Someday, I’ll be able to read just a few pages of a Thomas Sowell book and then put it down and get back to work. That usually doesn’t happen now. Nor did it happen with the new book about Sowell, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason L. Riley. Were it not for the ordinary business of life, I probably would have read it in a single sitting like I did Sowell’s 2000 memoir, A Personal Odyssey.

People don’t yet study Sowell the way they study John Rawls, John Stuart Mill, or Milton Friedman — yet. That day is coming, and Maverick will occupy a prominent place in scholars’ efforts to grapple with one of the most profound, careful, and controversial thinkers of the last century and a half.

Lest the reader doubt Sowell’s stature, Riley explains how Friedrich Hayek (Nobel economics prizewinner in 1974) and James M. Buchanan (1986) reacted to what is widely agreed to be Sowell’s best purely scholarly contribution, Knowledge and Decisions, first published in 1980. Hayek found it revelatory and original even though it was largely an expansion of Hayek’s core insights in his classic 1945 American Economic Review article “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Buchanan wrote of the book that “it invites comparisons with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,” and he wrote to Sowell specifically, “You have written a great book, and I do not recall ever having said that to anyone.” It’s high praise from a scholar who exhorted people to write for the ages.

Race and discrimination / Like too many great minds, Sowell is underappreciated in his own time. He has incurred the wrath and vituperation of those on the academic and activist left who have denounced him as a sellout, a race traitor, an “Uncle Tom,” and worse. Though they have insulted him, they have not refuted him. To the extent that they claim they have, they have only refuted strawman claims that he never made.

Throughout his work on race and discrimination, Sowell never claims that discrimination is a thing of the past, that it wouldn’t be good if people were less prejudiced, or that free markets completely eliminate discrimination. He is not interested in whether or not some discrimination exists or whether or not discrimination has some explanatory power for various social and economic problems. He is interested in whether or not discrimination is the main reason for disparities between ethnic groups and, therefore, whether or not eliminating discrimination will do much to close those gaps. In one passage in Riley’s book, Sowell tells him that he finds the critics’ insults reassuring. If the intellectual heavyweights of the academic and activist left can encounter Sowell’s ideas and arguments and respond with little more than bluster and bile, it suggests that Sowell might be on to something.

Skin in the game / Sowell, as Riley explains, has very little use for intellectuals qua intellectuals — nor does he think intellectuals and experts should occupy particularly privileged places in society. Arguments matter and they must be logically consistent and backed by carefully and correctly interpreted evidence.

In books like A Conflict of Visions (1987), The Vision of the Anointed (1995), Intellectuals and Society (2010), and Intellectuals and Race (2013), Sowell patiently if sternly explains how frequently intellectuals make serious mistakes. The mistakes bother him, obviously, but not as much as the incentives intellectuals have to make them. Sowell is skeptical of intellectuals as self‐​styled saviors of society because they pay no meaningful price for being wrong.

He trusts the decentralized, systemic knowledge processing and reasoning of the free market over the centralized, articulated knowledge processing and reasoning of intellectuals precisely because the decision makers in the free market have “skin in the game,” meaning they benefit or shoulder costs based on whether they are right or wrong. Chin‐​stroking intellectuals pontificating on how society should be organized from cool coffee shops (like I’m doing as I write this), seminar rooms, and the halls of Congress don’t have nearly as much to gain from being right or as much to lose from being wrong.

Scholarly credentials do not impress Sowell in part because he has sterling credentials of his own. As he once said to Hoover Institution research fellow Peter Robinson on an episode of Hoover’s interview show Uncommon Knowledge, the real benefit of a Harvard education (which Sowell has) is that you don’t have to be intimidated or impressed by anyone with a Harvard education. Moreover, his doctoral training at the University of Chicago meant a steady diet of Friedman and George Stigler. Friedman held his students to notoriously high intellectual standards: he once congratulated Sowell on earning a “B” in his course in which no one had earned an “A.” Stigler combined high standards with a famously sharp — some would say cruel — wit. For Sowell, after growing up black in the middle of the 20th century, serving a stint in the Marine corps, and then studying under Friedman and Stigler, there wasn’t much that would faze him.

What matters / Nor, for that matter, was he easily convinced by anyone’s doctrines. That, of course, was fine: Friedman said that anyone who is easy to convince isn’t worth convincing. In Sowell’s long and distinguished career filled with breathtaking achievements, there is perhaps nothing more remarkable than the fact that he remained a Marxist for a time even after taking Friedman’s course. It’s hardly consistent with critics’ claims that he was bamboozled or bribed into embracing free markets.

His turn away from the Marxian darkness and toward the free‐​market light happened in the summer of 1960, when he was working at the U.S. Department of Labor. He was struck by the fact that no one there seemed to care whether minimum wage law actually helped workers. What mattered was that the bureaucrats were being paid to administer and enforce it. They were less like the dedicated public servants of The West Wing and the market failure chapters of economics textbooks and a lot more like the Vogon bureaucrats in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books.

Importantly, Sowell has always been a student of society rather than a self‐​appointed savior of society. He has opinions about the way things should be, of course, but those opinions are backed by reason and evidence rather than ideology.

His first question about any program or policy is not “Would this be just or fair?” or “Wouldn’t it be nice if things were this way?” It’s “What are the likely effects?” In the case of affirmative action initiatives in college admissions, for example, he argues (in Riley’s words) “that they not only haven’t helped the original intended beneficiaries — disadvantaged blacks — but have, in practice, led to slower black progress than we would have seen in the absence of such policies.” Alas, Sowell has been proven correct insofar as affirmative action has given racists a pretext for discounting black achievement as the product not of merit but of special privileges.

On campus / Riley’s account of Sowell’s teaching career is especially interesting. He was decidedly out of step with the times, and he resigned from several positions after butting heads with colleagues and administrators about his difficult grading and his high expectations. While he was an assistant professor at Cornell University, for example, a discussion in which an administrator overruled his decision to remove a student from a summer program he was running ended with Sowell’s resignation from the summer program and from the university.

He joined the faculty at Howard University, where he had been a student before transferring to Harvard, hoping to marry his high ideals about racial uplift to his very high intellectual standards. He was disappointed — and perhaps especially disappointed with well‐​meaning whites — when he was told not to expect too much from his students. He encountered, in other words, what he would elsewhere call “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Eventually, he made his way to the economics department at the University of California, Los Angeles and, ultimately, into a fellowship at the Hoover Institution that allowed him to teach for a full generation not in the classroom, but through his research and writing.

Readers looking for a lot of biographical details or information about Sowell’s childhood will be disappointed with Riley because this isn’t that sort of book. Instead, Riley gives us a fascinating, accessible, and easy‐​to‐​read introduction to one of the truly great minds of this era. Sowell, however, isn’t interested in notoriety. He tells Riley: “I’m not sure I want to be particularly remembered. I would like the ideas that I’ve put out there to be remembered.” As Maverick circulates and scholarship on Sowell grows, I have no doubt that they will be.