Intro. (Recording date: April 30, 2024.)
Russ Roberts: Today is April 30th, 2024, and my guest is economist and author Glenn Loury. His Substack is simply Glenn Loury. This is Glenn’s second appearance on EconTalk. He was here in July of 2020, talking about race and inequality. Our topic for today is his memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. Glenn, welcome back to EconTalk.
Glenn Loury: Thanks, Russ. It’s very good to be with you.
Russ Roberts: I want to let parents listening with children know that today’s conversation may include a number of topics inappropriate for children. You may wish to listen before sharing.
Russ Roberts: This is an incredible book. As listeners know, I’m very busy. I’m not sure listeners know that I try to read every page of every book I discuss here on EconTalk. So, when I’m asked to consider a book of 448 pages, which is the length of Late Admissions, I usually just say, ‘No,’ right away. There’s no way I can read a 448-page autobiography.
But out of respect for Glenn, I picked up the book and I looked at the opening pages; and I couldn’t put it down. I read every page, I think every word. It is an extraordinarily interesting book about what it means to be a human being, a man, a black man, a husband, a father, as well as an economist and social critic at the highest levels. Along with Glenn’s very eventful career as an economic theorist. We get a great deal of information about his infidelities, his drug use, his arrests, his journey as an observer of race issues in America. I’ve never read anything quite like it.
Glenn, why did you write this book with the degree of revelation you chose to share about your personal–I’d have to say–failings?
Glenn Loury: Well, Russ, I thought it was time to come clean with myself, with my children. I thought there was no point in playing about such a project. The book couldn’t be opposed. It couldn’t be a brand-enhancing advert. It had to come from the soul.
I say somewhere early in the book, in the Preface, I had to tell it all. If I didn’t tell it all, nothing I said would really be credible. And I tried to explain what I mean by that. But I didn’t want to be lying to myself. One of the ideas that I played with in the book is the contrast between the cover story that one tells others and one tells oneself about the most difficult and the darkest corners of one’s life. The cover story and the real story.
I won’t go on long on this. I did go through a Christian conversion in my late 30s and early 40s, and I did go through a wrenching recovery from drug addiction. And, in that place in my life, I learned that if I didn’t tell myself the truth about what I was doing, why I was doing it–how do we say in the movement? We say, ‘Secrets make you sick.’ If I didn’t come clean with myself, I wouldn’t get better. I wouldn’t be able to solve the problem of self-command.
I’m in my 70s, Russ. I just felt it was time to come clean. So, why play at something like this? I don’t need to write a memoir. It’s not as if I can’t make a living just teaching and doing research and economics. The whole project would have seemed, like, opposed. There would have been something fraudulent about it if I didn’t tell the truth. And so, I did.
Russ Roberts: And that metaphor–the cover story and the real story–is very haunting and very powerful; I loved it–because, the cover story is the story without all the details, and 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.
But, time and time again in this book, you give us both the cover story and the real story. You talk about the fuller image, more of the facts, the full color version of what was happening to you at the time, both in your head and around you–your actions, what you told yourself that was true, what you told yourself that wasn’t true; and now you’re looking back on it.
It’s a very powerful way, I think, to think about the challenge that you say of self-command. Which, you know, I’m almost 70, and I feel very similarly to you that, that project is a huge part of what it means to be a fully realized human being. It’s taken you a while–it’s taken me a while–but the book shows a great deal of progress without being self-congratulatory, I would say. Is that a fair assessment?
Glenn Loury: It’s a beautiful assessment. It really is gratifying to hear you say it. It’s what I was trying to achieve. It has been said about this book–Evan Goldstein in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” said this: he said, ‘Is it self-revelation or is it self-sabotage?’ A good friend of mine whom I’ve known since grad school, Ronald Ferguson, took me aside at my son’s wedding. My son Nehemiah just got married. He’s in his early 30s. And, Ronnie was there and he said, ‘God, I don’t know if I(?) like this guy that is being revealed to me in this book.’ And, I remember my response to him was, ‘I’m not sure I liked him either, but I’m not that guy. I am not that guy.’
And, what’s the difference between me and that guy? To me, I see that guy for what he was and see myself in him, but I’m not that guy. That guy couldn’t have told himself the truth about his life.
So, I’m throwing myself on the mercy of the court here, a little bit. You know, I’m saying: ‘Warts and all, here he is. He’s struggling. He’s trying to be better. He’s trying to be honest. Can’t you see him? Can you see him trying to be straight?’ ‘The guy who can tell that story in that way, maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all. Maybe he’s not so different from me,’ I’m asking the reader to think when I lay it bare like that. You can see him in his low points, but you can also see him struggle to pull himself and stand up straight with his shoulders back.
So, anyway, it is a bid to offer something to my readers that will stick to the ribs, something sturdy, something human.
Russ Roberts: It sticks to the ribs, all right. We just finished the holiday of Passover here in Israel and around the world. It’s still going today if you don’t live in Israel. But, I finished the book sometime in the middle of the holiday, or most of it, and I had trouble not talking about it all the time. So, it definitely–and sharing it with strangers, which is a little bit weird, as opposed to talking about the holiday of Passover. But, so, I’d say it does stick to the ribs.
Russ Roberts: Talk about your childhood and that incredible–so just to preface this, at the age of 17, you fathered a child. You found yourself married with two children very shortly after that, and you grew up in a–well, I want you to talk a little bit about how you grew up, what kind of neighborhood and economic life that you had as a young man, as a boy, growing up.
But shortly after that–and this part of the book is quite extraordinarily inspiring; you could make a movie out of just this part–you find yourself in graduate school at one of the most demanding programs in economics. It’s a dizzying ascent from the challenges of both your childhood and then marriage at a very young age with fatherhood on you. Talk about that transition and how you coped with it mentally. It’s an extraordinary part of this book.
Glenn Loury: Well, I was born in 1948 on the south side of Chicago to a close-knit family. My mother’s family was very close-knit. My mother and father divorced when I was quite–four, five years old. I had one sibling, a sister. So, I was raised by a single mom–my mother, a wonderful woman, a sweet, gentle, kind, giving woman, but not the most organized, responsible, diligent parent, and had a wild streak. Her brother, Alfred, called her Go-Go. Her name was Gloria. He called her Go-Go, because she was always on the go. She and my father split up, and she remarried. That marriage didn’t last very long. We moved–we moved a lot. By the time I got to the fifth grade at 10 years old, I had been enrolled in five different schools.
Her sister, my Aunt Eloise (pronounced E-lo-ees’–Econlib Ed.), was just the opposite in terms of the degree of command over her life and responsible, organized living. Her sister was a matronly, ambitious, church-going woman, who owned a nice-sized house. I mean, today, it wouldn’t seem much to me, but at the time, it was a mansion: six bedrooms, a beautiful living room with a piano. But, my Aunt Eloise was a woman who would not sit by idly and watch us–that is, her sister and her sister’s children–be dragged around apartment to apartment. And, saw to it that a small two-bedroom unit was created upstairs and into the back of her large house. When I was 11 years old–10 or 11 years old–we moved in. And, I spent my most formative years in that house, in that little apartment.
These were working-class/middle-class people. I mean, my aunt and uncle, Uncle Mooney–her husband, James A. Lee–Uncle Mooney. They called him Mooney because he had these big eyes that protruded half-moon-like. And that was his nickname, and it just stuck. He was a barber and hustler, small businessman. He’d buy and sell things. He did what he needed to do to make a living. Most of it was legal. He sold a little bit of cannabis out of the back of his barber shop. He knew the guys, the Italian guys, who would hijack trucks. So, when there was a truckload of suits that had gone missing, a half dozen of them might end up in my uncle’s barber shop in the back that he’d resell. They had a dry cleaners for a while where they were operating another kind of business. So, they were business people. He didn’t work for anybody. My Uncle Mooney didn’t believe in working for the white man. He didn’t believe in banks. He had come up in the Depression era and had watched banks go bust, and he kept his life savings stuffed into old fruit juice cans that were under a floorboard in the closet off of his bedroom. And, this was my domestic situation.
Russ Roberts: Somehow you end up at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for graduate school at a time when MIT is arguably the best program in the country. I went to Chicago around then. I might have disagreed with you if we’d met at a conference. But, what was that like to walk the halls of MIT, to have Solow and Samuelson and other great minds as your professors, given your background? And, how did you relate to that program as a–I was going to say, as a black kid from the south side? You weren’t a kid anymore at that point, but given your upbringing?
Glenn Loury: Yeah. I just turned 24 when I arrived at MIT. I was just blown away by MIT. I was intimidated at first, but I got in the classroom and I did pretty well. Paul Samuelson, yeah, Bob Solow, Peter Diamond, Franco Modigliani. Franklin Fisher. The econometrician, Stanley Fischer, the monetary theorist. Martin Weitzman, the micro theorist. Peter Timmons(?), the economic historian, and others. And, by the way, the Sloan School wasn’t that bad either. And, there were some pretty good economists at the Sloan School, and there was a lot of work going on in operations research and queuing theory, and stochastic dynamics and things like that, that I was exposed to.
I took to it. I did very well. That’s for someone else to say. But I was near the top of my class of students at MIT from day one. And, I flourished. A black kid, yeah, and there weren’t so many of us. MIT did have an outreach to try to bring in African-American students to their Ph.D. program. As was explained to me later–I actually didn’t know it at the time–the faculty had decided that while they were going to admit 25 or so in each class. They would add–I’m not sure where the funding for this came from–an additional three admissions that they would use to identify the most promising black graduate students that they could identify in the (inaudible 00:17:36) in MIT. And, in the year that I was admitted, 1972, there were three of us African-Americans–Ronald Ferguson, who I’ve mentioned was one, and then there was another guy.
Would I have been admitted without the affirmative action? I’d like to think so. I had an outstanding record at Northwestern, but it is MIT; and it was arguably the best department in the world, and a lot of really good applicants didn’t get admitted, so I don’t know.
But, I got there and I did well. I made friends. I made Jewish friends, because a lot of the people in the faculty and in the student body were Jewish. I had a very close friend, Pinti Kouri, K-O-U-R-I. He’s no longer living, unfortunately, a Fin, who took a liking to me and kind of almost adopted me, I’m going to say. He could see I was rough around the edges. I was an urban kid. I didn’t have a lot of sophistication and about the fine arts, about what knife and fork to use when I’m at a table, about what wine to drink or whatever like that. Pinti kind of befriended me and invited me into his circle of friends, and I enjoyed that. (More to come, 19:03)
