A 95-year-old economist at the Hoover Institution and social-media sensation. Mr Sowell has long argued that government programmes created in the name of compassion ended up rewarding behaviour that kept people poor. He has argued that poverty in America was already declining before the mid-1960s "war on poverty" began, and that all that is needed to reduce deprivation is the magic of free-market capitalism. A 2026 paper by Richard Burkhauser of Cornell University and Kevin Corinth of the American Enterprise Institute confirmed his claim on the data, finding that the pace of poverty reduction was no faster after the War on Poverty was declared than before. For a long time most economists dismissed Mr Sowell's arguments as the ravings of a right-wing ideologue.
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