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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I'm a social scientist, but I can see, looking across the aisle, as it were, at what my colleagues are saying. are doing, and I've lived through the anti-racism mania. I've lived through the various enthusiasms of feminism and sexual liberation and whatnot. The debate about capitalism, you know, is a different argument now than it was when I was coming along.
When I was coming along, you read Karl Marx because you wanted to be educated and you knew that that was an important part of the intellectual inheritance, but you read it with a skeptical eye because you know that while the radical agitator and bomb-thrower of Marx was an important historical figure, you didn't think that the economic analysis was really very cogent or incisive.
And you didn't read it as a Bible. You read it as a, okay, there is a problem here about how to understand the implications of the transformation, which is industrialization and so on. Yes.
There are real issues about how the fruits of economic cooperation get divided amongst the participants in the process, the people who bring capital, the people who own natural resources and land, the people who rely on their labor as the source of their income. And there's an analytical issue about how to think that through. And we saw Marx as something of an oddball in that respect.
And I think in the center of the economics establishment, that would be the judgment. But I think I can't stop the sociologists from reading Marx. I can't stop the anthropologists from reading Marx. I can't stop the literary critics from reading Marx. I can't stop the historians from reading Marx. And they've taken that kind of sensibility, that kind of...
a criticism of established social relations and the kind of radicalism and enthusiasm, as I say, for the fads that come along of equality and so on. They've taken it where they've taken it. The university has become, to a certain degree, captured by that sensibility, and we're seeing a backlash against that.
I don't see how you can say that women were not empowered. If, you know, we go to, who is it? Betty Friedan or Simone de Beauvoir or somebody like that. And this set of issues that they were talking about. And you look at where ideas are about equality for women now and the appropriate role of women in society. political and social life.
I think you can say, I don't know if you want to say they were liberated because they are confronted with challenges in life that are intrinsic to the, it seems to me, to the way in which we reproduce and the way in which the species has evolved and Some of that stuff is hardwired and it's going to always be a part of the issue.
But I think the presumptions about the entitlement of women to an opportunity to fully develop their human potential is a move forward. Were Blacks liberated? Well, I just read an interesting book by Jason Riley, the conservative African-American Wall Street Journal editorialist. He calls it the myth of affirmative action, and he basically argues in the spirit of the great Thomas Sowell that—
You know, Blacks were really doing pretty well between 1940 and 1960. And when you look at the acceleration of wages and the breakdown of barriers of segregation and whatnot, that that was a golden age for African-American advancement and that advancement after 1960 happened.
was less rapid and that the big, the ballyhoo about liberation of African-Americans associated with Black power and the civil rights movement and the advent of affirmative action is overstated. That there were downsides, significant downsides to those developments, both in terms of abetting economic empowerment for African-Americans, but also in terms of the
credibility of the political claims that blacks were making on the rest of the society, and things became more partisan and divisive. And this is Riley's argument, and I have some sympathy for it.
Well, you know, if you were to pick up a typical work wanted ad page in 1960 in a major American city, you would see explicit kind of no blacks need apply type language. If you were to look at controlling for the skills that people had, the anticipated earnings of a worker, you would see that their being African American was a negative and it was a non-trivial negative in 1960.
If you were to look at the way that housing market operated or at the allocation of public educational resources, you would see significant discriminatory barriers that impeded African-American development of their skills and participation in the society. And all of that has changed. So that's, I think, for the good without any question.
That having changed, let's call it the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the change in the ethos of the country with the rise of the civil rights movement and so on, that having changed, the question becomes, we get to 1970, let's say, and the question becomes, what next? And there, I think the story is less clear. And I think that there are developments that are very distressing.
I think when you, there's a wonderful book that I want to plug here called The World of Patience Gromes, G-R-O-M-E-S Gromes. by a man called Scott Davis. Patience Grohms is a woman born in the late 19th century, like 1890 or something like that, to a yeoman farmer, a Black person who owned his own land, her father. And she's a princess. She takes piano lessons. She dresses up for church on Sunday.
They have a very strict behavioral code. They're devout Christians. They are Booker T. Washington-esque in their orientation. And she marries and migrates to Richmond, Virginia and starts a family in the 1920s. And Scott Davis, the author of this great book, traces her family life through the early 1960s. And what you see for Patience Groms is her kids struggle.
The neighborhood, which is not wealthy, but stable. Her husband works for the railroad. He's got a very good job. Neighborhoods declines. Model cities and various kinds of federal programs come through that end up remaking the community in ways that actually work in an adverse effect.
Public housing, which is initiated with the idea that the poor were going to be sheltered, ends up creating ghetto-type phenomenon.
The kids who used to be interested in earning the respect of their peers by keeping their nose clean, keeping their nose to the grindstone, not having kids before they were married and stuff like that, end up embracing a much looser and less helpful set of cultural practices. And by the time you get to the 1970s, it's a mess. So, there's a lot of mess.
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