Reflections on ‘Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell’ by Jason L Riley. # 221. 13/02/2026

Out of Many, One People.

Welcome, to a thinker whose footprints are often found in these blogs, and who who certainly deserves a lot more attention from Christians across the theological, political and social spectra.

Reflections on ‘Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell’ by Jason L Riley.

Why did Kemi Badenoch cross the Atlantic? To speak at a conference at the Hoover Institute in California last October, honouring the life’s work of the economist and sociologist Thomas Sowell. Chaired by Condoleeza Rice, former Secretary of State under George W Bush, and Glenn Loury, emeritus Professor of Economics at the Ivy League’s Brown University, and with an opening interview with Clarence Thomas, the senior member of the Supreme Court, the conference was a summit of leading black conservatives. But it also including other supporters, notably perhaps America’s leading public intellectual, Steven Pinker: ‘I’ve spent my life at Harvard, Stanford, MIT. And I would certainly count Tom as one of the most brilliant people I have come across and one of the deepest thinkers’ (p 166). Badenoch was on a panel, speaking about Sowell’s impact on Britain. Sowell, now 95, was not at the conference but could follow it by landline.

Jason Riley’s ‘Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell’ (Basic Books 2021) is readable and well organised. Whilst primarily an intellectual biography summarising the different phases of Sowell’s academic career, and his three main concerns – economic theory, the history of ideas about society, and race and ethnicity – it briefly alludes to his personal background. Born into poverty in rural North Carolina, Sowell moved to Harlem to live with his aunt after being orphaned. He left school at 16, worked in unskilled jobs, which gave ‘a lasting respect for the common sense of ordinary people’ (p 4), and once lived in a shelter for wayward boys, where he had to keep a knife under his pillow. He served in the Marines, and then began his tertiary education in his twenties, ending up at Harvard. He lectured in economics at Harvard, Cornell and UCLA, but became dissatisfied with the fads and unreality that increasingly marked universities, and became a scholar-in-residence at the public policy think tank, the Hoover Institution, from where he has written 40 books as well as maintaining a regular output of newspaper columns.

I first started reading Sowell from about 1990, such as ‘The Economics and Politics of Race’ (1983) and ‘Race and Culture – A World View’ (1994). They powerfully shaped my understanding of race, as they highlighted my increasing restlessness about the standard anti-racist thinking of the time, often influenced for Christians by the Marxist-leaning Ken Leech. Ministering in Wembley in an area of considerable ethnic diversity, the marked differences in the trajectories and progress of different ethic groups, the decisive influence of family formation and parenting, and different approaches to study and leisure were all major factors that a ‘left’ emphasis on race simply failed to account for.

Sowell radically shifted the dial from emphasising racial disparities as the consequence of society’s repression of black people and other minorities towards the central importance of cultural formation as the main source of difference. ‘Multiculturalists in the academy and in the media, were trying to have it both ways, he said. On the one hand, they argued that ethnic cultures were unique, which was true. At the same time, they refused to address the economic consequences of those differences, which was intellectually dishonest’ (p 185). Yet the obvious nonsense that ‘the differences between different cultures doesn’t make any difference’ had become the standard orthodoxy in both society and the church, leading, for example, to a preoccupation with equal outcomes, imposing quotas, making percentage comparisons, creating both unfulfillable expectations and impotent establishment guilt.

For me, the ‘black oppressed/white oppressor’ binary collapsed under the weight of Sowell’s global and historical detailed evidence. The thread of heterodox and contrarian thinking, and dissatisfaction with prevailing racial orthodoxy, that runs through my blogs stems from my discovery that Sowell gave a far more satisfactory account of the multi-ethnic society I was living in. (In blog # 61 25/01/2022 ‘Conservative, Gifted and Black’ I gave a summary of Sowell’s views).

What emphases of Sowell’s writings then are important for us today?

1. Attention to evidence.

Sowell began his career as an economist and a Marxist, but his ‘adherence to empiricism – to use data-driven evidence’ (p 7) underlined for him its failure to deliver promised outcomes. Riley’s early chapters describe in some detail developments in post war economic theory as Sowell, influenced by economists such as Friedman and Hayek, transitioned to a market-orientated focus with its trust in the judgement of a multitude of consumers to make better decisions on the ground rather than administrators on high. He says approvingly of the laissez-faire classical economists that ‘their real concern was creating and sustaining economic growth to help the working class’ (p 103). Underlying this a theme which runs through all that Sowell writes: his criticism, at times even contempt, for intellectuals and for abstract theory and his trust in and concern for the life of ordinary people. In the sections below there will be examples of how Sowell uses hard statistical evidence, which abound in his books, to undermine the unfounded assumptions of liberal commentators.

2. The central importance of culture.

‘Each group trails the long shadow of its own history and culture, which influence its habits, priorities, and social patterns, which in turn affects its fate’ (chapter superscription to ‘Culture Matters’, p 191, quoting from ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals’). Sowell (aided no doubt by research assistants) produces abundant world-wide evidence to illustrate the theme, and thereby indicting the blinkered provincialism of many American and British accounts of race relations: ‘cultural traits . . have far more bearing on economic advancement than how the group is treated by society at large’ (p 142). Thus his emphasis falls on human or social capital - skills, behaviours, values – as the determining factor. He points to the damage done by the derision that started from the 1960s for the ‘respectability politics’ which had been a powerful influence on the newly urbanised black communities of the first half of the twentieth century. But supporting the earlier outlook: ‘Census data show that in the 1940s and 1950s black poverty rates plummeted, black incomes rose at a faster rate than white incomes, and the racial gap in years of schooling narrowed from four years to two’ (p 53). Central to this was ‘His defence of the traditional family . . . essential decision-making units down through history and . . best positioned to socialise the next generation’ (p 167). Subsequent differing attitudes to the consequent accumulation of social capital led to divergences. As the earlier black sociologist E Franklin Frazier discovered ‘whereas a relatively large middle class is emerging in our cities, at the same time a large degraded proletariat is also appearing’ (p 174).

3. Critique of black leaders and white liberals.

As an outlier, Sowell is unrelenting in his scorn: ‘The civil rights establishment had long operated under the assumption that racial discrimination largely explained statistical disparities in achievement and that, in the absence of bias towards minority groups, we would see more equitable outcomes’ (p 176). It is important to stress here that Sowell does not deny the reality of racial discrimination but simply that it forms an inadequate explanation for poor outcomes. Accordingly, the strong focus on the need for black political action following the successful Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s had little real life impact. ‘Yet even as blacks were increasing their political clout in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, black welfare dependency was rising, as was black crime, black teen unemployment, and births to single black women’ (p 177). The drive for affirmative action was no panacea: ‘the rate at which blacks entered middle-class professions decreased after the implementation of affirmative action policies’ (p 54), whilst ‘racial preferences for the black underclass were not only ineffective but counterproductive, that they stigmatised black achievement and that they were no substitute for the development of skills, attitudes and habits that are conducive to upward social mobility’ (p 51).

Sowell’s push back against the orthodoxy of black political leaders has led to him being ignored or criticised. He has joked that he spent the first half of his life being afraid of the white man, the second half being afraid of the black man. The only serious engagement with his views I have come across has been by Cornel West in a chapter in ‘Race Matters’ where West makes the important point that the sexual irresponsibility and violence that Sowell argues are the main enemies of the black underclass are in fact fed by the capitalist outlets that Sowell would defend. Overall, however, Sowell lays the blame on the distorted mentalities that prevail amongst intellectuals, who ‘have romanticised cultures that have left people mired in poverty, ignorance, violence, disease and chaos, while trashing cultures that have led the world in prosperity, education, medical advances and law and order’ (p 38).

Because he sees black political activity as seriously misdirected and too easily ‘inordinately impressed with strident loudmouths’ (p 123) he sees attempts to drive the white establishment to change (as by Ibram X Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, or Black Lives Matter) as offering little towards real improvement. ‘We must decide whether our top priority is to smite the wicked or to advance the less fortunate, whether we are looking for visions and rhetoric which make us feel good for the moment or whether we are seeking methods with a proven track record of success in advancing whole peoples from poverty to prosperity’ (p 196). Rather than bring political pressure on the white establishment, blacks need to rely upon themselves to develop their own resources for advancement. ‘The moral regeneration of white people might be an interesting project, but I am not sure we have quite that much time to spare. Those who have fought on this front are like generals who like to refight the last war instead of preparing for the next struggle’ (p 233). Given this perspective it is not surprising that Sowell is unimpressed by demands for reparations for slavery. As Riley summarises his views: ‘Well into the twenty-first century, black leaders still often seemed more interested in seeking slavery reparations and toppling Confederate statuary than in offering poor black families an escape from failing public schools’ (p 49). But the two emphases are not incompatible.

4. A wider mental framework.

Sowell only started writing on race well into his academic career ‘because there were things I thought needed saying and I knew that other people were reluctant to say them’ (p 11). But his views on race stem out of a wider framework which he developed whilst working as an economist. His distaste for abstract and ungrounded concepts made him wary of high-sounding phrases or unfocused rhetoric. In his very original writings as a political theorist a running theme that developed out of his thinking was the basic contrast between ‘constrained’ and ‘unconstrained’ visions of society. He says his book ‘A Conflict of Visions’ is his favourite. Siding with conservative thinkers down the ages, Sowell agrees with Edmund Burke’s constrained recognition that ‘we cannot change the nature of things and of men but must act upon them as best we can’, set against Robert Kennedy’s unconstrained optimism that ‘Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream of things that never were and say, why not’ (pp 157/8). A dictum of Sowell is that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Obama’s ‘Yes, we can’ will also lead to several, very possibly unwelcome, ‘we also dids’.

There is scope for further theological reflection here. Does the fall and the power of sin lean us towards pessimism about the capacity of politics to bring about change? Or does our vision of the kingdom of God inspire the hope to work towards ‘things that never were’? Sowell himself gives little weight to religion, even though it has played a major role in generating the social capital and ‘respectability’ that he sees as central to the social and economic uplift of black people.

5. If the church takes Sowell seriously . . .

a) We will stop using theoretical, sociological phrases like ‘racial justice’ or ‘institutional racism’ without having defined clearly what we mean by them.

b) We will work from seriously analysed evidence. Why do some churches thrive in multi-ethnic areas and some struggle? Why the welcome increase in minority ethnic ordinands? Has the situation concerning race in our society and church become sufficiently bad that it requires considerable expenditure in money and staffing, or are we merely responding to a ‘post George Floyd’ bubble? We need a much more rigorous evidence base.

c) We will stop striving for proportionately equal outcomes given the wide range of cultures in our society; and, as in ‘From Lament to Action’, stop deluding ourselves with unfulfillable percentage minority ethnic targets, as though all ethnic groups are virtually identical.

d) We will work with gifted people, and not make appointments in order to boost the number of UKME/GMH appointments.

e) We will recognise that all decisions involve trade-offs. Appointing a ‘racial justice’ advisor, along with their support needs, may well mean taking away gifted minority ethnic leaders from ‘front line’ parish posts, as well as taking the money from at least one incumbency post.

Whilst Sowell’s views need interrogating, by economists and theologians especially, nonetheless he is an original, extremely well-informed and creative thinker, especially as regards race. Anyone who wants to think seriously about living in multi-racial Britain ought to engage with Sowell’s writings. Jason Riley’s excellent biography is a good place to start.