This blog featured a quote here of the economist Thomas Sowell from an essay which I found rather incoherent. However, that was not intended to be an overall view of his work as an economist. I accept that he is a pretty clear thinker and good reviewer of data in trying to test the conventional views about differences in income between women and men, race inequality and other normative issues such as income distribution. He gets credit for his keen eye for data to support the views that he propounds and is known to be a myth buster regarding economic fallacies in this book.
In this podcast on the Library of Economics and Liberty site, he speaks rather clearly and at length about the issues of poverty, inequality in income and educational attainment, population size and immigration. His views on all but the last are not only pretty solid but appear to find immense support in the data that he marshals for the discussion. A good economist he certainly is, but he is less lucid and candid when he tackles the subject of immigration towards the end. I am certain this is because of the reluctance towards the acceptance of immigrants today among political conservatives.
As is noticeable, when questioned on his view about immigration policy, he quickly returns to an argument about a nation needing citizens more than workers. I do not know whether this theory is even testable and consider that his interviewer lets him get away with it as he has had a very good interview on his core subject of economics and its applications. Core contradictions are discernible in the fact that immigration is substantially responsible for the fact that the US remains one of the few high income countries with a young and growing population size. The distinguished professor trips when he attempts to justify a conservative political position that is at odds with the facts of immigration.
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