Thomas Sowell on the Myths of Economic Inequality

- It happens to me all the time and it happened just this week. A young person I'd never met introduced himself to me and said that when he saw our guest today, on an earlier episode of this program, he felt he was seeing a man who knew how to think. Dr. Thomas Sowell on Uncommon Knowledge now.

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Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Thomas Sowell has studied and taught economics, intellectual history, and social policy in institutions that include Cornell, Brandeis, UCLA, and Amherst. Now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution Dr. Sowell has published more than a dozen books, including the classic a conflict of visions. Coming soon, a revised edition of his most recent volume,

Discrimination and Disparities. Tom Sowell, welcome. - Thank you. - You grew up in Harlem, dropped out of high school to join the Marine Corps during the Korean War, received an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a masters from Columbia, and your doctorate from the University of Chicago. All of which pales by comparison with the fact

that you once tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers. (laughing) But during this period from Harlem to the University of Chicago, throughout your 20s you've said, you spent most of the decade of your 20s as a Marxist. - Yes. - Why? What was it... what was the attraction? - Well I guess I first was...

very puzzled. See there's one little correction I would make. At age 16 I was a dropout, high school dropout, and I went to work full time as a Western Union messenger. - Delivering telegrams. - Delivering telegrams. - We better say that because there will be a generation that won't know what Western Union was, but go ahead.