Sowell worked briefly as a government labour economist but soon found himself on an academic career track. He taught at Brandeis, Cornell and UCLA, among other institutions, before settling in 1980 at Stanford University's Hoover Institution in a fellowship named for Rose and Milton Friedman.

But Sowell has never been a typical academic. For one thing, he is constitutionally averse to whining. In The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (1995), he provides a brilliant anatomy of that toxic amalgam of victimisation and a sense of entitlement that fuels political correctness.  Sowell ranges widely over many important social issues, showing how the supposedly good intentions of the anointed go awry. 

Consider LBJ's "war on poverty". Launched in 1964 by cadres of liberal elites, it was a moralistic crusade that began by grossly overstating the problem in order to whip up self-righteous fervour among the susceptible.  Its announced goal was not only to relieve poverty but also to quell urban violence and to increase the independence of its intended beneficiaries.

In fact, it had the opposite effect. The federal welfare programmes further stripped people of their autonomy by making them more dependent on public handouts.  As Sowell shows, by the early 1960s poverty in the United States was declining sharply. In 1960, the number of people below the poverty line was half what it had been in 1950. But between 1960 and 1974, the number of people receiving public assistance nearly doubled. Between 1965 and 1974, government-provided benefits increased twenty-fold. And as for dealing with urban violence, it was in the 1960s and early 1970s that race riots raged across American cities and campuses.

In recent years, Sowell has emerged as one of America's most clear-eyed and penetrating columnists. Whether the subject is terrorism, the economy, health care, or more general political and moral questions, Sowell weighs in with a forthrightness and sanity that is as refreshing as it is rare. "Many are for him," Sowell wrote about Barack Obama during the campaign last year, "for no more serious reasons than his mouth and his complexion.  . . . Here is a man who has consistently aided and abetted people who have openly expressed their contempt for this country, both in words and in such deeds as planting bombs to advance their left-wing agenda." You see what I mean about Sowell not being a typical academic.