Economics

Nick Gillespie | From the August/September 2024 issue

"All you need, besides the cocaine, is a lighter, water, baking soda, some Q-Tips, high-proof alcohol, a ceramic mug, and a piece of cheesecloth or an old T-shirt," writes Glenn Loury in his riveting Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. The book is surely the only memoir by an Ivy League economist that includes a recipe for crack cocaine along with technical discussions of Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Albert O. Hirschman.

Born in 1948 and raised working class on Chicago's predominantly black South Side, Loury tells a story of self-invention, ambition, hard work, addiction, and redemption that channels Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Richard Wright's Native Son, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and Milton Friedman's Capitalism & Freedom. An alternative title might have been "Rise Above It!," the slogan of a pyramid-scheme cosmetics company on which he squandered his savings as a young man in Chicago.

Now a chaired professor at Brown University and the host of The Glenn Show, a wildly popular YouTube offering, Loury worked his way through community college, Northwestern, and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ph.D., became the first tenured black economist at Harvard, emerged as a ubiquitous commenter on race and class in the pages of The New Republic and The Atlantic, was offered a post in the Ronald Reagan administration, and was then publicly humiliated after affairs, arrests, and addiction all became public, threatening the end of his professional and personal life. With the support of his wife, Linda Datcher Loury (herself a highly regarded economist), Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), and colleagues, Loury managed to rise above it and not just rebuild his academic reputation and relationships with his children, but also gain a unique perspective on economics, individualism, and community.

Reason: When you say you are a black conservative, what does that mean?

Glenn Loury: Well, I think of a few things. One of them is thinking that markets get it right in terms of the resource allocation problem and that the planning instinct and centralized, politically controlled interference in theeconomy is suspect. Of course, there are exceptions. The general predisposition is that I like prices. I like laissez faire. AndI think the first and second fundamental theorems of welfare economics are true, that we get efficient resource allocation when we allow the interplay of self-interest. You know, classical liberal stuff.

That makes you a libertarian, not a conservative.

Well, I was going to go the Edmund Burke route. I was going to say not discarding everything that's been handed to me from the past generations. Respect for tradition, reverence for some of these things that we've been handed down. So when people can't define who's a man and who's a woman, I hold my wallet. I'm a little bit skeptical about this nouveau thing.

But the "black conservative" comes out of I think a reflex or reaction to the dilemma that we African Americans face as the descendants of slaves, a marginal population disadvantaged in various ways and struggling for equality, dignity, inclusion, freedom.

I think there's a trap in that situation: the trap of falling into a status of victim and of looking to the other, the white man, the system to raise our children and deliver us from the challenge which everybody faces of living life in good faith, of, as Jordan Peterson puts it, standing up straight with your shoulders back. Of confronting the reality that there's some stuff that nobody can do for you. This posture of dependence, these arguments for reparations, this invocation of structural and systemic [racism], when the real questions are of responsibility and role.

In your book you cover your education in economics, but it's also a memoir that traffics a lot with addiction, both with drugs and sex. Can economics explain addictive behavior and self-destructive behavior?

Well, I think of the late Gary Becker. He has a paper on addiction. And I think of George........

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