For Thomas Sowell, economics, politics, and life are all questions of trade-offs. So too is photography, the lifelong hobby he developed while serving in a U.S. Marine Corps Combat Camera Division. In a new documentary about Sowell from the Free to Choose Network, Common Sense in a Senseless World, Harvard linguist and best-selling author Steven Pinker notes:
Photography did have connections to his vision of reality. Tom once commented to me, “To be a photographer, you have to master trade-offs. All of the little adjustments that you fiddle with in the camera never involve making everything better or everything worse. It’s a matter of trading one thing off for another.”
The documentary, narrated by the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley, favors describing the broad strokes of Sowell’s philosophy over the minutiae of his preferred policy solutions, and it uses Sowell’s biography to emphasize certain themes, rather than to sketch out a detailed portrait of his life. It’s a large-brushstroke picture of Sowell, a compelling introduction to one of the most brilliant conservatives of the past 50 years or so. (Riley’s new book, Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, comes out this May.)
Sowell was born in North Carolina in 1930 to a single mother — his father had died shortly before his birth — but raised in Harlem after his mother passed away. His aunt and uncle took responsibility for the young man, and despite having been orphaned and having grown up very…
