until he was 28 and went on to receive his PhD from the University of Chicago before he became internationally celebrated as an intellectual and writer. His upbringing was more than something to be overcome. It profoundly shaped his scholarship, in particular by making him disdainful of elite intellectuals who imposed their ideas on society through government. As Sowell wrote in his memoir, growing up he had daily contact with people who were neither well educated nor particularly genteel but who had practical wisdom far beyond what I had. That gave him a lasting respect for the common sense of ordinary people, a factor routinely ignored by the intellectuals among whom I would later make my career. Sowell's provocative body of work on everything from race to childhood development to charter schools and their enemies is the subject of a new documentary and a forthcoming biography titled Maverick. He's someone who has done something of an intellectual loner throughout his career. Jason Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the author behind the new documentary and biography of Sowell. Someone who is a Buck convention concerned himself with being a truth teller, being a straight shooter. Maybe this is a commentary on intellectuals today is that makes him a Maverick. Someone who puts truth above popularity, who doesn't concern himself with being politically correct. He follows the facts where they lead, whether or not a conclusion is a popular one. Riley says that Sowell's genius rests in his unwavering attention to empirical facts and data and policy outcomes, regardless of intentions, a tendency that was sharpened by his PhD training at the University of Chicago under future Nobel prize winners Milton Friedman, George Stigler and Friedrich Hayek. This whole notion that this is the black family has always been disintegrating, that is nonsense, that 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 into He was thinking like a Chicago economist. Essentially, it's an adherence to empiricism, to facts and logic and putting that ahead of theory. Tom is much more interested in how an idea has panned out what the evidence is for success or failure, rather than simply what the intent is. And I think that is what distinguishes him and much of the Chicago School from their counterparts at MIT or Harvard or other places where there was much more of an emphasis, at least in the field of economics, on on elegant theories and mathematics. When Sol showed up at the University of Chicago for doctoral work, he called himself a Marxist, a designation he ultimately rejected not because of Milton Friedman's lectures, but because of his subsequent job experience in the federal government. I was still a Marxist after taking Milton Friedman's course. But one summer in the government was enough to let me say, no, this government is really not the answer. Milton Friedman didn't cure you, but the federal government did. Federal government did. So what would say the federal government doesn't do anything? One of Sol's most brilliant works is Knowledge and Decisions, published in 1980. He elaborated on Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek's insight that information and knowledge are dispersed among people and markets in highly sophisticated, yet unarticulated ways. That's something most intellectuals and planners ignore as they override the expertise and experience of the common man through government fiat. In a 1981 review of the book, published in Reason, Hayek wrote that Sol had not only broadened the application of the ideas and effectively carried the approach into new fields that I never considered, but he also succeeds in translating abstract and theoretical argument into a highly concrete and realistic discussion of the central problems of contemporary economic policy. To the extent that decision making has taken out of the hands of ordinary people and placed in the hands of government bureaucrats and politicians, what you are doing is increasing the distance between the person who makes the decision and the person who has to suffer the consequences of that decision. And one of the reasons Sol wrote that book is because he thought that too much decision making was being put in the hands of government and that we were headed down a bad path by going in this direction. And I think obviously he's been born out by that. In a conflict of visions, which is Sol's favorite of his own books, he identified two fundamental modes of understanding the world. Thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Marx to John Rawls exhibited what Sol calls an unconstrained vision based on the mistaken idea that human beings and society are perfectable. In later books, Sol championed a constrained vision articulated by classical liberals such as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and America's founding fathers who constructed a system of checks and balances to protect man from his worst tendencies. The constrained vision rejects utopianism and instead holds that social progress comes from acknowledging that there are no perfect solutions, only trade-offs. As Burke wrote, we cannot change the nature of things and of men but must act upon them the best we can. Sol's good friend and fellow amateur photographer, Harvard linguist Stephen Pinker, draws a parallel between how cameras work and societies work. Tomlin's 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 for 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, they're only trade-offs. Sol's life experience and ideological commitments are perhaps most clear in his long-held positions on the centrality of school choice to improving the life prospects for low-income blacks and other minorities. One of his first major works was 1972's Black Education, Myths and Tragedies. And his latest book was 2020's Charter Schools and Their Enemies. 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. Tom brings this economic empiricism to anything he's writing about. That's something that I've greatly appreciated and then the need for, to be a critical thinker in the way that he has. He wrote about these racial topics almost out of the sense of duty because there were things that needed to be said that too few others were willing to say. And I'm so glad he did his duty. I think we are so much better off for having this body of work out there to draw on that is still so relevant today. If he had spent his entire career writing about intellectual history, John Baptiste and the classical liberals, I'm sure so be remembered as a great scholar, but I am so glad he decided to take the punches he's taken over this other stuff on race and ethnicity and culture because I think for some of us, that's equally important. Despite disavowing utopianism and human perfectability, Seoul has never wavered in a belief that things can and should get better if we put aside ideological priors, assess the facts on the ground and work to give individuals more and better choices. I grew up in an era when people in 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 was a predestined amount of teenage pregnancy, a predestined amount of husband desertion. Today, Seoul is in its 90s and still writing and publishing, though his greatest scholarship is almost certainly behind him. His body of work will continue to have a profound impact on our understanding of the world long after he's gone.