Thomas Sowell (born 1930) is the case where the discovery specialty crossed multiple disciplinary boundaries from outside the credentialing systems of each, and where the crossing produced one of the book's own Fundamental Maxims. Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, into a family of limited means; his father died before his birth, his mother died shortly after, and he was raised by a great-aunt and her two grown daughters, first in Charlotte and then in Harlem, New York. He was admitted to Stuyvesant High School — one of the elite specialized public schools in New York City that selects students by competitive examination — but dropped out at seventeen because the family's financial situation required him to work. He held a series of manual-labor jobs. He was drafted into the Marine Corps during the Korean War. After military service, he entered Howard University and graduated magna cum laude in economics in 1958. He took a master's degree from Harvard in 1959 and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1968, where he studied under Milton Friedman.
Sowell began his intellectual career as a Marxist — a committed, theoretically serious Marxist who believed that government intervention was the correct mechanism for alleviating poverty — and changed his position because the data contradicted the theory. He worked for the U.S. Department of Labor in the summer of 1960, studying the effects of minimum-wage laws on employment in the sugar industry of Puerto Rico, and what the data showed him was that the minimum wage was destroying the employment of the people it was supposed to help. The data was clear. The theory predicted the opposite. Sowell followed the data. This is the discovery specialty operating on economic evidence in the same way Newton's specialty operated on planetary motion and Faraday's specialty operated on electromagnetic phenomena: the empirical pattern wins, and the prior theoretical commitment yields, no matter how psychologically expensive the yielding is.
The work that followed crossed economics, history, cultural studies, education, race, political philosophy, and intellectual history across more than forty published books and several hundred essays. Knowledge and Decisions (1980) applied economic reasoning to the structure of institutional decision-making. A Conflict of Visions (1987) proposed a taxonomy of political philosophy based on two underlying models of human nature. The Vision of the Anointed (1995) analyzed the specific cognitive and rhetorical patterns of twentieth-century progressive intellectual culture. Basic Economics (2000) became one of the most widely read introductory economics textbooks in the world. Intellectuals and Society (2009) documented the pattern by which credentialed intellectuals reach conclusions that empirical data does not support and defend them against disconfirmation through status rather than evidence. The Hoover Institution at Stanford, where Sowell has been a Senior Fellow since 1980, is the integration partner. It provided the specific institutional form he needed: a research position with no teaching load, no departmental committee obligations, no pressure to publish in any particular journal, and no expectation that he would stay inside a single discipline. The Hoover Institution is, for Sowell, what Caltech was for Feynman and what the Royal Institution was for Faraday — the integration infrastructure that recognized the specific cognitive architecture in front of it and built a working environment around what the architecture could do.