Glenn Loury
speaker
197 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Glenn Loury’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, in economics, MIT was riding high then. There were people, Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson, Franco Modigliani, Robert Merton, all of whom became Nobel laureates in the fullness of time. Samuelson had been honored in 69 or 70, I think. It was a very, very strong department of economics. It was very Jewish, both the faculty and the student body, and that was noticeable to me.
They were notes to the grindstone. They were soft left.
Yeah. I'd say maybe 12 out of... 150, something like that. They had a program, MIT did, determined to respond to the time. They were liberal Democrats. They had a kind of affirmative action thing. Now, I will say...
I'm quite sure I would have been admitted to MIT based on the record that I had established at Northwestern, the prize-winning record, A's in everything, taking graduate courses in math and economics when I was still an undergraduate and so on. I think I would have been admitted regardless of their program. But I was among three, a cohort of three African-Americans in a class of 25.
who were admitted in 1972, and they had been admitting since 1970, and they continued this on through, I think, 75 or 76, three Black students. I was told later that the way that that was done was they had their regular budget for graduate students, and then they had additional funds that would allow them to admit three more students who were African American.
So they were about 12 of us, 12 to 15 students.
I did. One didn't finish. He was from Kansas City by coincidence, and he left after a couple of years and never finished his degree. The other teaches at Harvard now and is a dear friend whom I've known for 50 years.
It was absolutely top-notch. I mean, it was—it's just technical stuff. And, you know, you were challenged, and the people that you were studying with and competing against— They had come from Israel and India and Japan and the UK and Russia, and they were the best in the world cohort of young prospective economists. And it was very rigorous, very mathematical. It was MIT, after all.
It was Paul Samuelson, after all. They were green eye shade types with the math and the equations and the statistics and the analysis. But they also had something of an interest, a political flair, as I say, moderate Democrat, left of center, but not really socialist. appreciating the market, but thinking about the mixed economy and regulation and stuff.
Samuelson wrote a column for Newsweek every month and Milton Friedman wrote a column for Newsweek and they kind of, Friedman, the conservative from Chicago, the University of Chicago, and they were kind of in dueling perspectives. I remember. But I was in the midst of that.
Well, there was a lot of debate about economics and about monetarism and Keynesianism and whatnot, about regulation and laissez-faire and whatnot. Yeah.
Yeah, I've kind of fallen away from economics, to be honest with you. These last 10, 15 years, I've become a guy that talks more about the culture issues myself. And now with the new administration, Trump, and with the tariffs and the changes in economic policy, there's more talk. It's very arch, it's very partisan, but there's more talk. But yeah.
Well, I want to distinguish between a specialized program of graduate study at MIT and a general education program for undergraduates at Brown. I think if I were to compare economics PhD study at Brown today to that at MIT in the early It would be a different kind of comparison.
There, the issue would be how the field has changed, the questions that are prominent, the techniques that are employed to investigate them. And there, I would focus a lot on the revolution of data analysis that...
laptop and desktop computers, the data availability and so on, and also the change in the set of questions that people are asking, which are applied in our experimental economics, for example, has become a big thing.
Nobel Prizes are given in development economics and stuff like that, where people are trying to figure out how to make the best use of resources to raise living standards in poor countries and stuff. And economics was more self-consciously theoretical and abstract when I was a student. You could make a living...
without ever carrying one of those boxes of computer cards over to the computer processing center. You could just with a pencil and a yellow pad sit and off the top of one's head, as it were, invent models of interesting economic phenomena and get yourself published in the journal and make tenure and all of that. And I think it'd be much, much harder to do that now.
Yeah, I think on the whole, it is a good thing. But that would be if I were comparing economics in 2025 to economics in 1975, much more empirical, much more data intensive, much more applied, and a wide range of questions.
But if I were comparing college in the period when I was a young student to now, I think the assault that we're seeing, the confrontation that we're seeing of elite higher education with anti-woke sentiment coming from the Trump administration and
Critics like the young Christopher Ruffo, but there are many, bespeaks the ideological drift that has characterized higher education in the last decades. It's become much more political, much more self-consciously radical, much more anti-establishment and, as it were, woke, faddish. You know, I've lived through the French theorist and deconstruction and whatnot. I'm not a literary or humanist.
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