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Glenn Loury's Round Trip
The travails and temptations of a black intellectual.
By Paul Krugman
Although Glenn Loury and I overlapped in graduate school--I arrived at MIT in 1974 and he left in 1976--I have never known him well. But I do remember the joke classmates told about him--that his thesis began: "This dissertation is concerned with the economics of racism. I define racism as a single-valued, continuous mapping ..." The story isn't true, but a chapter of that thesis, titled "A Dynamic Theory of Racial Income Differences," does have an appendix that begins "Each agent begins life with a random innate endowment. Q is the endowment set, taken to be a subset of an arbitrary, finite dimensional Euclidean space."
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![]() Reading Loury's dissertation today, 22 years after he wrote it, is a depressing experience--precisely because the essays were so good and remain so relevant. In the first few pages, he stated the central dilemma of race policy in modern America. He was willing to give American society the benefit of the doubt, to assume that in the future, racism--direct economic discrimination--would no longer be a major force holding African-Americans back. But he argued that this probably would not be enough, and therein lay the dilemma. ![]() |
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![]() In a better world, Loury would have spent the last 22 years devising policies--working with other well-intentioned people to come as close as possible to squaring this circle, finding ways to eliminate the legacy of past racism with as little intrusion as possible on the colorblind ideal. But he has basically never been able to get off square one--because at no point over the past two decades has he been able to find allies who are even willing to accept the reality of the dilemma. ![]() |
![]() To Loury's credit, he did not give in to these pressures. He said what he thought. In so doing, he found himself labeled a "black conservative"--and thereby exposed to new and dangerous seductions. Let's face it: Any articulate minority intellectual who reliably espouses conservative positions is automatically offered a ticket to a very nice lifestyle. No more rejections from picky academic journals or grubbing for sabbatical time. Instead there are cushy fellowships at Hoover, guest editorials in the Wall Street Journal, and invited articles in Commentary--maybe even a regular column in Forbes--and a steady stream of invitations to plush conferences in nice places. All this and more lay before a bona fide academic star such as Loury. Until personal problems temporarily derailed him in 1987, he was well on his way to high political office and all the rewards that brings in later life. ![]() |
![]() The final straw was surely the grotesque affair of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. This book came close to claiming that, given your genes, it makes no difference to your economic success whether you grew up in Scarsdale or the South Bronx. The implied subtext was that this absolves society from any responsibility to do something for children growing up in the South Bronx. Since The Bell Curve was published, it has become clear that almost everything about it was inexcusably wrong: suspect data, mistakes in statistical procedures that would have flunked a sophomore (Murray--Herrnstein is deceased--clearly does not understand what a correlation coefficient means), deliberate suppression of contrary evidence, you name it. Yet conservative publications such as Commentary, which was always happy to publish Loury when he criticized liberal evasions, would not grant him space to critique The Bell Curve. So Loury is now on his own (or rather, at the head of a small movement of like-minded people, centered on his new Institute on Race and Social Division): rejected by the black political elite, which still wants to blame everything on white racism, and equally rejected by a conservatism that wants to do precisely nothing about continuing racial inequality. And the dilemma Loury identified so clearly 22 years ago remains not only unresolved but also unconfronted. ![]() ![]() To see what Loury is up to now, check out the Institute on Race and Social Division's home page. The Institute also posts many of Loury's recent writings. In Slate, Nicholas Lemann published a layman's summary of the statistical errors in The Bell Curve. Paul Krugman is a professor of economics at MIT. His new book, The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science, was published this month. His home page contains links to many of his other articles and essays.
Illustrations by Robert Neubecker.
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