Glenn Loury on the Cover story and the Real Story
Economist Glenn Loury talks with Tyler Cowen about jazz, the theoretical-economics career he set aside, and the memoir he is finishing — organised around a single distinction he draws between the flattering account we tell ourselves of our own past and the harder story underneath it. He turns that lens on his own political conversion, his crack-cocaine addiction and recovery, his marriages, his religious doubt, and his views on race.
Key ideas
- The memoir’s organising idea is the gap between the cover story and the real story. Loury’s forthcoming memoir returns, at juncture after juncture, to the difference between the self-aggrandising account he told himself unreflectively at the time and what he later recognises as the truer, less flattering version.
- He illustrates the distinction with his own flight from economic theory. His cover story for leaving Harvard’s economics department for the Kennedy School in the early 1980s was that the dual appointment (economics and Afro-American studies) was impossible; the real story, he says, is that he lost his nerve and feared he would never match the theorists around him.
- His message to the political right that admires him: the people in America’s ghettos and lockups are ‘us,’ not ‘them.’ He argues this is an American story, not only a Black American story, and doubts many of his right-wing admirers grasp it — while extending a reciprocal call for empathy toward working-class white voters he thinks the political left too often dismisses.
- He recounts freebasing crack cocaine in the late 1980s, recovery through AA/NA and his church, and a deliberate relapse two years sober to find out what he thought he had lost — the euphoria was real, he says, but so was the shame, and he never touched cocaine again.
- His religious position has moved from evangelical Christian to agnostic, a shift he says left his view on abortion unchanged but altered his sense of personal accountability to others.
- He names his wife, Lajuan Loury, as his sharpest critic on race — she argues his culture-war targets distract from the structural economics that actually drive disadvantage, and he does not resolve whether she is right.
- Facing his own mortality, he expresses real doubt, not resolve. Having watched his first wife die of cancer in 2011, he doubts he can meet death with her dignity, and suspects his own drift from Christianity makes that less likely, not more.
Content
Music, upbringing, and taste
Cowen opens with a thought experiment: what music would a ‘Glenn Loury movement’ play? Loury answers bebop-era jazz — Mingus, Miles Davis, a young Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Monk — and ties the choice to his upbringing on Chicago’s South Side rather than to politics; he was born in 1948 and was fourteen in 1962, when that music was the sound of his uncles and cousins. He resists Cowen’s suggestion that the association carries any political content of its own.
The conversation ranges across Chicago R&B and Motown (versus Stax’s comparative fade from popular memory), Michael Jackson’s complicated posthumous legacy, and a generational needling about whether he would let his daughters listen to Prince’s Dirty Mind. Loury is consistently candid about the limits of his own knowledge — on bluegrass and country music, on why Stax has aged worse than Motown — declining to bluff an answer he does not have.
The economic theorist who set theory aside
Loury trained as an applied theorist at MIT in the 1970s, under mentors including Peter Diamond, and published early work on the pricing of exhaustible natural resources and on the relationship between market structure and the rate of innovation — a 1979 paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics he still speaks of with some pride. His first academic post, at Northwestern in the late 1970s, put him in the same theory group as Roger Myerson, Bengt Holmström, and Paul Milgrom in the years just before each won a Nobel; Leonid Hurwicz was a frequent presence nearby. He says he did not fully appreciate, at the time, how revolutionary that moment in mechanism design and information economics was.
In 1982 Harvard hired him as professor of both economics and Afro-American studies, recruited in part by Thomas Schelling. He describes a crisis of confidence there — comparing himself unfavourably to the theorists filling the pages of Econometrica — and recounts confiding this to Schelling, who laughed uncontrollably before telling him: ‘You think you’re the only one? This place is full of neurotics hiding behind their secretaries and their 10-foot oak doors… Why don’t you just put your head down and do your work?’
He says he did not take that advice. Today, he describes himself as somewhat alienated from the economics profession, whose empirical, natural-experiment-driven style has displaced the applied-theory tradition he trained in; he no longer advises many graduate students, and stepped back two years ago from teaching first-year PhD microeconomic theory to make room for younger colleagues in his department.
The cover story and the real story
Asked what he learned about himself in writing the memoir, Loury names the book’s central motif directly: the recurring gap between the cover story — the account that is ‘always self-aggrandizing… not as craven, not as callow, not as vicious’ as events actually were — and the real story beneath it, which he says he rarely remembers accurately on first reflection.
His worked example is Harvard. The cover story was that the dual appointment in economics and Afro-American studies was an impossible burden, and that the department was cold. The real story, he says, is that he choked: he was afraid of failing to match Myerson and Milgrom, and the Kennedy School offered a path to acclaim that carried none of that risk. He draws the general lesson bluntly — ‘I’ve learned that my capacity for self-delusion is almost unbounded’ — and notes there are ‘many other stories like that’ he is saving for the book, a signal that the same method extends to the material Cowen raises next: his politics, his addiction, and his religion.
Race: what the right misses, what the left misses, and ‘Omar’
Pressed on what the white political right that admires him fails to understand about race, Loury’s answer is unambiguous: the people ‘languishing in the ghettos, the housing projects, the lockups’ are, in his words, ‘us… our people… Americans… It’s not them.’ He calls this an American story, not only a Black American story, and doubts it has fully landed with his right-wing audience, whom he thinks too often treat troubled communities as an alien imposition on an otherwise pristine canvas.
He extends the same critique in the other direction. Working-class white voters drawn to populist politics, he says, are ‘people too’ with stories of their own that black activists too often refuse to hear with any generosity. He attributes the asymmetry partly to ordinary in-group psychology and partly to the incentives facing political actors who need to mobilise supporters with a clear us-and-them narrative — while adding that Christian teaching on humility, which he still half-hears in the background, makes the same point better than he does.
Much of this territory is worked through in his running dialogue with John McWhorter on their show, The Glenn Show, about a figure they call ‘Omar’ — a stand-in for the young Black man deep in visible dysfunction, cycling through crime and instability. McWhorter’s formulation, which Loury repeats approvingly, is that ‘Omar makes me sad, and Omar makes you mad.’ Loury says he genuinely does not understand Omar’s motivations, distrusts both progressive and conservative media framings of people like him, and wants grittier, less tendentious reporting from inside the communities he is quick to judge.
Differences with McWhorter, and his toughest critic
Asked to boil down his differences with McWhorter to the smallest possible number of dimensions, Loury points to audience: McWhorter, who writes for the New York Times and lives in New York, cares what his colleagues there think in a way Loury says he stopped doing long ago. His example is McWhorter’s refusal to engage the transgender debate in their conversations — not from disagreement, but from a calculation that speaking his mind would cost him more than staying silent is worth.
Asked who is his strongest critic on race, Loury names his wife, Lajuan Loury, without hesitation. He paraphrases her recurring argument: that his targets — affirmative action, ‘Defund the Police,’ critical race theory — are a smoke screen from the deeper structural economics that actually generate disparity: corporate power, thin social provision, low wages, inaccessible healthcare. Asked directly whether she is right, Loury declines to answer, deferring to ‘the last chapter of the memoir’ — a genuine, unresolved ambivalence rather than a rhetorical dodge.
Addiction, faith, and facing death
Loury describes freebasing crack cocaine in the late 1980s, and the recovery that followed: treatment, a halfway house, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, his church community, and the support of his then-wife, the economist Linda Loury. Two years sober, he deliberately bought and smoked cocaine once, to find out whether he had given up something worth missing. The euphoria, he says, was real — but so was the shame, and he threw the rest away and never touched cocaine again.
His religious position has since moved from evangelical Christian, during the years of his recovery, to agnostic today — a shift he is careful to distinguish from atheism. He says it left his opposition to late-term abortion unchanged, since he held that view before he was ever a Christian, but altered his sense of personal accountability: he compares his younger self, unaccountable to the wife he did not respect and the community he had left behind, to the doomed ‘master of the universe’ of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.
The conversation closes on mortality. Loury watched Linda Loury die of metastatic breast cancer in 2011 and says he doubts he can meet his own death with the dignity and lack of self-pity she showed. He expects fury and inconsolability rather than grace — ‘Nietzsche would be my friend, not the New Testament’ — and suspects his drift from Christianity makes that outcome more, not less, likely. He states plainly that he thinks personal survival after death is an illusion, while wondering aloud whether only such a belief could let him die well. He leaves the question open, not resolved.
See also
- Glenn Loury — speaker
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness, Jazz, and Identity — companion Conversations with Tyler episode on race, jazz, and American identity, from a differently positioned Black public intellectual