Sowell, Thomas (1930- )

US economist. He taught at Rutgers 1962-63, Howard 1963-64, and Brandeis Universities 1967-70. He left the University of California: Los Angeles in 1972 to direct the Ethnic Minorities Research Project at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. His books include Black Education: Myths and Tragedies (1972) and Race and Economics (1973).

He was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, and educated at Harvard, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. During the Reagan administrations of the 1980s he gained considerable publicity for advancing the neoconservative position that affirmative action was bad for the morale of black Americans.