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Thomas Sowell

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Thomas Sowell
Sowell in 1964
Born (1930-06-30) June 30, 1930 (age 94)
Spouses
  • Alma Jean Parr
    (m. 1964; div. 1975)
  • Mary Ash
    (m. 1981)
Institution
Field
School or
tradition
Chicago school of economics
Alma mater
Influences
Awards
AllegianceUnited States
Service/branchUnited States Marine Corps
Years of service1951–1953

Thomas Sowell (/sl/; born June 30, 1930) is an American economist and social theorist. He is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.[6]

Sowell worked at Cornell University and University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked for think tanks such as the Urban Institute.

Since 1980, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He writes from a libertarian conservative perspective. He is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics and political science.

References

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  1. Pinker, Steven (2002), The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, New York: Penguin Books, pp. 286–296, The most sweeping attempt to survey the underlying dimension is Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions... Sowell calls [the two 'visions' of the nature of human beings] the Constrained Vision and the Unconstrained Vision; I will refer to them as the Tragic Vision...and the Utopian Vision... My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the Tragic Vision and undermine the Utopian outlook...
  2. Phaneuf, Emile (December 5, 2013). "Sowell's Visions". The Freeman. Archived from the original on February 27, 2014. Retrieved November 14, 2014.
  3. Sailer, Steve (2002-10-30). "Q&A with Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate". United Press International. Archived from the original on 2019-09-26. Retrieved 2013-09-30.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  4. Jenkins, Holman W. (June 29, 2012). "The Weekend Interview with Jonathan Haidt: He Knows Why We Fight". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved March 5, 2017. ...as a moral psychologist, I had to say the constrained vision [of human nature] is correct.
  5. Haidt, Jonathan (2012), The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 338–340, Based on my own research, I had no choice but to agree with these conservative claims. As I continued to read the writings of conservative intellectuals from Edmund Burke in the eighteenth century through Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell in the twentieth, I began to see that they had attained a crucial insight into the sociology of morality that I had never encountered before. They understood the importance of what I'll call moral capital... If you believe that people are inherently good, and that they flourish when constraints and divisions are removed, then yes, [simply linking people together into healthy, trusting relationships] may be sufficient [to improve the ethical profile of the group to achieve a moral vision for the group]. But conservatives generally take a very different view of human nature. They believe that people need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external constraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions. People who hold this 'constrained view'...
  6. "Thomas Sowell Articles – Political Columnist & Commentator". townhall.com.

Other websites

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