Speaker

Glenn Loury

Glenn Loury

Economist and public intellectual; professor of economics at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, since 2005. Trained as an applied theorist at MIT in the 1970s, he built an early career in economic theory before becoming one of the best-known Black conservative — and later independent — voices in American public debate on race.

Born in 1948 on Chicago’s South Side, Loury took his first academic post at Northwestern in the late 1970s, in a theory group that briefly included Roger Myerson, Bengt Holmström, and Paul Milgrom in the years before each won a Nobel Prize; his own 1979 paper on market structure and innovation, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, dates from this period. In 1982 Harvard appointed him professor of both economics and Afro-American studies, recruited in part by Thomas Schelling. He describes a crisis of confidence there and, by his own later account, chose to leave theoretical economics for the Kennedy School and a career as a political commentator rather than risk failing to match the theorists around him — a decision he revisits at length in the memoir he was completing at the time of this conversation.

Loury has described his own political trajectory as moving through a Reagan-era conservative phase; he says that, in retrospect, he was more often right than wrong in some of the positions he took in those years, while also treating that period as one of several ‘cover stories’ his memoir sets out to correct. He recovered from an addiction to crack cocaine in the late 1980s. His first wife, the economist Linda Loury, died of metastatic breast cancer in 2011; he is now married to Lajuan Loury. He co-hosts The Glenn Show, a recurring dialogue with linguist John McWhorter, and describes his religious position as agnostic, having moved away from the evangelical Christianity of his recovery years. [?] The exact title of his Brown University chair is not stated in the source transcript.

Core positions

  • The cover story versus the real story. Loury frames honest self-narration — distinguishing the flattering account we tell ourselves from what actually happened — as the organising method of his memoir, and applies it to his own career choices, his politics, and his addiction alike.
  • Shared ownership of Black urban dysfunction. He argues that the people in America’s ghettos, housing projects, and prisons are ‘us,’ not ‘them’ — an American story, not only a Black American story — and that this point is lost on much of the political right that admires him.
  • A reciprocal empathy gap on the left. He extends the same critique the other way, arguing that working-class white voters drawn to populist politics deserve comparable generosity from Black activists who too often dismiss them.
  • Distrust of tendentious framing on both sides. He says he does not trust progressive or conservative media accounts of dysfunction in low-income Black communities, and wants grittier, less politically serviceable reporting from inside those communities.
  • Agnostic, not atheist, on religion. He describes ongoing uncertainty about an afterlife and personal survival after death, alongside real doubt about whether he can face his own death with the dignity his late wife showed facing hers.

In the wiki