Who Are You Calling A Fraud?

Socialist magazine publisher Nathan J. Robinson thinks he has a slam dunk case against classical economist Thomas Sowell. Does he?

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“Respect your elders.” It would appear this life advice is not readily accepted by Nathan J. Robinson. The founder of Current Affairs magazine had this to say on the occasion of economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell’s 95th birthday in 2025: Happy Birthday Thomas Sowell, you’re a fraud and a pseudo-scholar whose academic peers do not respect you because they know your arguments are flimsy and unsubstantiated!

“Flimsy and unsubstantiated” is an absurd way to describe Sowell’s work to any of its sympathetic readers. But, in the Xwitter post linked, Robinson cites his own lengthy 2023 critique as his evidence. The critique amounts to a diatribe against Sowell’s entire life’s work.

I actually encountered Robinson’s article first, when I was recently reading Sowell’s Wikipedia page, where the “Reception” section cites it. Unlike Robinson, I would be incredibly honored were I ever able to meet Sowell—if nothing else, he came from humble beginnings to achieve more during his life with his almost century-long, indefatigable work ethic than I ever will—but I was curious what types of criticisms one could levy if so inclined.

Thomas Sowell is a towering figure, which Robinson admits, so trying to take him down is a tall task. But Robinson clearly thinks he has something here, sharing his article almost two years after its initial publication. Indeed, most responses to the xweet engaged that comment, but not the whole article. I can find no direct rebuttal to the larger piece online.¹

Until now.

I.

The core of Robinson’s thesis is this:

Thomas Sowell is not very interested in serious empirical evidence at all. His books rarely engage with the major academic literature on the subject he’s writing about, he cherry-picks the studies that are consistent with the ideological beliefs he already holds, he leaves out crucial pieces of data that would make his position look weaker (and make The Intellectuals looks less absurd), he argues with ludicrous straw men, and he makes totally unsupportable claims about work he has clearly not bothered to read.

The adjective “serious” is doing some work here, as within a couple chapters of almost any Sowell book you can find copious empirical evidence on offer. And this excerpt is the only time in the article that Robinson mentions straw men, so it is not clear where they lie. There is also some overlap in some of the concepts invoked (e.g. cherry-picking vs. leaving things out, or straw men vs. not having read something). Overall there does seem to be some attempt here at bulking up the charges.

Is the image Robinson paints of Sowell nonetheless a fair one? Well, if I thought the answer were yes, I wouldn’t be writing more than 4,000 words about it.

II.

The first point to make is that Robinson intentionally limits himself to Sowell’s books. He mentions Sowell’s media appearances as generally existing, but doesn’t cover any of them (he would likely argue he doesn’t have to, and I suppose not).

Nonetheless, had Robinson been interested, he would have found Sowell doing battle with Meet The Press, Frances Fox Piven, New York and Pennsylvania welfare administrators, Harriet Pilpel, Robert Lekachman, Albert Shanker, Charlie Rose, Diane Rehm, and Ben Wattenberg, the last of whom spent much of the interview defending his record in the Lyndon Johnson administration, even if he became less progressive through the years.

That’s not the record of someone who fears that he can’t defend his positions against scrutiny.

Another problem with Robinson’s line of criticism is it opens one up to the charge of hypocrisy. An entire Current Affairs article defending rent control, for example, never brings up New York and the infamous Bronx arson cases of the 1970s.

In fact, almost the entire Robinson takedown of Sowell falls to the same criticism on which it is itself based, as we’ll see.

III.

Robinson opens by citing Sowell admirer Jason Riley’s 2021 biography of Sowell. Does Robinson use the biography to establish a detailed case for Sowell’s work? Nope; he quotes from it twice, and both of them later on. At the beginning, Riley is simply a foil for Robinson’s own thesis: that the author of Knowledge and Decisions, A Conflict of Visions, and dozens of other books is nothing more than a hack.

Robinson does quote Friedrich Hayek’s review of Knowledge and Decisions. It is the last time Robinson will mention this book, often regarded as Sowell’s best, at all. He will bring up A Conflict of Visions once as well, and for a rather specific purpose.

IV.

Robinson’s first concrete criticism is that Sowell presents the debate over minimum wage too narrowly in Social Justice Fallacies, published in 2023. Perhaps a 93-year-old author made his reputation for earlier works, but that aside, Sowell himself admits elsewhere (in the fifth edition of Basic Economics²) that “the statistical complexities of separating out the effects of minimum wage rates on employment from all the other ever-changing variables which also affect employment mean that honest differences of opinion are possible when examining empirical data.”

More Sowell:

One common problem with some research on the employment effects of minimum wage laws is that surveys of employers before and after a minimum wage increase can survey only those particular businesses which survived both periods. Given the high rates of business failures in many industries, the results for the surviving businesses may be completely different from the results for the industry as a whole.

Indeed, the 1994 Card/Krueger study that began the revisionism on minimum wage impacts—according to the very Current Affairs article that Robinson cites as his refutation to Sowell’s minimum wage treatment³—is an example of this very issue. Their methodology was to “analyze the experiences of 410 fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania following the increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour.” Sowell may well have had this exact study in mind when he volunteered the existence of studies that might contradict him.

V.

Robinson’s next target is Charter Schools and Their Enemies from 2020.⁴ His accusation here isn’t that Sowell omits data or provides inaccurate data, but that he doesn’t attempt to separate all the factors that could lead to a charter school outperforming a standard public school in the same building.

I haven’t read this book, but I suspect Robinson’s questions are beyond Sowell’s scope in it. An accounting of all those factors is not, in fact, necessary to still decide that the charter schools should be an option for parents and students, and to want to know what motivates their “enemies.”

Robinson asks:

Are the two populations of students comparable? Sowell says that the racial demographics between the students in the charter schools and the students in the public schools are similar. But are the parents similar? Or do charter schools attract students whose parents are particularly invested in their success? Does the public school have more students with learning disabilities than the charter school? Charter schools are known for trying to attract top-performing students, and we know that “across the United States, charters aggressively screen student applicants, assessing their academic records, parental support, disciplinary history, motivation, special needs and even their citizenship, sometimes in violation of state and federal law.

Not to get into the whole debate, but a parent who sends their kid to a charter school could well cite all those factors (less the citizenship one) when explaining their rationale for the decision. If you’re invested in your child’s education, you’re not exactly looking to put them in a classroom with the undisciplined and unmotivated.⁵

VI.

Robinson then moves on to Sowell’s treatment of Noam Chomsky and the Vietnam War in Intellectuals and Society, another book on which my personal Sowell experiences are not founded. We can say that Robinson’s previous attempts to show Sowell lacking factual rigor involved: first, a subject on which Sowell has in fact volunteered contradictory information—hold that thought—and second, a subject on which Robinson presents side points as actually key to the premise. This third attempt may well be more successful, but I cannot refer to the subject matter itself to confirm.⁶

Now, that thought you held. If Robinson wanted to criticize Sowell for not citing other information often enough or strongly enough, that would be one thing. Instead, he claims he does it so rarely that he amounts to a “fraud and a pseudo-scholar.” So far, he has offered one at least somewhat convincing piece of evidence in three tries. And while Robinson says he has other demonstrations of Sowell lacking rigor, presumably he thought these were his best three, otherwise why choose them over the alternatives?⁷

Yet he’s not even close to done.

VII.

Robinson now moves on from factual points to logical points (though he only cites one example here). On the subject of reparations, he quotes an unidentified Sowell book as saying, “Biological continuity of the generations lends plausibility to the notion of group compensation—but only if guilt can be inherited. Otherwise there are simply windfall gains and windfall losses among contemporaries, according to the accident of their antecedents.”

Here is Robinson’s rebuttal:

We don’t need to assume that moral guilt can be inherited, only that property claims can be inherited… if the shareholders of corporation X hold a claim against the shareholders of corporation Y, then even if both corporation’s shareholders die, and their shares have passed to their descendants, the legal claim will be unaffected.

You can, of course, argue that in practice, designating Black Americans as a group with a collective property rights claim against white Americans is impractical, or that the claim should lapse after a certain amount of time. But the point is that Sowell is wrong to say that a program of reparations necessarily depends on an idea of “biologically inherited guilt.”

But asking how many generations of a delay is too many doesn’t have to be about practicality or a lapse. It can simply be questioning what link there is without the guilt itself passing down. The property itself certainly did not, at least in any clean sense. Blacks owned 0.5% of the wealth in the United States in 1863—mostly belonging to free persons, one assumes—against 2.6% in 2016, but that 5x increase is obviously only part of the story: The U.S. population in the 1860s was about one-tenth of what it is today, and the economy was a fraction of a fraction of a percent of its current size.

So how else does Robinson propose that whatever was (undoubtedly, to be sure) stolen via slavery persisted through time? Like Robinson, I’m not arguing here for or against the policy—but I am questioning whether he really has a point.⁸

VIII.

Robinson finally gets philosophical for a minute as we near his only citation of Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed—an entire book devoted to citing and countering the worldview opposite his own, by the way—where Robinson takes issue with Sowell’s criticism of Ralph Nader among others. Robinson offers a single sentence from Sowell’s five-page treatment, surely excluding no other pertinent information therein.

Here’s the Sowell line that Robinson chooses: “What the Nader approach boils down to is that third parties should preempt the consumer’s choice as to whether he wants to sacrifice a comfortable ride in order to make a remote danger slightly more remote.” The point, per Robinson, is that Sowell considers Nader an example of the many “‘third party’ busybodies presumptuously imposing themselves where they are not wanted.”

Sowell’s criticism of Nader in the book is specific to Unsafe At Any Speed, and rather more substantial than Robinson portrays. For instance, Sowell is not even speaking for himself, but quoting someone else, when asserting that Nader was not beyond mischaracterizing opposing views. This other witness felt so mischaracterized by Nader, in fact, that she was led “‘to suspect that he didn’t know too much about cars.’”

But I digress. Robinson’s point here is that, if a policy is put in place based on the advocacy of people like Nader, then that new policy is a consequence of democracy, not of busy-bodying: “In a democracy, [government] is supposed to put into place the laws that the people,” writes Robinson. But even he will admit “this is highly imperfect in practice, because our democratic institutions are not terribly responsible to the popular will.” Why might that be?

Robinson is trying to separate the political outcome from the person or group advocating for that outcome, but in fact this separation does not necessarily exist. In Sowell’s very treatment of Nader, he writes: “Whatever the outcome of the battle of facts, Nader won the battle of the media and the battle of politics.” And thus Sowell does in fact acknowledge a democratic dimension to the subject. Instead, Robinson accuses Sowell of treating “the government like it is some Council of Elders the ‘anointed’ who impose themselves on the rest of us.”

Robinson’s entire posture in this section ignores even the concept that intellectuals and other “anointed” could be the very ones helping to shape public opinion, rightly or wrongly. There is in fact a whole literature on this, from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein to Robert Cialdini.

IX.

Robinson now gets to a deeper discussion of Sowell’s writings on race and gender. Notably, he does not broach the hot subject of income disparities (which Sowell discussed copiously in his Firing Line appearance with Pilpel). Instead, Robinson sees a softer target in Sowell’s treatment of other forms of discrimination.

Throughout, a point previously made on the socialist subreddit r/stupidpol (of all places, but which still rated the article a “7/10”): Robinson seems to think that by using Sowell’s argument as a foible, he is relieved of the responsibility to provide any counterarguments for his own positions.

The only point I add here is the moment where Robinson either fundamentally misunderstands one of Sowell’s arguments, or himself commits the exact faux pas of leaving out relevant information. The citation in question (this is Sowell, quoted by Robinson):

As a purely factual matter, prices do tend to be higher— and the quality of service and products lower—in stores in low-income neighborhoods. But the knee-jerk assumption that this represents ‘exploitation’ or ‘racism’ ignores the economics of the situation. Many of the ghetto stores charging high prices are struggling to survive, while supermarkets in other neighborhoods are very profitable charging lower prices.

Robinson goes on to accuse Sowell of “exonerating employers and businesses (‘mistakenly blaming’) for discrimination and price gouging” but leaves out Sowell’s entire basis for the cited claim. Robinson is quoting Discrimination and Disparities from 2018, but in Basic Economics, Sowell points out higher insurance costs, more expensive security measures, and the greater presence of shoplifting and vandalism, as among the things that businesses in low-income neighborhoods, more so than those in higher-income areas, must account for when setting their prices.

And to be clear, Sowell considers this situation to amount to a “painful fact” and “tragic end-result,” not value-neutral. Yet, as Sowell says, “there are major practical consequences to the way causation is understood”—that much Robinson might well agree with as far as it goes.

But instead, and having used some of his preferred subtopics to make the impression, Robinson just reduces this argument to Sowell shrugging his shoulders when it comes to discrimination and disparities (lower case).

But that’s not what Sowell is really doing, and ultimately, despite his criticisms in this section, Robinson ends up shrugging his own shoulders: “Personally, I don’t want to live in such a world” as Sowell portrays.

X.

Just so you don’t get the wrong idea from me, Robinson’s very next words are his summation of the case: “Sowell has written dozens of books, and I could spend a very long time going through examples of areas where his logic is atrocious, his facts are cherry-picked, and his conclusions are clearly based on ideology rather than dispassionate, careful analysis.”

So far, we’ve noticed that Robinson hasn’t conclusively proved these claims. But here you may notice another contradiction. Robinson had to cast a wide net to take Sowell down as a “fraud” rather than, at worst, someone who may have written a substandard book or two in his 90s; however, Robinson ultimately ran into the problem that no net would be wide enough. He couldn’t possibly provide enough data to conclusively prove his point, even if those he had included were convincing, which they were not.

By not touching Knowledge and Decisions, for instance, which was published in 1980, he in effect renders it a legitimate work. And despite his claim of having countless examples of Sowell being shoddy outside of those provided in the article—one or two of which may even be from that 400-page work, I don’t know—it is still fair to assume that he saved his best for this article given its purposes. We’ll get to more of those purposes momentarily.

XI.

For now, Robinson cites Sowell’s other great book, A Conflict of Visions from 1987. This work is Exhibit A in Steven Pinker’s praise for Sowell, a more generic version of which Robinson cited all the way back in paragraph two. In The Blank Slate, Pinker considers Conflict of Visions “the most sweeping attempt to survey the underlying dimension” to our “everyday political debates.” And Pinker goes on to explain how Sowell does it.

It seems Robinson also views A Conflict of Visions as Sowell’s most valuable work, even if only to once again denounce the man. Ultimately, Robinson thinks he’s caught Sowell—and, as he’ll admit for the first but not last time, the general economic-right movement—in a trap.

“Sowell lays out a theory of politics that is useful in understanding what he is doing,” Robinson writes, because obviously Sowell is always up to something (but Robinson surely not). Robinson then accurately summarizes, as Pinker did years before, Sowell’s portrayal of a dichotomy between a “constrained” or “tragic” vision and an “unconstrained” vision of the world as underlying several political disputes. The best sources to describe these are still the book itself, or at least Pinker’s summary, but Robinson also gets it mostly right.

But here comes the trap:

…while [Sowell] clearly thinks the ‘tragic’ vision superior to the ‘unconstrained’ vision, both are ‘visions,’ and both tend to ‘dispense with facts.’ The conservative vision, in which regulation invariably produces disaster and reformers always Hurt The People They’re Trying To Help, is just as dogmatic as the view that government can easily solve all of our social problems.

Robinson isn’t necessarily wrong here—although his use of “invariably” and “always” seem to suggest some of his own straw men, as anyone short of an anarchist sees some role for government—but also admits as obliquely as possible that his own ideology can be considered dogmatic as well. Of course, if that’s the case, then Sowell isn’t by default on any worse footing than your notable economic-left commentator of choice, at least in their own popular works. Does Robinson not have to similarly investigate a Sowell peer on his own side, for their logic and balancing of the evidence, before rendering his verdict on Sowell? Instead, there’s no experimental control.

One might also note—indeed, ones have noted, like Sowell and Pinker—that the tragic and unconstrained visions do not match perfectly onto a left/right dichotomy, and some ideologies are a mixture of both visions. Maybe Robinson misses this because it’s not relevant to his point.

But Karl Marx, for instance—as Sowell and Pinker note, but Robinson does not—had a tragic vision of world history up to his contemporary era, while his ultimate vision was unconstrained.

We saw what happened in history when Lenin and Stalin implemented their flavor of Marxism—and it was indeed pretty tragic.

XII.

Mercifully, there are only three paragraphs left in Robinson’s screed. (Unfortunately, there are rather more than that left in mine.)

Backhanded compliments abound in the antepenultimate: “I can very easily see how someone could believe the story about [Sowell] being overlooked and ignored by Intellectuals because he brilliantly demolishes their pieties. He packages his beliefs this way, and it is a very compelling narrative… Sowell is a very good writer and a clear thinker who is nevertheless deeply wrong.”

I’m not sure how Robinson sees a “clear thinker” who he also doesn’t think can form a cogent logical progression, but the main point here is that he sees Sowell’s work as nothing but a narrative: “[Sowell] has so fully swallowed free market libertarianism that no pile of evidence could be gigantic enough to shake him from it.” Once again, let us allow for the possibility that by the time Sowell turned 90, this accusation might ring at least partially true. That still wouldn’t ipso facto make his whole life’s work a fraud.

Of course, in the process of trying to establish that premise, Robinson has by necessity left out 99.99% of Sowell’s work. It’s unclear how much you have to demolish before an entire body of work disintegrates into dust—especially if you’ve only really batted at the top floors and not taken a real shot at any of the more foundational pieces. Robinson’s own narrative, that he’s on the correct side, tries to do the rest of the work.⁹

And that’s not to mention all the other “free market libertarians” I doubt Robinson likes very much either, from Milton Friedman¹⁰ to Reason Magazine.

In the penultimate paragraph, Robinson writes:

It’s true that few critics have responded to Sowell’s factual claims carefully. I think it’s been a serious mistake for critics not to take Sowell’s work seriously and respond to it carefully. It allows those like Riley to maintain the illusion that Sowell’s work holds up under scrutiny. I would encourage economists, sociologists, historians, legal scholars, and policy analysts to go through his work carefully and if it’s wrong, explain why it’s wrong.

But Robinson’s motives for saying all of this are ulterior. In his final paragraph, he can’t resist giving his game away:

Let me say finally about Sowell: he does put the conservative case more compellingly than anyone else ever has before him. He is indeed one of American conservatism’s sharpest thinkers and clearest writers. The fact that his version of reality—even when presented with such skill—is still an obvious fraud should tell us conclusively that the right’s worldview cannot be defended.

Robinson’s goal was never to make a balanced criticism of Thomas Sowell¹¹ or even to get others to make their own. Sure, Robinson wants other leading ideologues on his side to criticize Sowell, but that level of inquiry is a means to Robinson’s policy ends.

Most of Robinson’s readers presumably aren’t (since most people generally aren’t) “economists, sociologists, historians, legal scholars, and policy analysts.” Relieved of the obligation to address Sowell’s works, the rest of Robinson’s audience can simply receive his wisdom and dismiss Sowell out of hand forevermore.

But Robinson’s goal isn’t even for his readers to be able to dismiss Sowell out of hand. If the “sharpest” proponents of a philosophy are unessential hacks, why bother with any of their proponents at all?

And so Robinson gives his readers permission to dismiss an entire way of thinking out of hand. It’s all a decent play if you don’t particularly want your own audience seeking information they might themselves find inconvenient.

1. Presumably, Sowell’s more qualified defenders found the piece—if they even encountered it—beneath contempt, and went on to more valuable uses of their time. The closest counterexample in name recognition I can find here is Wilfred Reilly, but his response was merely, “Who is you?”

2. It’s unclear which edition Robinson has, although he cites Basic Economics by name exactly once, and on this very subject (to which Sowell devotes 14 pages in the book). But what he cites on page 159 is, in my copy, on page 233.

3. A counterweight to the magazine article, on the subject of the minimum wage literature, can be found here.

4. A younger Sowell talked about this same issue in several of his 1980s media appearances. It’s one of those subjects, like the minimum wage, that never goes away.

5. A reductio ad absurdum sometimes occurs here, suggesting that if schools became fully sorted along these lines, then of course the worse schools become untenable. But there is such a long way before that point that one must ask: is this an argument against the option, or for reducing these phenomena in the default programs?

6. That said, it is difficult not to notice the peril of an intellectual like Sowell dismissing other intellectuals.

As an aside, while I did write my undergraduate thesis about the Vietnam War, it was not about a relevant subtopic.

7. Maybe he was more familiar with these examples, having been more recent, or maybe they are issues he particularly cares about. But his case only gets less impactful if either of these were his true motivation.

8. Frankly, I sensed something wrong with Robinson’s argument before I could articulate what that was, so—in some degree of shame—I also asked ChatGPT for some help on this particular section. Its verdict: One can take issue with Sowell’s premises, but his logic is sound.

9. It’s always much easier to destroy than to build. If you’ll pardon the tonally dissonant plug:

Fake Cities, Real Lessons

10. Clearly Robinson doesn’t think Thomas Sowell deserves a Nobel Prize like the one Friedman won, but I would suspect he doesn’t think Friedman deserved his either. By the way, I don’t know what specific achievement the committee would award Sowell the prize for, I’d agree that it’s no great shame he never won it—although probably not as stridently as Robinson would.

11. If you want one of those, you can find it—in all places—in a conversation between Riley, Glenn Loury, and John McWhorter. That’s a trio Robinson can surely hardly stand any more than Sowell, but Loury’s role in the conversation is not unthinkingly supportive of Sowell either.