Thomas Sowell has a suggestion for young people heading off to college: Get an education while you’re there.
He’s even put together a reading list.
Sowell's introductory statement makes clear that he expects readers to question what they find, including his own arguments.
The economist and author, now 96, launched Facts Against Rhetoric last year to help people find arguments they might otherwise go through their entire schooling without encountering. It’s an extensive collection of books, essays, interviews, lectures, and online courses, organized by subject and available to anyone with the curiosity to start clicking.
Introducing the project in an April 2025 interview with Peter Robinson, Sowell described his purpose as “enabling students to get an education despite being in college.”
Parents paying the tuition may find something useful here too.
The site is a meticulously curated collection of educational resources on subjects ranging from “Intellectuals and Ideologies” and “Italians Around the World” to economics, education, and race. Alongside direct links to interviews, lectures, articles, and courses, Sowell provides extensive bibliographies pointing readers to books, specific chapters, and articles, often noting where and in what formats they’re available. You can click through to watch Sowell challenge claims about the “wage gap” for blacks and women on William F. Buckley Jr.’s “Firing Line” in 1981 or listen to Edward R. Murrow's 1943 account of a brush with death on an RAF bombing run over Berlin.
Although 96, Sowell is hardly taking a victory lap here. He is on a mission, the urgency of which he explains in his introductory statement. A college graduate has decades of life ahead of him, during which he will encounter questions his professors never anticipated. Even if everything they taught him were correct, memorizing their answers would leave him poorly prepared to think through those new problems.
He will need some practice disagreeing with people. Preferably before his livelihood depends on it.
A former Marxist’s reading list
In his long life, Sowell has had to revise a few convictions of his own.
Born in North Carolina in 1930 and raised partly in Harlem, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School, worked a succession of jobs, and served in the Marine Corps. Eventually he earned degrees from Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago. He went on to teach at Cornell, Amherst, and UCLA, among other institutions.
Along the way, he was a Marxist. Studying under legendary free-market economist Milton Friedman did not immediately cure him. In Sowell’s telling, a summer working at the Department of Labor in 1960 proved more effective. Investigating unemployment in Puerto Rico’s sugar industry, he wanted to test whether minimum-wage requirements were contributing to the problem. His colleagues’ lack of enthusiasm for an inquiry that might undermine their own department’s policy helped change his understanding of government.
Decades later, Facts Against Rhetoric gives readers plenty of opportunities to examine the conclusions he reached. His own books appear throughout, alongside work by economists, historians, journalists, and other scholars.
The selections plainly reflect his sympathies. Under socialism, for example, you’ll find Friedman's 1993 talk "The Rise of Socialism Is Absurd" as well as a reading list, including Joshua Muravchik’s “Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism" and Paul Hollander's "From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez: Intellectuals and a Century of Political Hero Worship." Anyone hoping for encouragement to join the revolution will have to look elsewhere.
But there is considerably more here than a collection of arguments to deploy against your liberal brother-in-law.
Start anywhere
For a first visit, try the capitalism section, which links to Friedman’s 1979 appearance on “The Phil Donahue Show” and his lecture “Is Capitalism Humane?” Both offer a manageable introduction before you commit to the books listed below them, including Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom.”
Readers who prefer a more structured approach can follow the economics page to Hillsdale College’s online “Economics 101: Principles of Free Market Economics.” The same page points to Sowell’s “Basic Economics” and Walter E. Williams’ “Race and Economics,” along with shorter selections on subjects including affordability and unions.
Parents may want to begin with education. Here Sowell assembles material on schools, colleges, admissions, and academic performance. There’s an interview about his “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” a discussion with Robert Pondiscio about Success Academy, and a link to Stanford’s 2023 National Charter School Study for readers who want to examine the research.
The college section also includes psychologist Steven Pinker’s interview with Reason’s Nick Gillespie, “What Went Wrong at Harvard.” Pinker discusses academic freedom, the policing of acceptable opinion, and why universities get into trouble when they pronounce on controversies their students and faculty should be free to debate.
For a longer excursion, the biographies page points to videos and articles on figures including Calvin Coolidge, Albert Einstein, and Frederick Douglass. Among a list of recommended books on John D. Rockefeller sits Ron Chernow’s “Titan"; readers considering Stephen Kotkin’s multivolume biography of Stalin — recommended here — can sample his work in the lecture “Stalin at War.”
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The library card
One of the site’s biographical recommendations is an extended interview with Sowell himself, “Thomas Sowell: A Free Man.”
In it, he recalls arriving in Harlem as a child and being taken to a public library by another boy. Sowell had never seen so many books. He also couldn’t afford to buy one, which made the purpose of the visit somewhat mysterious.
His young guide persuaded him to get a library card. Sowell borrowed two books and began acquiring the reading habit that would occupy much of the rest of his life.
Now he has some suggestions for the rest of us. His introductory statement makes clear that he expects readers to question what they find, including his own arguments: “Whether you end up agreeing with me or with them is beside the point.”
Pick a subject, follow a link, track down a book. You can disagree with Professor Sowell — or not — after you’ve done the reading.