One guest on this program, one, is more requested by far than any other.

Thomas Sol on Uncommon Knowledge Now.

Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. Thomas Sol lived in Gastonia, North Carolina,

to the age of nine when his family moved to Harlem. After attending New York City Public Schools,

Thomas Sol worked in machine shops, tried out for the Brooklyn Dodgers, moved to Washington, D.C. to join the Civil

Service, became a United States Marine, and finally settled into a track in higher education

that would take him from Howard University to Harvard University, where he received his undergraduate

degree, to Columbia, where he earned his master's, and then to the

University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in economics. After teaching at institutions,

including Douglas, Cornell, and UCLA, Dr. Soll joined the Hoover Institution here at Stanford,

where he has remained a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution for more than

four decades. Dr. Sowell is the author of thousands. Literally, I checked this, thousands

of newspaper and magazine columns and of some five dozen books. His newest project is a website,

Facts Against Rhetoric, which you can find at Facts AgainstRderick.org. We're announcing this website today in this podcast for the very first time,

so let me repeat it. Facts againstriteric.org. Tom, welcome back. Good being here. Tom, your website, I've spent hours with it now. It represents a kind of syllabus or curriculum for the right way, the correct way to think about modern life, with topics ranging from cultures to economic issues, to education, to war and peace.

Why did you go to the trouble of pulling these materials together?

Wouldn't students come across this material in ordinary college courses in any event?

No. I thought of it as enabling students to get an education despite being in college.

All right. All my questions today are drawn from the website or use the website as a point of

departure. Economic issues, under the heading on the

website of economic issues, you provide a link to your classic work, basic economics. A brief

passage from that book, I'm quoting basic economics. Empirical questions are questions that

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