This week my guest is my friend and colleague Emily Skarbek. For two years at Brown, Emily and I co-taught a course called “Race, Crime, and Punishment in America.” As you’ll see in this episode, we came to the discipline of economics through very different routes. I was trained by Keynesian progressives at MIT, whereas Emily locates her intellectual roots in twentieth-century classical liberals, like Friedrich Von Hayek, and the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, like Adam Smith. She’s also a great admirer of Thomas Sowell. Since I’m busy organizing a conference on Sowell’s work and writing my lecture for the event, I decided to have her on to pick her brain about the man.
Emily begins by explaining why Thomas Sowell remains, at 95 years old, an important and compelling thinker. Though Sowell was, in many ways, a conservative who argued for the utility of tradition, his work also bears the mark of classical liberalism. I ask Emily how Sowell synthesizes these not-entirely-compatible influences in his thinking. She argues that our economic and social policies could benefit from a dose of Sowell, especially when it comes to the response to the COVID pandemic and Trump’s economic policies. Are Sowell’s ideas too archaic for the world today? Or is his influence with decision-makers on the rise? There’s been a surge of interest in his work lately, so it’s possible that a Sowellaissance is in the offing.
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0:00 What Thomas Sowell means to Emily
3:54 What’s the difference between a conservative and a classical liberal?
10:59 Ground News ad
12:45 Sowell’s interventions in price theory and microeconomics
19:31 The parallel careers of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams
24:51 Emily: Trump is not fulfilling Sowell’s vision of liberty
33:37 A Sowellian critique of expert-driven COVID policies
45:08 The risks of uncertainty in Trump’s economic policies
53:46 The future of classical liberalism
58:01 The Mont Pelerin Society’s intellectual landscape
1:01:15 Glenn’s departure from classical liberalism
Recorded August 19, 2025
Links and Readings
Friedrich Von Hayek’s book, The Constitution of Liberty
Hayek’s essay, “Why I Am Not a Conservative”
Thomas Sowell’s book, Knowledge and Decisions
Bart Wilson’s book, Humanomics: Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations for the Twenty-First Century
John Cochrane’s review of Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative
Hayek’s book, Law, Legislation, and Liberty
