Glenn Loury: Tales of Sex, Drugs, Capitalism, and Redemption
Late Admissions is a deeply human memoir by a leading economist and public intellectual whose honesty and humility is inspirational.
My guest today on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie is economist and podcaster Glenn Loury, whose new memoir is titled Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. I guarantee this is the only academic autobiography you’ll read this year (or any other) that contains a deep discussion of Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty and instructions on how to make crack cocaine. In my experience, too many economists abstract themselves out of deeply felt human experience, flattening even the most emotional topics into two-dimensional charts or graphs. A brilliant analytic thinker and a top-drawer technical economist, Glenn never flinches from talking about emotion and depth of feeling.
I can’t remember when I first met Glenn in person, but I’ve been reading him my entire adult life and have learned an incalculable amount from both his specific insights and his general manner. He was everywhere in white-hot policy debates in the 1980s and ‘90s, a rare thinker who had deep principles and a common decency that are often the first casualties in most culture war debates.
Born in 1948 and raised working-class in Chicago's predominantly African American South Side, Loury tells a story of self-invention, ambition, hard work, addiction, and redemption that channels Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Richard Wright's Native Son, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and Milton Friedman's Capitalism & Freedom. An alternative title might have been “Rise Above It!,” the slogan of a pyramid-scheme cosmetics company on which he squandered his savings as a young man in Chicago.
The first tenured black economist at Harvard, Glenn emerged in the 1980s as a ubiquitous commenter on race and class and was offered a post in the Reagan administration. Then a series of scandals involving affairs, arrests, and addiction threatened the end of his personal and professional lives. Late Admissions is an unflinching look at Loury's failures and successes, written by one of the most popular academic presences on YouTube.
A future issue of Reason magazine (subscribe now!) will carry a condensed and edited transcript of our recent conversation. Let me share part of the conclusion of that here:
You're a critic of race-based policies, but you also get kind of pissed when people dismiss the black experience. You say being a black American is a part of your identity. Is there a way for us to bring our individual cultural and ethnic heritage to the conversation that doesn’t divide us or put us in one group or another?
We all have a story. We all have a narrative and a cultural inheritance. And yet underneath we are kind of all the same. Our struggles are comprehensible to each other, and our triumphs and our failures are things that we can relate to as human beings. And that's how we should be relating to each other.
I'm in my 70s now, and I've just written a book about my life. So who am I? What does it amount to? I'm the kid that really did grow up immersed in an almost exclusively black community on the south side of Chicago. The music that I listen to, the food that I ate, the stories that I was told and that I told to my own children in turn. These things are related to the history, the struggles and triumphs, the dreams and hopes of African-American people. That's a part of who I am. And it annoys me when people attempt to say “get over it” to me. They're not respecting me when they tell me that race is not a deep thing about people.
It's a superficial thing, I grant you that. I grant you the melanin in the skin, the genetic markers that are manifest in my physical presentation, don't add up to very much. But the dreams of my fathers and others, the lore, the narrative about who “we” are, that's not arbitrary and it's not trivial. And it seems to me sociologically naive in the extreme to just want to move past that. That's a part of who people actually are.
But I struggle with this, because I also want to tell my students not to wear that too heavily, not to let it blinker them and prevent them from being able to engage with, for example, the inheritance of European civilization in which we are embedded. That's also your inheritance. Tolstoy is mine. Einstein is mine. And yours. I want to say to youngsters of whatever persuasion: Don't be blinkered. Don't be so parochial that you miss out on the best of what's been written and thought and said in human culture.
I’ve embedded the YouTube link to video of the Q&A here, followed by links to Apple and Spotify podcasts.
Let me know what you think.
0:00— Introduction
1:34— Why write a memoir now?
4:17— What is a black conservative?
7:47— Glenn Loury's background
15:10— Addiction and self destruction
17:00— 'A hustler and a player'
21:34— Crack, Infidelity, and the remarkable Dr Linda Loury
25:44— Loury's downfall in the late 80s
28:38— Recovery, self-knowledge, and making amends
36:32— 'Rise Above It': a MLM scam with real lessons 40:40- Loury's career and legacy in Economics
45:08— College students and protests
49:00— Affirmative action and conservatives
52:30— Equality, childhood development, and cultural influences
57:21— The Black Experience and healthy cultural discourse
1:02:22— Immigrants as beacons of hope
My previous Reason conversation with Glenn, from June 2020:
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Hey my dad liked the ladies!