Glenn Loury

Glenn Cartman Loury, (born September 3, 1948) is an American economist, academic, and author. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005. At the age of 33, Loury became the first African American professor of economics at Harvard University to gain tenure.

Loury achieved prominence during the Reagan Era as a leading black conservative intellectual. In the mid-1990s, following a period of seclusion, he adopted more progressive views. Loury has somewhat re-aligned with views of the American right, with The New York Times describing his political orientation in 2020 as "conservative-leaning."

Early life and education
Loury was born on September 3, 1948, in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, growing up in a redlined neighborhood. Before going to college he fathered two children, and supported them with a job in a printing plant. When he wasn't working he took classes at Southeast Junior College, where he won a scholarship to study at Northwestern University. In 1972, he received his B.A. degree in mathematics from Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1976, writing his dissertation, "Essays in the Theory of the Distribution of Income", under the supervision of Robert M. Solow. At MIT he met his future wife, Linda Datcher Loury.

Career
Loury became an assistant professor of economics at Northwestern University after receiving his doctorate. In 1979, he moved to teach at the University of Michigan, and was promoted to full professor of economics in 1980. In 1982, at age 33, Loury became the first black tenured professor of economics in the history of Harvard University. He moved to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government after two years. While at Kennedy school he would befriend William Bennett and Bill Kristol (He later said in an interview that his economics appointment was a mistake because he "wasn’t yet fully established as a scientist". )

In 1987, Loury was under consideration to be an Undersecretary of Education in the Reagan administration. He withdrew from consideration on June 1, three days before citing personal reasons.

After a subsequent period of seclusion and self-reflection, Loury reemerged as a born-again Christian and described himself as a "black progressive." Loury left Harvard in 1991 to go to Boston University, where he headed the Institute on Race and Social Division. In 2005, Loury left Boston University for Brown University, where he was named a professor in the Economics Department, and a research associate of the Population Studies and Training Center.

Loury's areas of study include applied microeconomic theory: welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution. In addition to economics, he has also written extensively on the themes of racial inequality and social policy. Loury testified on racial issues before the Senate Banking Committee on March 4, 2021. and presented at the Bruce D. Benson Center Lecture Series at the University of Colorado Boulder on February 8, 2021.

Loury hosts The Glenn Show on his Substack with John McWhorter, often regarding questions of race and education.

Political positions
On a 2017 episode of the Sam Harris podcast Making Sense, Loury stated that while he used to be "a Reagan conservative", he now thought of himself as a "centrist Democrat, or maybe a mildly right-of-center Democrat." The New York Times described Loury as "conservative-leaning" and The Wall Street Journal described Loury as a “Reagan Republican”.

On January 9, 2007, Loury spoke out against increasing the number of troops in Iraq.

Presidential elections and candidates
Loury was opposed to Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential run. He continued to criticize Obama as president calling his tenure “depressing in the extreme" and also criticized Obama's closeness to Al Sharpton.

In 2016, he supported Hillary Clinton. After the 2016 United States presidential election, Loury said it was dangerous for people not to recognize Donald Trump as the 45th President. During debates with John McWhorter, Loury defended Donald Trump. During Trump's presidency he doubted claims that Trump was an existential threat to the public. After Trump refused to concede that he lost the 2020 United States presidential election, however, he rebuked Trump. Loury would later blame Trump for the 2021 United States Capitol attack but opposed the second impeachment of Donald Trump.

Race
Loury opposes reparations for slavery and affirmative action. He has said that "affirmative action is not the solution, but neither is it the problem". Conversely, he has criticized affirmative action saying, "Affirmative action is dishonest. It’s not about equality, it’s about covering ass."

In 1984, Loury drew the attention of critics with "A New American Dilemma," published in The New Republic, a piece in which he addressed what he termed "fundamental failures in black society" such as "the lagging academic performance of black students, the disturbingly high rate of black-on-black crime, and the alarming increase in early unwed pregnancies among blacks."

In June 2020, Loury published a rebuttal to a letter that Brown University president Christina Paxson sent to students and alumni in response to the murder of George Floyd by a policeman. Loury questioned the purpose of Paxson's letter, saying it either "affirmed platitudes to which we can all subscribe, or, more menacingly, it asserted controversial and arguable positions as though they were axiomatic certainties."

Immigration
On immigration, Loury said in an interview segment in The First Measured Century, "There are benefits of immigration, and there are also costs. The benefits in terms of cheaper, eager labor to help we Americans produce the products that we want to consume. The costs are in terms of making it more difficult to equalize the economic circumstances of some Americans who are at the bottom of the heap, because they now have more competition for their labor, as a result of immigration."

Awards and honors
Loury was elected as a member of the Econometric Society in 1994, Vice President of the American Economics Society in 1997, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2011. He was elected president of the Eastern Economics Association in 2013. Loury is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a main academic contributor to the 1776 Unites project. He received the Bradley Prize in 2022, and was named the John Kenneth Galbraith Fellow from the American Academy of Political & Social Science for that same year.

Personal life
Loury fathered two children as a teenager with his first wife, Charlene. He also has a son from another relationship, Alden, who serves as data projects editor for WBEZ in Chicago.

Loury and his wife, Linda Datcher Loury, had two sons together. Linda died in 2011. He has since remarried.

On 11 April 2024, Loury announced his diagnoses of arthritis and stenosis of the lower-mid spine. He underwent surgery 10 April 2024, and plans further surgical treatments.

Publications

 * Loury, Glenn Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, New York: Norton. 2024