An weekend interview with Thomas Sowell...

"Classy Economist"
Thomas Sowell is a lifetime student of the market force.
BY JASON L. RILEY

Mr. Sowell's unorthodox views on racial matters have made him our foremost "black conservative," but the modifier sells him way short. He is one of the country's leading social commentators--without qualification. And his scholarship is not only voluminous but wide-ranging, covering everything from education and law to political philosophy, migration and the history of ideas. His primary discipline, however, is economics, specifically the history of economic thought, the subject in which he earned his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1968 under Milton Friedman and George Stigler. It is the subject he taught at Cornell, UCLA, Amherst, Brandeis and elsewhere during an academic career in the 1960s and '70s. And it is the subject of his most recent book, "On Classical Economics," which Yale has just published.

I hadn't read Sowell until a few years ago. Now I read all of his columns, and he rarely disappoints. Thomas Sowell is fantastic. Hard to believe he's 76...I would have guessed at least 10-15 years younger.

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