The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Glenn Loury. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Glenn Loury. Glenn is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of Social Sciences at Brown University, where he’s also a Professor of Economics and a Professor of International and Public Affairs. He’s also a Paulson Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
He is an academic economist who has made scholarly contributions to the fields of welfare economics, income distribution, game theory, industrial organization, and natural resources economics. He’s also a prominent social critic and public intellectual having published over 200 articles in journals of public affairs in the US and abroad on issues such as racial inequality and social policy. Welcome, Glenn.
Glenn: Good to be with you, Jim.
Jim: I’m looking forward to this conversation. You don’t know this, although I told to you a minute ago, but I’ve been reading you since probably the early ’80s when I used to subscribe to The New Republic before it went to hell, and read some of your other book along the way and such. So I know more about you than you know about me.
Glenn: Although we have a friend in common, Stephanie Lepp.
Jim: Oh, really? That’s great.
Glenn: Yeah, she mentioned that because I did a podcast with her for my Glenn Show just last week, and she mentioned that she had had an exchange with you, I think.
Jim: Yeah, we worked together on a number of things. She’s guest hosted my podcast a couple of times and I’ve been acting as a mentor for her in her new endeavor and such, and we do a monthly group call for producers of podcasts and stuff, which is fun.
Glenn: How cool is that? Yeah.
Jim: She’s a wonderful person. She really is.
Glenn: I agree. I like her a lot.
Jim: But before we get down to it, for those who want to know more about Glenn and his work, and he does have The Glenn Show Podcast, but he also has a substack named The Glenn Show, and you can follow him @GlennLoury on Reddit. And as always, links to all this stuff and anything else we talk about can be found at the episode page at jimruttsshow.com. So check it out. Today we’re going to mostly talk, though I’m sure we’ll branch this way and that about Glenn’s… Was it about a year ago that you published this book?
Glenn: The official publication date, it was May 2024.
Jim: Oh, okay. Even more recent than that. Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. I got to say, those who listen to the show regularly, know I don’t do memoirs. I don’t think I’ve ever done a memoir actually. Of the 400 episodes I’ve done, probably 200 of them based on books. But I’ll tell you what caught me. This was the most audacious preface to a book I’ve read in a long damn time. It was Meta as Hell. Glenn, why don’t you tell us what game you were playing there in your preface?
Glenn: Yeah. Well, I announce to the reader, I say, “You and I, the reader and author, are playing the game. I’m telling my life story and you know that I have it in my interest to make myself look good. So you’re going to be skeptical as a reader. You’re going to read between the lines. You’re going to try to figure out where is he really coming from, what’s he hiding? What’s he trying to say? What are his motives? Now I know that and you know that I know that.”
Okay, so what’s my strategy in this game? This game I call the problem of self-regard. My strategy is to win you over through candor. I’m going to fess up, as it were. I’m going to tell you discrediting things about myself, things that don’t make me look so good. I’m going to put it right there, and you’re going to see this guy doing that and you’re going to think, “If he’s willing to tell me that, surely he’s not lying about that. Maybe he’s not lying about other things too, other things that are more subtle. And maybe at the end of the day, he comes off looking not as bad as he would’ve looked if you hadn’t given him the benefit of his candor.” Something like that, Jim.
Jim: That’s a good description, but doesn’t do justice to the brilliance of the writing. It sucks you in and twists your head around about three different ways, and then you realize he’s a magician who’s told you the trick that he’s going to do, but doesn’t quite tell you how he’s going to do it, and then he pulls the trick on you anyway and you don’t notice.
Glenn: I love the way you put that, and I have to give credit where credit is due. I’m trained as an economist, game theory. I have had influential mentors like Thomas Schelling, the late great Nobel honored game theorist and economist. The Strategy of Conflict, that’s his great book. And nuclear deterrence, and preemption, and credibility, and threats, and bluffs, and hostages, and trip points, and focal points. This is Tom Schelling, and this is a certain way of thinking and awareness of the strategic complexity of a social interaction. And I bring that sensibility to bear in the writing of my own life story.
Jim: And when you think about it, that kind of game theory, it’s like two mirrors facing each other, the infinite regress, right?
Glenn: Indeed.
Jim: Because of course, the reader could go one level deeper and then you could go one level deeper, but fortunately, humans only typically go three levels deep. One of the fallacies of linguistics that Chomsky claims, “Recursion is the fundamental element of human language,” but in reality, almost never do we have more than four levels of recursion, and three is the limit for most people.
Glenn: Interesting, very interesting.
Jim: I’m sure your buddy, John, would know all about that.
Glenn: Being a linguist.
Jim: Being a linguist. So let’s get into it. You grew up in Chicago.
Glenn: Yeah.
Jim: Where in Chicago?
Glenn: On the South Side of Chicago in a neighborhood called Park Manor, which was a pleasant residential district with single-family modest homes and small-scale apartment buildings, with trees and grass and fruit trees in the backyard and aspiring upper working class, lower middle class Negro families. It was a nice neighborhood.
And I was lucky, I grew up in my aunt’s house, my mother’s sister, who was a small business woman and a social acolyte, and whose husband was a hustler and a barber and a shopkeeper, who worked 20 hours a day to keep my aunt in the style to which she was accustomed. My aunt had a grand house in this relatively stable neighborhood. It was a neighborhood that had been all white in the 1950s, and had quickly converted to being all Black by the time I was a teenager in the early 1960s, Chicago.
Jim: I lived in Chicago briefly for a little bit, about six months in Rogers Park. I had some grungy apartment up there and it was kind of fun. The one thing I remember most about, there was 300 bars within walking distance.
Glenn: Yeah, I know Rogers Park. That’s on the North Side, that’s getting close to Evanston where I went to school at Northwestern University. So I used to drive through Rogers Park four or five times a week when I was a kid.
Jim: I was about two blocks from Loyola University. And so your family was part of the great migration of Black people, known as Negroes at the time they did it, that moved out of the South and moved to the North to get away from the racist motherfuckers in the South, to not put too fine an edge on it. Is that pretty close?
Glenn: Yeah, I might not have put it that way, but that’s accurate. This is my mother’s mother’s generation. My mother was born in Chicago. My father was born in Chicago. But my mother’s mother’s generation, that’s a family from Brookhaven, Mississippi who migrated in stages first to Memphis and then up to Chicago and my mother’s mother had six sisters and five brothers.
There were 12 altogether and they all ended up in Chicago, my mother’s mother’s family. And that was in the years just after World War I. My mother was born in 1928. So yeah, they were part of the early stages of the Great Migration. The Goodens, that’s their name, my mother’s mother’s maiden name. They were part of that social upheaval of Negroes moving from the Deep South up to Chicago, the Illinois Central Railroad. That was the highway.
Jim: Interesting. You talk about the great aunts. So I assume that was your mother’s mother’s sisters?
Glenn: Correct.
Jim: They sounded like they were quite some ladies.
Glenn: Oh, yeah, they were wheelers and dealers and whatnot. They actually owned property in relatively prosperous neighborhoods of Chicago. Chicago was a very segregated city in the 1930s and the 1940s. My mother tells of my great aunt making bathtub gin during the Prohibition days. I don’t know about that. Maybe that’s a fairy tale or something, a family lore, but they were impressive women. Yeah.
Jim: And your aunt, your mother’s sister, Eloise, reminds me a lot of my grandmother who was this ultra respectable lady, despite the fact that she had very little money and she made goddamn sure that all the relatives also were respectable. In fact, when she died, one of the things somebody said about her was a quote from her. She said, “A rut was hanged as a horse thief in 19th century, but no rut has ever been divorced.” And I can tell you, within two years of the time Grandma Winifred passed, there was a whole cascade of divorces.
Glenn: Well, okay.
Jim: Tell us about Eloise. She clearly was a huge influence.
Glenn: She pronounced it Eloise.
Jim: Eloise?
Glenn: This is my mother’s older sister and yes, it was in her household. And I began the book, the chapter one with a story about a ritual on Sundays. We’d come from church, she’d line us up, us kids, and ask us, “What went on in the church, what was the sermon about?” I used that as a way in to tell the story about this household, which was her household where I grew up as a kid and about her as a matriarch, and a figure of authority and aspiration and modeling of her line, to be on the right side of the line. Yeah, a woman of respectability, a churchgoing woman, a chairman of the social, religious and literary guild of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and a stalwart figure.
She took in four foster care children who were a family. They all had the same mother but different fathers, but they were scattered because the mother had fallen on hard times of addiction and so on, and she had to give the kids up to the childcare. And my aunt found out about this family and she adopted all four of these youngsters and brought them into her household. These were my cousins. We were all there together in the opening scene of my book, reporting back to her about church that day. This was this woman.
She exerted a stabilizing influence on my upbringing because my mother, who was footloose and fancy-free, she wasn’t the most responsible person. She had a beautiful Nightingale’s voice, she was a party girl. She liked having a good time. She had flings. My mother had me in five different schools before I’d finished the fifth grade, moving me from one apartment to another around the West Side. And my aunt urged and encouraged and cajoled, and my mother decided to come and live in a small apartment upstairs in the back of this grand house that my aunt owned.
And it’s in that apartment, sleeping on the living room couch when I got too old to share the second bedroom with my sister, the three of us, my mother, my sister and I lived there and that’s how I came up. And it was my aunt who presided over this environment that I’ve been describing.
Jim: Yeah. It sounds like that was actually a damn good thing for you and your family, that you had this aunt to be the rock that your mother could be associated with.
Glenn: That’s well-put.
Jim: So let’s go a little bit into your high school days, and I was particularly taken, and of course the story takes a turn a couple times with your relationship with your buddy, Woody.
Glenn: Yeah. Well, again, a very conscious decision in the writing of the book to center Woody early on, because he was my best friend growing up. I was 10 years old when we moved in with Aunt Eloise. And Woody’s family lived on the same block, but across the alley. There was an alleyway, two avenues and an alley in between, and we were on Michigan Avenue and they were on Indiana Avenue. And those are two parallel avenues and the houses on the East Side of one and the West Side of the other, separated by the alley.
It was 90 seconds from my porch to his back porch. And we grew up playing stickball and being in little league and pilfering neighbors’ fruit trees and chasing girls and so forth. We were buddies. The thing about Woody, his father, company owner, he had a small contracting concern. He almost got his degree in engineering at the University of Illinois, but had dropped out and started his own little business and was struggling but was making a halfway decent living. His father had a big influence on me as well, which I talk about in the book.
But in any case, the thing about Woody was everybody thought he was white when you first saw him because he was very, very fair. But he wasn’t white because on both sides of his family, both his mother and their father, they had Black blood, whatever we mean by that. They had ancestors who were recognized as Negroes, as African American, and they were hiding it. They were living there in this all-white community, which had been very segregated. And then a few Blacks moved in and then suddenly, within a five to 10-year period, it had become 95% Black. And they never moved.
Jim: So they did a reverse pass essentially.
Glenn: Yeah. Right. They had been presumptively allowing their neighbors to think of them as white people when they were living in an all-white neighborhood, but when it became all Black, they didn’t move. And I overheard the mother say one time, “We wouldn’t run from our own kind. We wouldn’t run from our own kind.” And I introduced this idea because this skin color, identity, race, Blackness, who’s Black?
And the loyalty that that extracts and the irony of pathos, of Woody wanting to be Blacker than a lot of people would allow him to be. And he ends up marrying his sweetheart from high school who’s a few years younger than him and is a dark-skinned Black American girl, Elvey. His parents object. They want him to find a different girlfriend, but he’s determined, “Elvey is the one.” And I say it’s a way of him letting everybody in the world know, “This is my woman, I’m a Black guy too.”
Jim: We’ll revisit Woody twice more further along in the story, but I just want to make a little comment and get your thoughts about it. This idea of the one-drop rule or Blackness in America, I always found, since at least I was 10 years old, to be one of the stranger concepts around. If you’re part Korean and part Mexican and part Irish, you just list what you are. But there’s this odd convention shared by the Ku Klux Klan and the NAACP that if you have any noticeable amount of Black blood, you are Black. What do you think about that?
Glenn: I think it’s one of the most interesting things going on. It is the inner workings of the social construction of race because what we got is a fiction here. We don’t have a biological category. We don’t have a objective hard definitional boundary. We’ve got a perception, a presumption, a categorization, a stereotyping, a projection. We got this complex social phenomenon in being cognizant of something that we’re calling race. It’s not like this everywhere. It wasn’t like this in Brazil, for example.
But in the history of the United States, and I think it may be due to the nature of slavery as an institution and the fact that you can’t have… It’s like squaring a circle. How are you going to have a liberal democracy of a Jeffersonian liberty enshrined in the declaration and so forth, and at the same time, have a traffic in human chattel where you’re buying and selling people and they don’t have rights? Well, it can only be if those people are not quite fully us.
They have somehow to be othered. I hate to use that word because it’s so trendy, but you know what I mean. It seems appropriate in this context. And so you have all these devices and the prohibition on mixing. That’s like a part of the same thing. There’s something interesting about the fact that you have, they call it, miscegenation. It’s just two people. It’s not as if they were cross-species fertilization going on, and yet it becomes this thing. So I see the one-drop rule as a part of the mechanisms required to manufacture the social reality of race.
Jim: Of course, the story is such a complicated one because in theory, it was the great sin to cross the color line and have sex, and yet, what, 95% of Blacks in America have white blood because the slave owners and their children thought there was nothing finer than having a Black mistress, and they wouldn’t even think of having a white girlfriend until they were 18 or 19.
And so there was lots of sex and children born across the color line all the way back to the beginning of slavery, and yet, nominally, that never could happen. And here, I live in Virginia, which was the starting place for Loving versus State of Virginia, which was amazingly 1967, I believe it was, very late in the day when the Supreme Court eventually had the good sense to say that those ridiculous anti-miscegenation laws were null and void.
Glenn: Well, yeah, you could tell a long story about race in the law that tracks this notion of the social construction of race, the legitimization of racial categorization and racial discrimination, but the 14th Amendment is supposed to set us free from all of that, isn’t it?
Jim: It’s supposed to, but they managed to find some ridiculous loopholes. Plessy versus Ferguson being one of the two worst cases in American jurisprudence. The other one being the one in 1857, Dred Scott. Dred Scott and Plessy versus Ferguson are the two most… And the one with the Japanese internment, I would say are the three worst Supreme Court decisions of all time.
Glenn: Korematsu.
Jim: Yep. Yep. Our system is not perfect, but those were some bad ones. We’ll revisit race and social policy a little bit later, but let’s stick to some biography for a little bit. You were a bit of a player or at least an aspiring player when you were in high school, and that led up to, shall we say, an adventure around your prom.
Glenn: Okay. So the backdrop is growing into my masculinity and my manhood and the influences of my uncles, my mother’s brothers, who were notorious womanizers in their respective ways. The older of the two of them, Adlert, A-D-L-E-R-T and Alfred. The older, Adlert, was a debonair, silver-tongued, brilliant, handsome, athletic lawyer. He graduated Morehouse College roughly the same time as Martin Luther King Jr. I think he was a little bit ahead of Dr. King at Morehouse where he was a Kappa. This was the fraternity, and he was a big one.
And he matriculated at the School of Law at Northwestern University where amongst a distinguished class of African American young aspiring juris like Harold Washington, who went on to become mayor of Chicago, the first Black mayor of Chicago. And Eugene Pincham, who became a federal judge. These were, as I said, my mother’s mother’s generation coming out of Mississippi, did very well in Chicago, and therefore my mother and her brother’s generation were relatively well off. He did go to Morehouse College and he graduated from Northwestern University. He was a notorious womanizer. And his brother, Alfred… I’m sorry to take so long, Jim, but we do have to set the scene.
Jim: These are good stuff, right?
Glenn: Set the stage for his brother. Alfred was also a womanizer and had ultimately gone on to father, over the course of his life, 22 children by four different women. My Uncle Alfred did this. He was a polygamist, a closeted polygamist, you could say. He had overlapping families, the 12 Roses, the Magnificent Seven, the Dynamic Duo and the Lone Ranger. They formed a family club, the Cartman Connection. My middle name, Glenn Cartman Loury, that’s my mother’s maiden name. That’s my mother’s brother’s name.
His family are the Cartman Clan, the Cartman Connection, which is a club consisting of the siblings all coming together across the different mothers and recognizing their commonality as a part of the tribe of the same tribe, and that’s how they break themselves down. The 12 Roses, the Magnificent Seven, et cetera. So I go on just to make the point. These dudes got a lot of you know what. They got a lot of it, a lot of it. Okay. Now, getting laid was like a big deal. It was like bragging rights, man. You wanted to get laid. You wanted to be a player. You wanted to be appealing to the opposite sex. You wanted to get sexual gratification.
I’m sorry, but this was part of the milieu. I’m not blaming these guys. I’m just saying that this was how I was coming along. But the thing was, I was younger than the other kids because I was this precocious bright kid. I was 12 years old when I went into high school. I was younger than the kids. I was a little bit of a squirt. All my hormones hadn’t had as much time to manifest their full effect.
Jim: And you were a bit of a nerd. You were a bit of a nerd. You remember the chess club, things like that.
Glenn: Yeah, and I did good at the Latin declensions and I was good at trigonometry. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That was me. So I was frustrated. Anyway, the long and short of it is I graduate from high school and I take this girl to my prom and I still am a virgin, but the next year it’s her prom. She was a junior when I was a senior. Now she’s a senior and she invites me to take her to her prom, and I want to make sure that we have some time in the backseat, but I need a backseat. I need a backseat. I have no car.
So I could go into the great details. The bottom line is I borrowed a car that was under repair on a service station lot and that you could start without the key. I found out that you could start this car from some kids who were fooling around in the neighborhood, and I went over and I started it. It started and I drove it off and hid it. And this was a hare-brained scheme, I tell you. It was madness. I understand how ridiculous it was.
You have to understand, this is a 17-year-old kid. I wanted to impress this girl. I wanted to take the car and I wanted to take her to park and neck and make out in the backseat after the prom. And of course, I get arrested on my way to pick her up to take her to the dance by the police who are looking for this vehicle, which has been reported missing from the service station lot. Little did I realize that they were going to catch me because they have radios. And that’s the story. I ended up with my father having to come and bail me out.
Jim: Yeah, fortunately they said, “All right, wise ass, don’t do that anymore, right?
Glenn: Yeah. I got a slap on the wrist because I was this nerdy kid who did a stupid thing. I was in a tuxedo. I was in my prom attire when they took me to the lockup.
Jim: Frankly, the cops must have been laughing their ass off because I’m sure they knew exactly what your motivation was. As I mentioned in the pregame, my dad was a cop, a Washington DC policeman, and he told us many a crazy tale that he ran across in his days, and he would’ve loved to have told that story. “Can you believe I saw some dude, he was going to try to get his girlfriend in the backseat, so he stole a car? But he was a nerdy-ass kid, so we let him go.”
Glenn: I get it. Yeah.
Jim: Oh, dear.
Glenn: It’s crazy. It’s crazy when I think back about it.
Jim: Unfortunately, today with this zero tolerance bullshit from the popo, you might’ve actually gotten in much more serious trouble than you did if you did something like that today.
Glenn: Yeah, you well might be right. I shudder to think. It was 1966. That was the year this happened.
Jim: In some ways, of course, the cops were worse in terms of blatant racism and beating. Where I grew up, cops beat you regularly, especially if you lied to them. And PG County, Maryland, famous for its violent police. But on the other hand, they’d let you go for things today they’d feel like they have to take you in on. So it was kind of cut both ways.
Might not have gotten that break. But anyway, let’s move on from there. You were this precocious, smart mathy kid, and you graduated from high school when you were, what, 16, I think? You were the class valedictorian, and then you went off to the quite good Illinois Institute of Technology. What happened there?
Glenn: Well, I messed up. I blew it. I didn’t go to class, I horsed around. I had my buddies. We’d go joyriding, drinking vodka in the middle of the day, hanging around pool halls, trying to pick up girls. I was irresponsible. I wasn’t focused. I used the freedom that I got when I transitioned from high school where supervision was much closer of what’s going on on a daily basis to college. I didn’t live on campus. I lived at home, but I commuted and I used that time to indulge myself and my wanting to have a good time.
I don’t know any other way of putting it. I disappointed my father who had scraped together a little bit of money to give me a nest egg, “Here, son, you’re going off to college.” And when he found out that I was in my second year being asked to take a leave of absence from school because of my poor grade performance, he said, “I’ll never give you another cent. You messed this up.”
And I ended up with my girlfriend getting pregnant. That was where that led. I made friends with a guy from New York City who liked to smoke weed, and was impressed with me taking him around the South Side pool hall scene, the storefront black pool halls, and who was just as footloose and fancy-free as I was at that time, and we didn’t help each other. But yeah, that’s what happened.
Jim: Ah, the temptations of life on the street.
Glenn: Yeah. Yeah.
Jim: And they’re real. I grew up in a rough place too. Not probably quite as rough, but I have to admit, when I came home from college in the summertime, I was quite the hooligan and hoodlum and we had lots of fun. But fortunately, I was able to hold back on that just enough to be able to go back to school and be responsible again. And so during this period, you worked at a printing…
Jim: … responsible again. So during this period, after you dropped out, you went to work at a printing plant. Tell us a little bit about that. Did you get married at that point to Charlene I think I recall?
Glenn: Yeah. I got married a couple of years later, but the kid came along before we were married. We did eventually marry. After I was messing up at college and flunking out, and then Charlene became pregnant, my girlfriend Charlene, I realized I needed to get a job. You couldn’t live around my Auntie Lois, even though we didn’t still live in her house. My mother had moved out with her third husband and lived in an apartment where I slept on the back porch. It was a two bedroom apartment, and they had a little sleeping area on the back porch, which was heated, and it was okay, but that’s how we were living.
And I realized I had to go to work and it was a balloon period in the US economy in the mid 1960s, 1967. And I easily found a job at a printing plant as a clerk, which was pretty well paying and there was overtime and there was the possibility of moving up the ladder a little bit. And all you needed to do was show up on time and know how to read the manual and add two and two. I did okay at that job, and I became a full-time employee. I started working with union members and people who had dirt under their fingernails at the end of the shift, and guys who walked around with these T-shirts with the sleeve rolled up and a pack of cigarettes tucked in the sleeve.
You couldn’t smoke on the shop floor, but they had smoking areas that were restricted and enclosed and guys would go in there and smoke. I was smoking at that time. I quit a few years later. But in any case, I went to work. I went to work at R.R. Donnelley and Sons, a big industrial strength printing operation that printed commercial magazines like Time, and Life, and Sports Illustrated, and Fortune, and National Geographic, but also printed telephone books and Sears catalogs and other such massive printing operations that were housed in a dozen buildings on a campus on the lakefront of Chicago, just south of Downtown Chicago.
Jim: Actually, I know a little bit about R.R. Donnelley. They were a big ass company, at least they were. And the other thing about them, they were always at the cutting edge of technical innovation in the printing industry. They had 3M developed for them certain kinds of glue, special kinds of packaging. And it turned out a friend of mine was a management consultant to them for a number of years, and he was always telling these stories about how advanced they were.
But anyway, during that time, you went from being this dude smoking too much reefer and drinking too much vodka instead of studying to an execution machine, where you signed up for community college. I read this part and I go, “Holy shit, how’d the guy even take a dump?” You were working full time, you were taking a full course load, I believe, at the community college. You had your family responsibilities and you were driving from one to the other to the other. And I go, “Whoa, this is impressive.” Tell us a little bit about that EPOC.
Glenn: Well, yeah, I think the way I tell it is that I disappointed my father and I wanted to re-establish his respect. And I think that was the underlying driving motive. I had the baby, Lisa, who had come along, Charlene’s firstborn. I had mea culpa, I did mess up. I realized I had it handed to me on a silver platter and I messed up. So I was determined to right the ship. I wanted to be able to command the respect of my peers, in my father in the first instance, but of my family more generally and maybe of my own self-respect. So I determined to re-establish the pursuit of education by going back to taking classes when I wasn’t working.
When I decided to take the community college classes, I had shifted my work schedule so that I could work either the second or the third shift, either from 4:00 to 12:00 or from 12:00 to 8:00 AM instead of working during the day and I would go to classes during the day. And I was serious about the classwork. I was taking accounting and math and the German language and determined to get my foot back on the ladder. My plan was to transfer to go to a year of community college and then to transfer to the University of Illinois Chicago campus of the University of Illinois and get a BA. That was my plan. And my clerical work at the printing factory was flexible.
They had a three shift operation there, so I could be assigned to cover a part of the accounting record keeping that I was doing on the second or the third shift as opposed to on the first shift. And that gave me the flexibility to take classes. I took classes, I put my notes to the grindstone, and you’re right, it was frenetic. I’d get up at my mother’s place, I’d go over to see Charlene and the kids because soon enough, a second kid came along, a year after Lisa, Tamara came along, and then I’d make my way to class, and then I’d make my way to the factory for an eight-hour shift, and then I’d make my way home trying to grab some dinner in between. It was pretty crazy.
Jim: Yeah, it made me tired just reading it, to tell you the truth. It’s extremely impressive. Here’s a guy who turns himself around entirely. So the fruits of this labor is that you get invited to apply to Northwestern?
Glenn: I do. I get discovered by my math teacher who’s a Northwestern alum and a retired engineer who’s teaching at this community college. He’s teaching calculus. He says, “You’re really good at this. You ought to get a real education.” And he recommends me to Northwestern, which is looking for Black kids from the inner city that they can reach out to who might not have otherwise come to their attention, and I’m one such.
They give me a full scholarship after an interview. My SAT tests were always strong, but my track record at college was weak. I had dropped out. What I had was a year and a half of good community college grades and the personal recommendation of Mr. Andros, who was my teacher, and they took a chance on me and let me in. And that was a life-changing opportunity for me.
Jim: Well, then you pretty much slayed it when you were at Northwestern, right?
Glenn: Or so he says, the author of this tale, whom you have to treat with a certain degree of skepticism, but yes, indeed, I did well, I aced everything. I was the star of math, and I was math major and an ECON minor. And after two years of straight A’s and everything and taking graduate courses and whatnot, my professors in economics had pretty much persuaded me that I would be best served by pursuing a PhD in economics. And I went on to apply to top programs and get admitted in top programs. But yeah, I discovered the life of the mind at Northwestern University in 1970, ’71, ’72. I discovered what mathematical logic was, I discovered what political theory was, what existentialism and humanism and such were.
I became aware that there was a lot to know. I can remember the circular tower library, this newly built library complex at Northwestern, where when I’d get off on the third shift, sometimes at 8:00 AM, and I’d get up there and I’d had two or three hours before my first class, I’d just wander in the stacks. It was like having an encyclopedia that was as big as a building. There was just everything going on. I was interested in everything. And that’s where I realized that I wanted to become and to be an intellectual, that I wanted to be a scholar as my life’s work.
Jim: Now, did you feel any dissonance, and looking at your family background you probably had more support than many in terms of your academic pursuits, do you have some dissonance as a Black young man becoming dedicated to the life of the mind?
Glenn: Oh, no. Although I can easily imagine that nowadays some people might. It’s too white, but how silly is that? And I don’t mean to put anybody down, I just mean really the inheritance of human culture to limit yourself and your experience of it based upon that kind of a consideration of identity, that’s a very small move. That’s an infantilizing move. It’s putting your head in the sand. It’s Know-Nothingism. So, no. Now, did I have a lot of role models of people I could look at and say, “I want to be like him because he looks like me”? No, I didn’t have that. And maybe it showed in the ways in which I handled or mishandled some other challenges that I faced coming along. But no, I never felt reticent about my enthusiasm. And I try to convey this sensibility in the book, my enthusiasm for the life of the mind and for ideas that, “Hey, hey, ho, ho Western civ has got to go,” sensibility. Again, I’ll say it’s small, it’s limiting, and we deserve better, and there’s a lot to know.
Jim: That’s a wonderful place to have gotten to. So you wrap up at Northwestern, do really good, and go on to your graduate studies in economics where you get accepted at a bunch of places and you chose to go to MIT, is that right?
Glenn: Yeah. I tell in the book about I applied at Berkeley and Chicago and Harvard-MIT. And I did get accepted everywhere I applied. And I tell about, well, the choice between Harvard and MIT, I was favorable to MIT because my teachers urged me to go to the department where the faculty were really interested in graduate education and were available and accessible. And that was MIT because that ethos was definitely a part of the MIT culture. Guys work with their doors open and you could just walk in. Of course, obviously, there’s a secretary in the outer office and if somebody’s working on something, they don’t want to be disturbed. But basically, they were accessible and Harvard wasn’t like that. They also cautioned me against going to the University of Chicago, the great tradition in economics there that I admire, and even in those days, understood well enough to know that it was admirable because they thought it too conservative, too ideologically free market oriented.
And this was the Keynesian versus the monetarist and this idea and central planning and governmental program versus free enterprise. And this ideological division, the people who were most influential on me were on the left side of the line, and they thought Chicago was just a little too political right for me. It would’ve been a lot easier on my family, my young wife and two children, if we had stayed close to home and I would’ve gotten a fine education at Chicago, and you can do the game of trying to wonder what it might’ve been if I had done this instead of that, but yeah, I ended up at MIT after all of that.
Jim: Yeah, we were there at the same time. I think you were there, what, ’72 to ’76?
Glenn: That’s right.
Jim: And I was there from ’71 to ’75.
Glenn: Oh, wow. How about that? What was your field?
Jim: I started in physics but bailed from it when I decided that I was good enough to be an experimentalist, but not good enough to be a theorist. And I then dabbled around and decided what I wanted to do, and I considered economics. And I took two economics courses, including one from Samuelson himself in a 15-person seminar format macroeconomics. And I concluded that economics must be bullshit if they think macroeconomics is actually a reasonable discipline because at that time, macroeconomics was a whole bunch of hand waving.
I loved micro, but I hated… I just was like, “What?” And of course, now as a Santa Fe Institute complexity science guy, I see how you could connect the two. But in those days, the two were completely unconnected. It just seemed to me micro was sound, macro was bullshit. And if they would let world-famous guys teach something as goofy as intro macro, I didn’t want anything to do with it. Now, obviously, a very immature attitude. I was only 19 at the time, smoking way too much reefer. But that was my intersection with the economics department. And then I went on to get an undergraduate degree at the Sloan School, so we probably passed each other in the hallway.
Glenn: It’s quite possible. In those years, I did spend time at the Sloan School too. It was right next door to the economics department there on Memorial Drive.
Jim: Yeah.
Glenn: Yeah.
Jim: Absolutely.
Glenn: And I see what you’re saying, I can see how a person with a science physics background might find the hand waving inelegance of macro, which was and is, you could argue, kind of confused. It is a hard problem that there are a set of problems that they’re trying to deal with, but you could see how a person might want more rigor and micro provides that rigor, although at the expense of narrowing the questions under consideration to those that admit to a very formalistic assessment. And I’m an applied micro theorist myself, so I get where you’re coming from.
Jim: Yeah, I said I have gotten to understand, especially through the agent-based modeling and things like that, that there are ways to tie the two together where you can use, let’s assume, an actor, and let’s not make him an Homo economist, but a rational actor. And you can get something like macro phenomena that emerges from micro behavior.
Glenn: Yeah, you can. You must know my friend, Sam Bowles.
Jim: Oh, I love Sam. In fact, I reviewed a chapter in his microeconomics book when he was writing it.
Glenn: I see. Yeah.
Jim: He’s the guy that is my kind of economist, right?
Glenn: Nothing wrong with that. I admire Sam a lot. Rajiv Sethi is another economist who I know has a Santa Fe connection.
Jim: I don’t know him, but I obviously know the name. So anyway, you go through and you actually work with Robert Solow, one of the more distinguished economists in the world. And I went through and counted the time, you got your PhD in four years, which was damn near impossible at MIT, you must have hustled.
Glenn: Well, it wasn’t uncommon in the economics department to finish in four years. I think that might’ve been the modal number of years for-
Jim: And the science is five or six at least, right?
Glenn: Yeah. You get to writing research papers even toward the end of your second year. And a lot of people’s dissertations consisted of three essays where they had three small research problems that they had developed in the context of their coursework or had pursued immediately during the third year after completing coursework. Usually, the first year was all required to core stuff. And then the second year was three or four fields where you’d branch out into different substantive areas of investigation. And then you had two years to write your dissertation. So it was a different model perhaps than in the hard sciences.
Jim: So not as impressive as it sounds, but still pretty good, right? Four years with Solow, that would’ve been some very interesting work. Now, during that time, the family life got to be pretty stressful.
Glenn: Yeah. I’m not sure what period of my stress-filled life you want me to recall right now.
Jim: Frankly, unfortunately, I didn’t write down in my notes when Splitsville happened with Charlene.
Glenn: Oh, yeah. Well, we’ve been growing apart. I describe in the book how my life and Charlene’s life differed when we got to Cambridge, when I was a PhD student. I am completely absorbed with classes and studying and seminars and problem sets, and she is working eight hours a day as a secretary at the Draper Laboratory complex and then getting the kids from daycare trying to make sure that the shopping is done and that the dinner gets prepared and stuff like this. I am immersed in this world, it’s not just economics, it’s a whole culture. These are among some of the most promising young people from India, from England, from France, from Italy, from Japan, who are my classmates, and I’m interacting with them. And I’m the guy who had the experience of doing a BA at Northwestern University and of getting a certain amount of education in contemporary philosophy and in politics and in European culture, and Charlene is not.
She had to leave high school as a student to give birth to our first child, Lisa, when she was 16 years old and had completed her high school education through a GED equivalency examination process, and was much less too interested in a depth that equipped for the kind of social intercourse that came up naturally in the MIT milieu. And finding a way to make sure that our relationship survived and was able to sustain itself was a problem. We were growing apart. On top of that, an old girlfriend who before Charlene and Lisa and Tamara came into my life, but who Charlene knew of, came to visit me in Cambridge. And we went out to lunch together, me and the old girlfriend, and Charlene happened to see us on the street. And she asked me, “Who is this person you’re walking with?”
And I lied, and I told her it was just one of my classmates. And she knew that was not true and that precipitated an argument. And that argument was kind of the mother of all the arguments that we had been having and that culminated. And the end of the dispute about this particular incident, which was carrying the freight of the totality of our living situation at that time was me saying, “I’m out of here,” her saying, “Yeah, get out of here,” and me moving to the YMCA where I rented a room for a few weeks until I could find a place to live and separating, and we never lived together again after that.
Jim: I’ve been fortunate. I’ve been married to my wife for 43 years because we both grown in not identical directions, but about the same rate. And I often see that people whose growth trajectories are very different, have a hard time staying married over the long haul. That sounds like what happened in this case.
Glenn: That was one of the things that happened. I don’t know that it was the only thing, but as I try to recollect what happened, Charlene who is fortunately still living, is not here to speak for herself. I’m sure she’d have something to say.
Jim: Right. Now, let’s get back to the idea space. At that time, as I recall, the MIT economics department would’ve been considered moderately left wing, right? Where was your head at politically at that time?
Glenn: I didn’t really have a politics. I was a techno guy. I was a math whiz. I was just interested in the proof, the theorem, the method, the technique, the stochastic process, the asymptotic properties, the dynamic system, the stability conditions, the matrix, the Jacobians and separating hyperplanes and the topological properties of certain spaces used to represent certain… Things like that. That’s where my head was. I was not political.
It’s true that MIT, led by the great Paul Samuelson, he wrote a column for Newsweek magazine every month, and Milton Friedman wrote a column for Newsweek magazine from the University of Chicago every month. And they kind of faced off against each other as the public intellectual economists from the left and the right respectively. So Samuelson was left but not far left, not Marxian, not radical, not socialist, but friendly to intervention, to public policy that aims to try to correct market imperfection and recognizing market imperfection and a kind of neoclassical synthesis, I think is… Anyway, we could go into the details, but yeah, they were mildly left of center. But me, I was just interested in proving the theorems.
Jim: So you hadn’t picked up the political bug quite yet at that point?
Glenn: Not yet. I was interested in ideas. I knew who the libertarians were. I knew who Ayn Rand was, and I read Robert Nozick when I was in graduate school, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which was published in the early-1970s, right around the time I was in graduate school. And I read A Theory of Justice. I didn’t understand either book, really. I came closer to understanding Nozick than I did Rawls, but I have since had to spend time with those books to get some sense of what they argue. But I was interested in broader ideas than just technical economics, some of which touched on politics, but not in any polemical kind of partisan political way.
Jim: Okay, interesting. So you graduate from MIT with a very distinguished advisor, and you get lots of job offers, as many as you want, probably, right? And a Black guy at a time when people are looking for a super smart Black guy in a field that was White dudes from top to bottom, pretty much, at that time, at least as I recall, looking around the economics department, and you decided to go back to where you’d gotten your undergraduate degree. How’d that come about and what was your thinking at the time?
Glenn: I got an offer at Harvard, I got an offer at Michigan, I got an offer at Berkeley, I got an offer at the Rand Corporation, LA, and at Bell Laboratories, New Jersey. I left off the last two because I wanted to do an academic post teaching and research, and with unrestricted research, not research channeled into a particular… And I chose Northwestern in part to get back to Chicago. My marriage had split. Charlene and the kids had moved back to Chicago. They were in Chicago. And my family and my life prior to coming to MIT had been in Chicago.
So that was attractive. And Northwestern was a very good department, especially in my field of economic theory. It was a very strong department with a good incumbent faculty and with the ability to attract talented young additional faculty, which it did do in the years that I was there. It was a good job. And Harvard was offering me 12 grand a year. Northwestern offered me 18 grand a year. This is 1976. That’s a 50% difference in salary. So I wanted to go home. It was a really, really good department in economic theory, and I could afford that Buick Skyhawk that I wanted to buy.
Jim: It ended up, you didn’t stick there. Tell us a little bit about your relationships with your peers there in the department, and what caused you to then move on fairly quickly?
Glenn: Well, there was kind of a push and kind of a pull. So Marcus Alexis is an African-American economist, now deceased. He’s very distinguished. You could look him up, Marcus Alexis. He’s got much to his credit. He was a professor at Northwestern when I was a student there, and he had taken me to some degree under his wing and was one of my mentors amongst the professoriate when I was a student at Northwestern, 1970, ’71, ’72, who influenced me. He was one of the influences. And when I came back to the department he and I… There’s kind of this protege thing. He had also brought me on as a adjunct faculty for a summer program for minority students in economics that he, as a professor, oversaw, and that I, as a graduate student, participated in during the summer where it was students of color, Black and Latino kids, from around the country who were trying to do PhDs in economics who were still undergraduates.
It’s like a summer boot camp where you did intensive coursework on micro and macroeconomics and statistics. And I participated in that under Marcus’s direction. So he was like an older mentor type figure. And I tell the story in the book, I don’t necessarily need to go into it in great detail here, but there was some tension between us on not so much political as on racial identity matters. And I wanted to be on my own. I wanted to, as it were, not be under his thumb a little bit, is the way that I felt. That was the push. The pull was Michigan, which had offered me a position when I came out of graduate school. They were still interested. And my second wife, Linda Datcher Loury, the late economist who passed away in 2011, but whom I married in 1983, she became my second wife.
She and I had become close during my last year at MIT. So when I moved to Chicago, she and I remained in touch. And her first job two years after I moved to Chicago was at Michigan. We moved together and became a couple in the year that I decided to decamp from Northwestern and accept Michigan’s persistent entreaties to see me as a member of their faculty. I accepted, I resigned my position at Northwestern, and I moved to Michigan with tenure after three years out of MIT and Linda and I took up together, and we subsequently married some years later.
Jim: And you were promoted to full professor one year after you got to Michigan?
Glenn: Well, yeah, because I got an offer from Princeton.
Jim: But you didn’t stay at Michigan either. Tell us why that turned out not to necessarily be the best fit.
Glenn: I got the call, what I call the call. We made a big joke out of it in the economics department in Michigan. There was this guy, a jokester named George Johnson, and George’s thing was to make fun of people when they were too-
Glenn: … thing was to make fun of people when they were too full of themselves. And one of the ways that he did this was to pretend that he was on the phone calling from Harvard, “Hello, this is Dick Caves. I’m calling to see if you’d be interested in a position, if you’d like to come and join us.” He’d say this, Dick Caves was in those years the chairman of the Economics Department at Harvard, Richard Caves. And this affected phone call was, “You’re just grandstanding, playing to the crowd, hoping that somebody will notice, that somebody will call you up and ask you to… Because you’re trying to get ahead in the profession, you’re a grandee, you’re self-promoting.” This was George.
So I got the call. I got the call, Tom Schelling, whom I’ve mentioned, the game theorist, was chair of an ad hoc committee impaneled by Henry Rosovsky, the fabled economic historian and dean of the faculty at Harvard University in the 1970s and ’80s. And Rosovsky had impaneled this committee to try to beef up the faculty of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard, which had fallen on hard times, which was not up to Harvard’s standards in terms of the academic distinction that a Harvard department should aspire to.
And so they went on massive searches in economics, in history, in english or american literature. Hired Werner Sollors, who is still there, who is, I would assume by now, professor emeritus of Literature at Harvard; and the late Nathan Huggins, a distinguished African American historian, were hired. And I was hired by this committee in economics in a joint appointment between the Economics Department and the Afro-American Studies Department. I was propositioned while at Michigan by Tom Schelling and the committee as to whether I’d entertain the offer. I went out there, I had dinner at the president’s house. I met people, I looked around.
Linda and I were by then close to marrying. They found a postdoc for her for two years at the Kennedy School while she looked around for a position that worked out for her. She ended up getting a job at Tufts where she served for 25 years before passing away. But yeah, I took the job at Harvard, coming from Michigan, as professor of Economics and of Afro-American Studies with responsibilities in both departments.
Jim: What was your thinking? I mean, it’s a big change from being a nerd math economist to spending half your time in African American Studies, which as far as I know, doesn’t have much math in it at all. I suppose you could apply Markov chains to it if you wanted to, but that must’ve been a big life decision to decide to cut your intellectual life into two parts. Tell us about your thinking and what brought you to make the decision to say yes to that.
Glenn: Well, they sold me on it, Harvard did. I was already walking a line and I try to describe that line in the book. I go back to my graduate school days and I talk about a talking to that I got from Dick Eckhouse. Richard Eckhouse, the late, he passed away last year, development economist. So the man who trained the likes of Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs and other very prominent economists were mentored by Dick Eckhouse. He was the faculty advisor to the outreach program that MIT established to try to recruit students of color, Black students to their PhD program. And I had a relationship with Richard. I would go into his office and talk to him about this or about that. And oftentimes he would take the initiative in those conversations with giving advice because I was a standout student and I was Black, I was at MIT and Richard took an interest in me.
And he said, “There’s going to always be demands on you as a Black person doing economics, even though your field of specialization might be specialized in technical, to have something to say about poverty and about inequality and about racism and discrimination and slavery and all of that. It’s kind of, you should prepare yourself to know.” And in the decisions about what courses to take. Do I take urban economics or do I take monetary economics? Do I take development economics or do I take fiscal economics? Do I take economic history focused on the nineteenth-century American experience or do I take international economics that gives me an idea about how growth has been uneven in the global context?
There were all these kinds of decisions to make, and the years are 1972, ’73, ’74. Black power is still alive. South Africa hasn’t had Sharpeville yet. It hasn’t had Soweto yet, not really. The struggle still has decades yet to go in South Africa. It’s mobilizing people. People are political. “Are you an economist who just happens to be Black or are you a Black economist?” That’s the kind of question you’d get from people. “You’re privileged, you have access to this great citadel of learning. How are you using that privilege on behalf of social good?” is a question that you would receive. And I was always moved by those questions and I took Richard’s warning to me quite seriously and I fretted about was I Black enough as an economist and what did that mean?
And even in my abstract theorizing, I wanted to apply the theorizing. The theorizing was I have a Markov chain, continuous state, discrete time, stochastic process, which I can characterize by certain integral equation. Under what circumstances, what are the conditions sufficient to know that regardless of the initial distribution characteristic of this stochastic process, the asymptotic behavior of it will be of a particular kind. It’ll go to a stationary state with enough iteration regardless of where it starts out at. Because I want to use that stationary state as a sufficient statistic for the inequality, embodying content of the transition process, if you get what I’m saying.
Jim: Exactly. It’s an attractor state, right?
Glenn: Yeah. It’s an attractor state for a dynamical system and the move from state T to state T plus one, iteration T to T plus one can be represented in a certain mathematical way, and I want to know what specific qualities of that mathematical representation are sufficient to ensure a unique globally stable attractor. And I set up a framework and I proved this kind of thing.
But what’s the framework? The framework is inequality in society because the stochastic process is modeling the outcome of dynamic income producing processes for individual families, and there’s an element of chance in that and that generates a random system and that allows me to carry out this program. Anyway, you can see that it’s very abstruse, but it’s about inequality and that’s kind like where I was. So that was one chapter of my dissertation.
Another chapter of my dissertation, where I introduced the phrase social capital, I’m saying I want to know whether the Blacks will catch up if you discriminate against them in the past, but you stop discriminating against them at a certain point in time and otherwise the system of economic interactions is fair. Does the weight of history eventually wash out? Under what circumstances will the weight of history eventually wash out? And what I was able to prove in my formalistic way was that if you had social, as well as economic processes that were going on side by side, and they were both consequential for economic outcomes. The social processes are things like stable integrated neighborhoods, residential neighborhoods where people don’t move. Friendship and commercial and business interactions that cut across the racial lines, peer groups where the informal interaction… Families, where the internal non-market processes are materially consequential for personal development. And if you had race infecting those processes as well as economic market processes, then the economic inequality wouldn’t necessarily disappear even if you had complete equal opportunity on the economic side. That was another one of my problems that I set for myself in my dissertation.
Sorry to go on so long, but just to say, you asked me how did I get to taking up this bifurcated intellectual portfolio. I had already, for a decade before I got to Harvard, been worrying about how to be a Black economist, how to be both a technically proficient and renowned contributor to the canon of economic theory, but also a person whose intellectual work could be counted on as part of the effort to make the world a better place.
Jim: This is maybe a tough question, but is that assumption that you have to go that way unfair to a Black person who wants to be a serious scholar? White people don’t have that thing hanging over them, that they need to be both a very top economist who is Black but also be a Black economist. Is that an unfair burden to put on a Black economist?
Glenn: It’s a burden for sure. I think unfair is a separate question. I talk in the book about how a couple of Jewish guys, Steve Chevelle and Meyer Cohn, they were a couple of years ahead of me as graduate students when I got to MIT, but my reputation preceded me and I did well on the first semester, and so they knew that I was up and coming. And I’m Black, and that made me stand out. And they took me aside. We were chatting over lunch one day and they asked me if I knew who David Blackwell was. David Blackwell is an African American, he’s now deceased, a great statistician who was the first Black person to have tenure at the University of California Berkeley in any discipline. And he got tenure there in like 1955 or 1956 or something like that. But David Blackwell was a contemporary mathematical statistician, a contemporary of Kenneth Arrow, the grade economist. And they actually overlapped in the work groups at the Rand Corporation, which used to have a very distinguished high level mathematical statistics study group there. And Blackwell and Arrow were colleagues there.
Anyway, David Blackwell, they asked me if I knew who he was and I did know who he was because he was a great statistician and he was Black, and I discovered him when I was an undergraduate. I actually wrote him as a idol, somebody I really admired, with a naive question for academic advice because he’s Black and he was a distinguished mathematician and I was a math whiz when I was in college. I had written him and he responded to my letter, so I knew who David Blackwell was. And they said to me, these Jewish guys, “You want to do something for your people? Be like David Blackwell. Be the best technical economist that you can be. Don’t let your research be driven by your desire to do something for Black people. Do something on the problems that you’re interested in at the highest possible level of technical virtuosity and let the chips fall where they may.” That was their advice to me. I didn’t, of course follow that advice, but I juxtaposed that advice to the advice I was getting from Richard Eckhouse because that captured perfectly the tug of war that was waging within myself, and it explains why I produced dissertations which are ostensibly about inequality, but which are really about the behavior of discrete time, continuous state, Markov chains as T goes to infinity.
Jim: Interesting, interesting, interesting. It’s interesting. When you get to Harvard, you find the culture maybe being a little different than you thought or not necessarily something you vibed with?
Glenn: I was in two departments, I was in Economics and I was in Afro-American Studies, and I didn’t handle the responsibilities of those, as you have noted, very different intellectual cultures very well. I mean, Afro is a humanities-driven discipline. It’s about history, it’s about literature, it’s about philosophy. It’s a little bit about sociology and politics, and it can be a little bit about economics, but it’s mainly about narrative, about representation, about the social construction of reality along racial dimensions, and that’s a humanistic enterprise. And I warmed to it to a certain degree, even though I was a neophyte. I mean, I wasn’t uninterested in it. It intrigued me because I had this inclination going back to undergraduate school of wandering through the stacks of the library and just pulling down anything that looked interesting. And the Afro part of my Harvard portfolio had that feel to it.
On the other hand, economics at the highest level was an extremely demanding and competitive game. And I needed, if I wanted to become the fulfillment of my promise as a young scholar, whiz kid at Northwestern undergrad, strong, top of my class at MIT as a theorist, good job market with offers all over the place and papers. I had papers, the Review of Economic Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Econometrica. I had been publishing, that’s how I got the offer at Princeton in 1980, and that’s how I got the offer at Harvard in 1982. I had a really good publication record. I was off to a strong start. I described this in the book.
So to fulfill that mission, the mission of continuing ascendancy and establishing myself in the top tier of under 40 economic theorists, because it’s not what you did yesterday. It is what have you done for me lately? It’s what are you working on? It’s what have you got under review and resubmit at a top journal? It’s what’s your grant going to be for? What’s the next project going to be? It’s what’s your program? And I didn’t have that. I didn’t have an economic theory research program that was robust and that I could say, “Here’s how the things that I’ve been doing so far accumulate into the question that I want to ask about this important open area in economic theory.” I didn’t have that.
To make that point more vivid in my mind that I didn’t have it, I was looking over my shoulder at my colleagues at Northwestern who had been young, assistant professors in the same cohort, roughly as had I. I came in 1976, so did Roger Myerson. Bengt Holmstrom came in 1977. Paul Milgrom came in 1978. They were working with Leo Hurwitz and Stanley Ryder. Leo is from Minneapolis. He was at the University of Minnesota, but he was a part of the math community at Northwestern. He and Stanley Ryder who was at Northwestern and who chaired the math community there were collaborators. Anyway, all of these guys except Stan are Nobel laureates in economics today. Roger is, Bengt is, Paul Milgrom is, Leo Hurwitz is if he’s still living, and I was right there with them. I remember the early seminars when they were working out their theories of auctions, their theory of asymmetric information and mechanism design, their theory of incentive compatibility. These are technical terms of art, but they are the working bread and butter of applied economics of information and institutional design theory types today, and that was created at Northwestern in the years that I was there. I was watching this happen.
That’s a fruitful research program. That’s what it means to be a player in the economic theory game. I knew what it meant to be a player, and I knew that I wasn’t being a player sitting in my office in Economics or in Afro looking at my blank page and trying to figure out where was the question? What was the method? Where was the problem? What am I doing? What am I working on? I had ideas, but the ideas were all not good enough, not deep enough, not profound enough, not serious enough, not good enough. And I choked, I panicked. I lost my nerve. I said, “I don’t know if I can stick this out. I cannot bear the thought of being mediocre at something, of just being an also-ran.”
And when the opportunity to move out of economics altogether and out of the appointment that I had at Harvard in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which had my joint responsibilities and into the Kennedy School of Government, where the role I would play would be more of a, “You’re a theorist and you do math modeling, and every now and then you’ll flash that at us, but you’re really working on public policy and political and contemporary partisan argument. You’re really trying to get your piece in the Atlantic monthly or in the New Republic as opposed to the American Economic Review or Econometrica. You’re really trying to influence policy makers. The teaching that you’re doing is not just to fuzzy-cheeked bright teenagers and young adolescents, but it’s to military officers and senior political officials who’ve come in for executive training programs to learn how to sharpen their exercise of their responsibilities in the management of public affairs.”
And I took the chance to get out of the game of economic theory, which I was losing because I couldn’t find my way in the maze at Harvard and to jump into the public intellectual game where I wasn’t half bad because I could write pretty well. I could speak on my feet, and I had some issues. I had the themes of race inequality and my heterodox critique of the mainstream view about race and inequality to go on, and that’s what led me to move out of economics after I’d come to Harvard. By 1984, I was out of the Economics Department and into the Kennedy School of Government.
Jim: Rethinking about replaying the tape is essentially impossible as we know, but do you think taking the bifurcation… You were amazingly young to be a full professor at Harvard. I mean, you might have been the youngest one there, I don’t know. But do you think that if you had not taken the joint appointment, you would’ve found your way in economics?
Glenn: Yeah, I mean, I think it would’ve been what it would’ve been. There are no guarantees that I’m going to end up with a Nobel Prize at the end of this alternative history. But would I had been able to hold my head up high as a journeyman member of a strong department like the University of Michigan where I was before I went to Harvard? Sure. And if I had taken the offer at Princeton that came along before then, I’m sure I would’ve been okay at Princeton as well. I would’ve found my way, and I mean, I might’ve been even better than okay. I don’t think you can know the answer to that question. It would’ve been different though.
I called them my little essays because that’s what Bob called them. Bob Solo, my thesis advisor who when he found out that I was in trouble at Harvard in 1982, 1983, he actually invited me to move over to MIT. Their department had had a deliberation, and they had decided that they’d be prepared to extend to me a professorial slot if I wanted to come home to MIT. But Bob made it clear that if I were to accept that offer, it would be on the understanding that my intellectual portfolio is going to reorient itself to focus on scientific work and not on public intellectual work, which would be, that’s okay for a cherry on top, but that should not be the main course.
And I turned that down and decided to make the Kennedy School my play at Harvard. And it was a moment of truth for me too, because if I had taken that, there’s no guarantee that I would’ve been as much of a player as I needed to feel myself being in order to be able to hold my head up high amongst my MIT colleagues, and then I would’ve had to live with the reality of being an also-ran, which is…
Jim: I’m going to ask you a really tough question here that just struck me. You’re obviously an extremely bright guy, as are all top theoretical economists, but as in any social status game, are you a little smarter or a little less smart than the other dude? You go to the Kennedy School, you’re dealing with intellectual lightweights in comparison. Did you know that you would be the big brain in the pond of smaller brains, and was that part of your motivation?
Glenn: Yeah, you’re right. That’s a very unsettling question, but it’s true because I think there is certainly merit in it in the supposition that the level of brainpower in the room when you’re in a top level economic theory seminar is different from the level of brainpower, just IQ, just sheer mental candle power.
Jim: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Glenn: I think that’s true, and I think if I’m being honest with myself, it probably did play a role, although I don’t know how much it was in the front of my mind, but a sense of confidence. I mean, after all, they were delighted. They were honored that I was there. I mean, they recognized that, “You’re a heavyweight.”
Jim: I mean, you were always the smartest guy in the room, let’s be honest.
Glenn: Which is not to say that the people at the Kennedy School were not smart. I mean, I think of my friend Richard Zeckhauser, the economist who did a PhD at Harvard, but in his faculty appointment when he came out with his PhD was at Harvard also. He’s been at Harvard his whole life, Richard Zeckhauser, a very fine economist and distinguished public intellectual. And I mean, he’s smart as a whip. I mean, it’s not like he’s not smart. But as a general rule, I think what you’re saying is correct about the place and about the ethos. And so, yeah, they were happy to have me, being honored by what I would add to the mix, and I felt confident that I’d be able to hold my own. And I did hold my own there for the years I was at the Kennedy School.
Jim: Now, you’re having these amazing successes, not without bumps and decisions that maybe you would’ve made differently or not, but you are clearly a star in your academic life, a very bright star and with a huge future and all this. But there were things going on in your private life, and at least my reading of it, it reached its denouement with the relationship with Pamela. Maybe you could talk a little about what led to that and then what happened.
Glenn: The bottom line is through these years, in the early years of my marriage to Linda Datcher Loury, in the period that I was going through my career challenges at Harvard, I was leading a double life. I was doing a lot of running the streets late at night, hooking up, hanging out in bars, smoking weed, and developing illicit extramarital relationships, and they were numerous. And I described most of them in the book. I say at the book, I couldn’t tell it all because the thing would never end, and that’s not bragging, that’s a confession.
And I am catting around, and I’m using this double life as a way of dealing with some psychological challenges with the enemy within, what I call the enemy within in the book, because I have identity issues. I mean, again, it’s about being Black. It’s about being Black enough. I don’t want to lose my connection to my roots somehow. I don’t want to become one of those effete, snobbish, alienated from the ghetto, from the real gritty authenticity of the thing. I don’t want to become one of those Black guys, one of those second or third generation middle class African American…
I called them the Negro Cognoscenti. They knew a lot about what fork to use at dinner and what wine went with what entree, but they didn’t know anything about how to cop weed in the projects and how to go into the bar and pick up the girl that is there to be picked up and not make a fool out of yourself. They didn’t know anything about that, and I knew how to do that. So I did it as a way of proving to myself… Was it really this? I fear to confess to you and to your audience that it was this. As a way of proving to myself that I hadn’t lost touch with my roots, even though I had of course lost touch with my roots because how could I have reached my full developmental potential without, as it were, losing touch with my roots?
So I was doing that, and Pamela Foster was like the culmination of this process in that she was a young woman with whom I give her name because if you go Glenn Loury Mistress in Google, you’ll probably find her name. 1986, ’87, and she writes occasionally from Smith College where she’s a student and then she graduates. And I answer, she’s an admirer of my pieces in the New Republic, just like you, Jim.
Jim: Luckily, I’m straight.
Glenn: And I reply to these cordially and more or less helpfully, and she graduates and she says, “I’d like to get your advice.” And so she lives in New York, I’m in DC. I say, “Why don’t you come down to DC? We can meet for a drink and we can get to know…
Glenn: … I say, “Why don’t you come down to DC, we can meet for a drink and we can get to know each other.” And she does. I’m at a meeting at the Hey Adams Hotel, which is a high-end hotel near the White House in Washington DC, which has exquisite rooms, one of which I am occupying as I’m there for meeting. And we have a drink in the barn, and I basically proposition her, I invite her up to my room and she says yes. And that begins a torrid affair.
And I go head over heels for this young woman and I end up moving her from New York where her job has just reached its expiration date and her lease on her apartment is expired, and she’s footloose and fancy-free. And I say, “Why don’t you come up to Boston? I’ll take care of you and we can carry on.” And she does and we do. Until we don’t. Because it’s all told in the book, I tell the whole gritty… All the details in the book. We get into a fight. In the fight, I throw her out of the apartment. I mean to say, I literally put her out. She doesn’t want to go.
To the other side of the door, and I close the door. I touch her, I put my hands on her. I don’t strike her, I don’t kick her, I don’t abuse her, I don’t believe I injure her. But she files an assault charge against me based upon that altercation. And I get publicly humiliated because I have to present myself for booking. And I have to be arraigned. Now, this is happening while I am this high-flying, nationally known, under-40 wunderkind, black, conservative upstart. I’ve come to the attention of the Reagan administration, the Secretary of Education is scouting me out to become his deputy. This gets in the press.
So I have to withdraw from any political appointment and I have to endure both legal jeopardy and the public humiliation, and the humiliation to my wife, and the injury to my marriage and the whole thing. And it’s public and it’s played out in the newspapers. And I go through that and I described that in the book. But that’s the culmination of a long process of double life development in which your humble servant becomes a player of a particular kind. This is part of what in the preface, which you so admired, the meta preference. I was talking about when I said I’m going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anyone to think was true of them, and yet they are true about me, and I’m telling you. So you know can trust me. This is part of that.
Jim: We’ll get back to the next turn of the screw, but first, let’s go back to politics. You described yourself at that point as a conservative. You said previously you had really not played the politics game. You go to the Kennedy School and you’re hanging out with guys like Bill Bennett and who was the other, little Crystal? I think it was the younger Crystal.
Glenn: Yeah, William Crystal. Yeah.
Jim: Yeah, the son. Those guys are kind of right, but not nut right like we have today, but like traditional conservatives. Is that where you picked up the more conservative perspective or just tell me the story about your political journey in how you’ve thought about things. Because I will say before I go into that, when I was reading you in The New Republic, one of the reasons I always looked forward to reading your essays was you used the word, and I would use exactly the same word, they were heterodox. You couldn’t say, was this guy a lefty or a righty? He was a guy that looked at a problem and really looked at it. And very few people do that anymore. And that’s what I remember most about your writings, and the fact that you were a black academic and weren’t obviously left, probably made people think you were a conservative more than you really were. At that time at least.
Glenn: Well yeah, I’ve gone back and forth and there are reasons even to this day to wonder just how conservative am I based on this or that position that I might take. But the conservatism that I’m talking about has three dimensions to it. One is strictly Hayekian, that’s Friedrich von Hayek, that’s the road to serfdom Hayek. That’s a-
Jim: The Austrian, the Austrian school-
Glenn: The Austrian economist, philosopher, also a Nobel honoree as it happens, but mainly a sustained arguer on behalf of economic liberty. And I always had respect for that tradition. I can remember reading Karl Popper when I was in undergraduate in philosophy courses and learning about that tradition. And as I said, I read Ayn Rand, I didn’t become a devotee, but I became aware of this economic liberty argument. I was influenced by capitalism and freedom. That’s Milton Friedman’s collection of essays of political tour de force, I mean a real brilliant piece of public intellectual writing. He anticipates so many things, school choice, negative income tax, volunteer army, et cetera in that book. And I can remember being influenced by that tradition, so.
And in economics, we’re kind of posed the problem of market mediated decentralized allocation of resources versus planned, socially controlled, politically mandated allocation of resources. And I come down on the side of the former, I mean I’m a respectful appreciator, not without limits of the virtues of economic liberty. And that predisposed me to being amenable to influence by the supply side revolution, which accompanied Ronald Reagan’s rise in the late seventies and early eighties, which is the time that we’re talking about. I was reading those guys. The low tax people, the people who said let her rip. I was reading them and I was taking them seriously.
That was one aspect, I said three. Another was culturally while I subsequently became more religious than I was in this period that you’re talking about in the early 1980s, I had a lot of respect for the cultural conservatism of the black Christian, Protestant, religious tradition. I wasn’t an avid feminist. I was a 30-year-old, 25-year-old guy in the late 1960s. I mean, do with me what you will, the early 1970s. I wasn’t completely on board with the nouveau latter day, let’s redefine our relations and how we get along with them and what we value and how we do things. I was resistant to it. I was being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century on some of the cultural stuff.
And then on the race thing, I was done with the mournful recitation of the wrongs of America’s past, with the kind of bloody shirt of racism, lynching, slavery. It’s all bad, you beating up on this black people can’t get ahead. It’s all Jim Crow, it’s Jim Crow. And I was like, the year is 1984. This was the year I published my breakthrough essay in the New Republic. We’re 20 years past the civil rights movement, have you looked at what’s actually going on in these ghettos? You got fatherless homes, you got violent crime, you’ve got social irresponsibility. You’ve got parents not raising their children, you’ve got school failure, you’ve got people not looking for work, you’ve got welfare dependency. I’m not asking you to agree with this Jim, I’m telling you where I was coming from in those years.
And it was like the glass is way more than half full here in the United States of America, under democratic capitalism at the end of the 20th century, we had better man up and woman up. We had better take responsibility for building our communities, for raising our families, for getting the trash off the front of our street and stop this mournful recitation of historic victimization. I’m saying it in my words today, I wouldn’t have said it exactly that way in 1984, but that was the spirit of it. The spirit of it was the civil rights movement is over.
There was a Malcolm X dimension to this, stop asking white people to save your bacon. Nobody is coming to save you. You think if you have to depend upon the generosity and the beneficence and the humanity of white people, that you have a secure foundation for your own prosperity and that of your children? You do not. So it was self-help, not anti-discrimination and anti-racism that was my guiding light, and that made me conservative. The cultural reticence made me conservative, and the economic free exchange orientation made me conservative, and that’s why I called myself a conservative.
Jim: Interesting. While this intellectual growth was going on. You continued to be a player in the secret part of your life, and you really hit rock bottom six months later. Hit that very quickly because I’m really much more interested in the upside on the other side of it than I am hitting bottom. So maybe just do the quick hitting bottom and then talk about how you then turned it around.
Glenn: You’re referring to my cocaine addiction in the year-
Jim: Yes, yes. Crack cocaine, crack cocaine.
Glenn: … crack cocaine. The year after Pamela Foster, the fiasco, that was May, June of 1987. In the following year, six months, I found myself wandering into a cul-de-sac, into a blind alley. And that was using to escape the feelings of depression and bereft sense of desolation that I was experiencing in the wake of the public humiliation and career devastating consequences of my being accused. Subsequently, not exonerated, just the charges were dropped because she didn’t pursue it because I didn’t assault her, but nevermind.
In the wake of that I started using cocaine, and the cocaine use escalated to smoking crystallized cocaine, cooked up in a process that involves using a little baking soda and causing a chemical reaction that causes the cocaine to crystallize form and you can smoke it. And I learned how to do that and I started smoking it and I got to the point where there was nothing else that I would rather do. And I’m a full professor at Harvard and I have this now, this double life in spades, this double, flaming double life.
And I get caught. I get caught by the Boston police in possession of these controlled substances, marijuana and crack cocaine. And that becomes now a second public scandal. And I go into treatment, and the treatment doesn’t take, and I relapse and I go into the inpatient treatment at the McLean Psychiatric Hospital, the renowned in Belmont, Massachusetts, a renowned psychiatric hospital that has all manner of treatment going on, including treatment for compulsive behavior and addiction. And that doesn’t take. I relapse after that. And I go back, and I go into a halfway house and finally, living in a halfway house in Irish Boston, run by a grizzled old former Boston police officer named Bob Brown. Full of at any given time, 15 men or so who are all determined not to use, not to drink, not to shoot up, not to smoke, not to snort, because we are in recovery, and living in their day to day.
And I lived in that halfway house for five months between June of 1988 and Thanksgiving of 1988. And finally I was able to stop using cocaine. And in the process of going into recovery, I also submitted myself gradually, but ultimately with great enthusiasm to my Christian faith, my acknowledgement of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and became a devout Christian and a practicing member of a growing congregation in Boston. All of this evolved in the years afterwards, but it had its genesis in this period between January of 1988, when I first began to seriously seek treatment for cocaine addiction, and the subsequent developments in my life that came about after that. But there was a two-year period there where my primary challenge was not to use. Today. It’s one day at a time. I only have to not use today. And if I can get through today without using, tomorrow I’ll be here and I’ll deal with it and whatnot. But let me not use today. And I put together six months, I put together a year, I put together three years, five years.
Jim: And you did it.
Glenn: I was able to get away from that and I was able to rebuild my life, my marriage with my wife. We had two beautiful children, Glenn the second, who’s 35 years old now, and Nehemiah, his brother who’s three years younger. Our marriage was restored after a fashion. Our family was born. The family that Linda and I brought into the world together was born in these years after the crash, the crash of the late 1980s. I survived it. I stopped using cocaine and I became a born again Christian. Was baptized.
Jim: Quite a story. Regular listeners know I am a extreme atheist actually-
Glenn: Extreme?
Jim: Even though I was raised as a Catholic. And I did notice in the book that you started having your doubts about religion after a while. Where did you actually end up?
Glenn: That’s one of the themes, and I guess where I am now is I’m going to say agnostic. And I’ll explain it this way. I cannot believe what I affirmed when I became a born again Christian, which was that a man was raised from the dead and that he still lives. I don’t believe that. I cannot get myself to believe that because it contradicts my reasonable assessment of what can and can’t happen in the world. I know, there are arguments and people will write in and they’ll tell me whatever.
On the other hand, that religious community that I was a part of was a wonderful thing, and the seeking that people were engaged in to try to ground their lives in a meaningful understanding of the ordering of the nature of things, where they are deist, that’s where they’ve planted their flag, but what they’re trying to do is to deal with our existential condition of meaninglessness. And I get that people are troubled by that and are in pursuit of something to ground their whole understanding of the existence in which they’re embedded in. I mean, I know that that sounded like gibberish and double-talk. I respect the quest.
Jim: Yeah, no, it’s not at all gibberish and double-talk. In fact, the work that I do in the social change area is all about addressing the meaning crisis that was left, that we do need something to fill the hole that God filled, right? There’s a reason that every culture known to anthropology had religion. And sort of post-Nietzsche that’s left a hole in the soul of Western purse people. And we have not figured out successfully how to fill that hole yet. So it’s a real thing. No, I don’t think that was gibberish at all, I think you were hitting exactly on it.
So you found religion, you found you were able to put your marriage back together of sorts. The story of, I’m going to jump quickly through some things in the story, Linda, the long-suffering wife seemed to have been a really wonderful person.
Glenn: Linda was a wonderful person. Let me not let that go by without the opportunity to-
Jim: Better than you deserved, probably.
Glenn: Oh, without any question. She stuck with me through thick and thin. Through my philandering, through my drug addiction, through all of these crises in my life and was not fully and adequately repaid in my, and I tell about this in the book, I tell about my, after Glenn and Nehemiah were born after they had grown into past their toddlers and into their preteens. I went back to some of my double life ways, and I started taking up again outside of my marriage, indulging myself in my interest in cultivating intimate relationships with people of the opposite sex outside of my marriage, even though I had professed as a born again Christian.
And even though Linda and I at our 10th anniversary had celebrated this wonderful renaissance, and she subsequently was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, and went through a decade, nearly a decade of struggle with the disease where we were married and where I wasn’t always faithful to her. And she expired at the age of 59, a distinguished economist, a loving mother, and a faithful wife. And I got a lot better than I deserved from her and she didn’t get what she deserved from me. I think it’s fair to say, I don’t dispute that.
Jim: Yeah, she seemed, she came across in the book as a totally admirable person, other than maybe too damn tolerant of your ways, but truly a wonderful person.
Glenn: Well, I’ll just tell one story. Since our time is limited, she died. My son Glenn, our older of our two sons who was living at home at the time, and I go to her office to collect her things, we’re packing up her books and I discover a dog-eared, marginalia filled, self-help book on forgiveness. And I’m thumbing through it, and in the marginal comments, I realized that some of her study of the book was motivated by her processing things that had happened in our relationship, where I was the object of her effort to forgive. And I put it in the box and include it now amongst my sacred things because that was her. She was trying to teach herself how to forgive me.
Jim: Beautiful, beautiful. So let’s turn back now to your intellectual and political trajectory. So we’re talking up to about 1987, 88 here. You’re at the Kennedy School, you’re hanging out with some conservative folks. You call yourself a conservative, in some ways you are, in some ways you’re not. But give me a 10-minute riff on where your public policy, public affairs, political life had went over the next arc of years.
Glenn: Well, it’s a story of growing up in Chicago, I was kind of naturally a centrist Democrat, a black democrat kind of thing. I mean, I didn’t have real politics, but I was soft left. Coming out of MIT and through the early Reagan years I moved right, and became kind of a neo conservative, not the invade Iraq neo-con, but you might need to ratchet up the criminal penalties and you might want to worry about the disincentives on the welfare transfer program kind of neo-con. I went through the crisis. I depoliticized for a while, I said, “Time out. I’m not going to do the polemic culture war stuff anymore. I’m going to get back to technical economics.” And I did kind of do that, but it didn’t stick. Because I’d had a taste of the limelight as a critical commentator, because I had a voice, and because I had some things to say.
The pages of The New Republic was still open to me. I can remember in the years during the mid and late nineties, I was writing regularly for The New Republic. They had a weekly feature called Hard Questions, which was a rotating column amongst people like me and Michael Walzer, and Michael Sandel, and other prominent political thinkers if I can put myself in that company. And we were regular contributors to The Republic. So I had a voice and I got drawn back into talking about public affairs, but I move left. I kind of repudiated my Reagan years. There were a number of things that got me doing that. I talk about it in the book.
I say there were three books that were published between 1994 and 1997 that were especially noteworthy. The Bell Curve on intelligence by Hernstein and Murray. America in Black and White by Abigail and Steven Thernstrom, who were friends of mine, and who wrote a very conservative race appraisal of America’s racial circumstance, taking a long view, taking a view back to the Civil War. And The End of Racism, which was Dinesh D’Souza, which was a cartoon in, I don’t mean to disparage D’Souza, but it was what you would expect from Dinesh D’Souza. On the race question, The End of Racism, it was glib, it was snide, it was sophomoric, it was insulting, it was irrational. You know, black people live in communities where the streets are littered with alcohol, urine and blood. Kind of stuff like that.
Anyway, it was a book put out by the American Enterprise Institute and touted as bright young wunderkind journalist, the next Bill Buckley writes his God and man at Yale treatise on the social ills of America’s race debate. And I just couldn’t stomach it. So I moved left. I became an anti-anti. At first I was an anti-civil rights establishment, anti-racism. Then I became an anti-anti-anti. So there’s anti-racism, there’s anti-anti-racism, and then there’s anti-anti-anti-racism. And that’s kind of where I found myself.
And the other issue that really drove me left was mass incarceration. I was watching the jails fill up. I was watching the outsized number of African Americans incarcerated. I was watching the negative impact of prisons on black communities and was alarmed at it and took it up as a cause. The early mutterings in this direction were included in my Du Bois lectures, which were published by Harvard University Press as a small book, the Anatomy of Racial Inequality, where I came down against colorblindness and in favor of affirmative action, and against anti-welfare stuff. So I was kind of a social democrat. I was left, in those years. And the anti-incarceration period culminated in 2007 when I delivered the Tanner lectures at Stanford. And I published a small book, Race Incarceration and American Values, based on those lectures. And I was decrying the inhumanity of America’s criminal justice system from the left. So that happened.
But I ended up moving right again, that’s why I called my book Confessions of a Black Conservative. And to make a long story short, it’s a reaction against the reactions against the spate of police killings of black men, the Black Lives Matter, the anti-racism movements. Shot in the arm, that was Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, and all the way up ultimately to George Floyd. And I had deep concerns and the summer of 2020 only solidified me in these concerns about how bad for the country and bad for black communities ourselves were these developments.
I understand that this is a very controversial thing that I’m saying, and I’m not giving you or anybody else a chance to fully rebut it since we’re at the end of the hour. But I began and my writings are plentiful. And if you go to a social web search engine, you can find all of my pieces all over the place, city journal, collette.com, and other places. And at my substack where I have a voluminous accumulation of video and audio commentary, and also written short posts to my newsletter where people can see where I’m coming from. But I moved right on the race questions primarily, and that’s where I am today. So started left, moved right in the Reagan years, moved left in the nineties and the early aughts, and have moved right since then.
Jim: I imagine you don’t have much truck with somebody like Ibram X Kendi?
Glenn: No, I think he’s an empty suit, I’ve said so. I mean with respect, I don’t know how you can say that to somebody, I mean, without malicious intent. I don’t think there’s any there there.
Jim: Alrighty. I want to thank Glenn Loury for amazingly, even though it was considerably longer than our typical episode, I left a lot of things out. I didn’t hit all my notes. As everyone knows, I copiously prepare for these shows. But I must say this has been amazingly interesting and real. I mean, this was not a bullshit conversation. This was a real conversation, and the got even more good stuff in it than that. So if you want to hear more about this amazing tale, I strongly recommend Late Admissions, one of the better books I read in a while. And check out Glenn and John McWhorter, is it McWhorter? No, yeah, John, I think it is-
Glenn: Yeah, john McWhorter at the Glenn Show every other week.
Jim: On the Glenn Show and all that. And so I want to thank Glenn Loury a lot for this rather long and probably painful at times, very honest conversation.
Glenn: You’re welcome, Jim. It was good to be with you.