Glenn Loury is a Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Loury is also a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the author of many books including The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, Race, Incarceration, and American Values, and the title of this EconTalk episode, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.

 

In their conversation, Russ Roberts and Glenn Loury explore the latter’s successes and struggles, how Loury’s experience with “the enemy within” compares with the economic situation of many Black Americans, and the importance of nuance in finding truth.

Glenn Loury’s story is one of triumph and rigor, despite the flaws he openly discusses in his memoir. Loury was one of three Black students at MIT, where he earned his Ph.D., and he received tenure at Harvard University when he was 34 years old, making him the first Black professor to be tenured in the Economics department. Early in his career as a Professor, Loury was published numerous times in the most renowned economics journals, such as Econometrica, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. However, Loury felt like he was failing to meet the standards of himself, his peers, many of whom were Nobel Laureates, and the professors who recommended him to Harvard. Upon reflection, Loury diagnoses the cause of his mental strife as the fear of failure, and his struggle to reconcile his upbringing with his life in academia.

Throughout the conversation, Roberts allows Loury to tell all. He discusses his affairs and conflicts with the law while as a member of the faculty at Harvard, and concurrent with an invitation to become the Undersecretary of Education in the Reagan Administration. Loury was arrested twice in one year, and battled drug addiction, with multiple relapses. However, Loury recovered from these challenges, which he notes was significantly aided by the support of his wife and his Christian faith.

Loury and Roberts draw several parallels between Loury’s struggles and the challenges disproportionately facing the Black community, such as drug addiction, criminality, and the lack of a stable father figure, which Loury dubs, “the enemy within.” To Loury, there are significant cultural challenges within the Black community which must be addressed in order to eliminate socioeconomic racial inequality. In Roberts’ paraphrasing, the Black community must take responsibility for their own actions, simply eliminating discrimination is not sufficient.

And I started thinking that a lot of the stuff that’s going on within African American communities, that values and attitudes and norms and behavioral practices and culture were also instrumental in the perpetuation of racial inequality. Not just discrimination. And, I started thinking that the agitation–the political agitation of the Civil Rights Movement and the activists–the ones who were against police brutality and who were demanding that companies not have employment records that were roughly racially representative and so on, wouldn’t really reach deeply enough to counteract the historically-inherited practices and patterns of living among African Americans that were a part of the problem.

Loury came to this conclusion because of his own research on racial inequality. In particular,  in his dissertation he found that historical inequality caused by racial discrimination would not necessarily decline due to an end to racial discrimination.

…this interested me. I was of the relatively conservative opinion that–for which there was some evidence, although there was certainly counter-argument–that the Civil Rights legislation had been enormously successful in eliminating overt racial discrimination. But that it was unclear whether that success would, in the fullness of time, lead to a situation in which socioeconomic disparities between the races would go away or would get near to zero… the anticipation that ending the discriminatory regime would lead, even in the very, very long list of runs, to group equality might be falsely grounded. It was a counter-example to the claim that laissez faire will take care of everything in the long run, even if you had a history which was racially discriminatory.

Through his research, Loury argues against both those who believe anti-discrimination measures would be effective in producing racial equality, and those who think the market will eventually solve the problem. To Loury, the answer does not come from policymakers, the concrete change must come from the Black community itself. Loury argues for Black people to take command over their own lives and rise up against the enemy within. Loury wishes to see progress in the Black community at large, akin to his own recovery.

…we, Black people, especially those of us who are at the margins of society, have a responsibility to take control of our lives and raise our children, to build up our communities, to develop our social capital, to affirm the ways of living that are most consistent with realizing the potential of opportunity in this society. And I feel like I can’t lie about my own life and have that be my message at the same time.

Although Loury’s book labels himself as a conservative, Roberts says he’s more a pursuer of nuance than he is married to a particular ideology. For instance, he objects to color-blind solutions to the educational attainment gap, but also to those who argue that racial disparities in the criminal justice system can simply be put down to systemic racism, such as works like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Loury’s work as a social critic largely began from an anti-incarceration liberal lens, but the Black Lives Matter era turned him back towards critiquing works and attitudes stemming from left-wing scholarly work on racial inequality.

…the new Jim Crow–is woefully simplistic and lacks nuance and subtlety. I mean, for example, has nothing to say about violence–about black on black predation, about what is revealed about the incomplete development of the human potential of the young men, mostly, who are engaged in the kinds of activities that end up with them being incarcerated in the first place. Of course, there is racism in the society. Yes, you can find police brutality and you can find laws that are unequally enforced, and drug laws and so on that are disproportionately impacting on blacks. But you can’t tell me that the failures manifested by the criminal activities of these young men–failures of the development of their own social maturity and ability to perform as citizens who are not a threat to their neighbors–is an extension of slavery.

Loury pokes holes in the current popular opinion on American racial issues, but this is because he finds critique and complexity as a necessity of pursuing truth. Loury is not a blind contrarian; he critiques conservatives as well. Though he befriended conservative figures and identified as a conservative, in the late 1990’s Loury found it difficult to be the Black figurehead of a movement lauding works like Charles Murray and David Hernstein’s The Bell Curve. Loury found mainstream conservative opinion to be unempathetic towards Black Americans, and reluctant to care about the struggles of the impoverished.

But I found it uncomfortable in a way, being the Black mascot of the neoconservative/conservative social policy world… I came not to be satisfied with, as I put it in a long review that I wrote of Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom’s book, which was published in 1997 in The Atlantic. I said, ‘It’s just not good enough to be right about liberals being wrong.’ Don’t you care about these people?… we (neoconservatives) still want solutions. It’s just that we want to stay in touch with reality. We don’t want to write these people off. We are not prepared to just give up the search for how to solve social problems. These are our people in these ghettos. We have to help them somehow. That’s not a idle or a fanciful or idealistic thought. That’s decency.

Loury and Roberts trace Loury’s criticism of both progressivism and conservatism, and the importance he places on nuance and self-command back to his own life. Loury finds it crucial to include every detail when analyzing his past mistakes, and in addressing socioeconomic inequality. The difference between Loury and his past self is that his past self didn’t reveal his faults, he didn’t tell the truth about his life. Loury goes into such a high level of detail throughout his memoir, and during the podcast because of the importance of being honest. In his words, if you don’t tell it all, you lose credibility. And in Russ Roberts’ words,

…by leaving out some of the details, we allow a narrative to emerge that protects ourselves from our self. It protects ourselves from others. It protects ourselves from judgment.

 

Related EconTalk Episodes:

Roland Fryer on Race, Diversity, and Affirmative Action

Edward Lazear on Becker

Bryan Caplan on Discrimination and Labor Markets

Glenn Loury on Race, Inequality, and America

Thomas Sowell on Economic Facts and Fallacies

 

Related Liberty Fund Network Content:

Systemic Racism in Crime and Housing, a Liberty Matters symposium at the Online Library of Liberty.

Systemic Racism in Education and Healthcare, a Liberty Matters symposium at the Online Library of Liberty.

Forced or Forbidden Discrimination: Why Not Laissez-Faire?, by Pierre Lemieux at Econlib

Racism is No Longer America’s Biggest Problem, by Wilfred Reilly at Law & Liberty

The Great Antidote: Scott Winship on Poverty and Welfare, at Adam Smith Works

On Justice and Equality of Outcomes, by Kevin Corcoran at Econlib