Glenn Loury

Economist, academic, and author

• Born: September 3, 1948
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois

Also Known As: Glenn Cartman Loury

Significance: Glenn Loury is an American economist, academic, and author. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and a professor of economics at Brown University. He also hosts a weekly podcast, The Glenn Loury Show.

Background

Glenn Loury was born on September 3, 1948, on Chicago’s Southside to parents Everett Loury and Gloria (Cartman) Roosley. The older of two children, he grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Park Manor. His father, whom Loury greatly admired, was a civil servant with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). A maternal uncle was a conservative Republican and the state’s assistant attorney general. Others in his family were Black nationalists. Loury tended to favor the views of his conservative uncle.

Loury fathered two children as a teenager. He eventually married the children’s mother and chose to drop out of college to take a full-time job at a printing plant as a laborer. Married with two children and working an eight-hour night shift, he enrolled at Southeastern Junior College, attending classes before reporting to work.

Loury’s hard work translated into a scholarship offer to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He graduated from Northwestern with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1972. Loury then enrolled in the graduate program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he studied under Nobel laureate Robert M. Solow. He graduated in 1976 with a doctorate degree in economics.

Life’s Work

After receiving a doctorate degree, Loury was hired as an assistant professor of economics at his alma mater, Northwestern University. Three years later, in 1979, he became an assistant professor of economics at the University of Michigan and was promoted to full professor in 1980. In 1982, Loury moved to Harvard University, where, at the age of thirty-three, he became the university’s youngest Black professor to achieve tenure. In 1984, Loury began teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

As a Black man, Loury took a controversial position against affirmative action. He believed that African Americans could no longer claim widespread discrimination for their circumstances. Instead, he argued that the Black community was being held back by limited economic opportunities. He wanted African Americans to own up to bad behavior such as rampant teenage motherhood, absent fathers, and Black-on-Black violence. He soon gained notoriety for his unique positions on race and became the darling of the conservatives.

In 1987, Loury was under serious consideration by former president Ronald Reagan to become the Deputy Secretary of Education. However, on June 1, just days before the nomination was to be announced, Loury withdrew himself from consideration, citing undisclosed personal reasons. His supporters were confused because he had already survived damaging news, including that he had fathered an illegitimate son during his first marriage and was not consistent in paying child support.

Three days later, a twenty-three-year-old woman filed assault charges against Loury, saying that he had dragged her down four flights of stairs and thrown her belongings out of the window. (The charges were later dropped.) Unbeknownst to Loury’s second wife, Loury had been paying for an apartment. He later admitted that he had wanted the woman out so he could install another. Then, in November, Loury was arrested for possession of cannabis and cocaine; a homemade pipe was found in his car. The press picked up on the story, and soon his run-in with the law was national news.

Following his arrest, Loury withdrew from the spotlight. He attended Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and focused on teaching the economics theories for which he was known—applied microeconomic theory, welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution. In 1991, he transferred from Harvard to Brown University and found religion. For a time, he refused to discuss race, saying that he did not want to endure attacks from those who called him an apologist for the White race or an Uncle Tom.

An outsider to the Black liberal movement, Loury soon began to break with his conservative friends. He was appalled by the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994, a book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein that argued Blacks had inferior intelligence, and Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism, which he felt was another attack on Black failure. In 1996, Loury wrote an article for The American Enterprise titled “What’s Wrong with the Right.” Then, in 2002, he published The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, in which he acknowledged that racial discrimination was at the root of the Black experience.

Over the next two decades, Loury worked to find a home along the ideological spectrum. Distanced by his conservative friends, he was not warmly welcomed by liberals, who did not trust him because he had spent years siding against them. Loury considered himself a right-of-center Democrat. In 2021, he published the second edition of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality.

As of 2023, Loury remained at Brown as the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics. He was a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and hosted a weekly podcast, The Glenn Loury Show.

Impact

Loury journeyed from the South Side of Chicago to become an academic who delves into the controversial issues of race and inequality. Loury opposed Barack Obama’s presidency but voted for Hillary Clinton. He initially defended Donald Trump but then later blamed him for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. His views are not easily categorized, and, as such, he has played provocateur to both ends of the political spectrum.

Personal Life

Loury was married to American economist Linda Datcher Loury from 1983 until her death in 2011. They had two children. He married LaJuan Loury in 2018.

Bibliography

Boynton, Robert S. “Loury’s Exodus.” The New Yorker, 23 Apr 1995, www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/05/01/lourys-exodus. Accessed 24 June 2023.

Loury, Glenn. “The Double Life: An Autobiographical Sketch.” Substack, 7 Nov. 2021, glennloury.substack.com/p/the-double-life. Accessed 24 June 2023.

Robinson, Peter, and Glenn Loury. “Glenn Loury’s Journey from Chicago’s South Side to the Ivy League and Beyond.” Hoover Institution, 23 Nov. 2021, www.hoover.org/research/glenn-lourys-journey-chicagos-south-side-ivy-league-and-beyond-1. Accessed 24 June 2023.

Shankar, Ravi. “Maverick.” Brown Alumni Magazine, 9 Jan. 2023, www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/2023-01-09/conservative-voice-glenn-loury-and-poet-ravi-shankar. Accessed 24 June 2023.