Glenn Loury’s Journey From Chicago’s South Side to The Ivy League And Beyond

[Music] welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson born on the south side of chicago glenn cartman lowry became a tenured professor of economics at harvard at the age of 33. four decades later dr lowry holds a chair in social sciences and economics at brown dr lowry also hosts a weekly podcast on the ricochet network the glenn show professor lowry thank you my pleasure on the glenn show you call yourself a woke buster and now what i want to know is what a chaired pro this is really quite an august thing you have a you you are a chair professor at one of the nation's oldest and most prestigious universities what are you doing calling yourself a woke buster well with the other side so to speak that is the woke side weren't so crazy i could go on you know with my equations and my lectures and mind my own business i'm trying to stay in touch with reality and maybe save the country maybe save the country [Laughter] all right you're a man who has traveled great distances one of these journeys for want of a better term is socioeconomic you grow up in a rough neighborhood in chicago you become a father while you're still in your teens you take a job as a clerk in a printing plant and that's where you start here's where you go doctorate at mit by age 27. mit is not a easy place to get through tenure professor of economics by 33 chaired professor at brown we could devote the whole show to your life story but what what do you what would you want people to know about how glenn lowry made that particular journey how did glenn lowry get from here on the south side of chicago to a shared professorship in providence rhode island well it's a long story peter i don't think we have all day um i got a lot of help i got inspiration from my father very good man no longer with us um self-made man who labored hard all of his life and rose to a high level in the internal revenue service as a federal employee i got a wonderful support from teachers i was fortunate enough at northwestern university to have been recruited as a scholarship student even though i was married with kids and working a full-time job but they were looking for some promising prospects from the south side of chicago to bring in the northwestern in the early 1970s and gosh i discovered the whole world intellectually speaking at that university in the few years that i spent there tremendous inspirational teachers at mit a great economics department now but even a greater department then with nobel laureates despair um and you know god-given talent if i may say so that allowed me to take advantage of these opportunities i worked my tail off i kept my nose to the grindstone finally even though i bounced around a little bit in my teens and it has paid off all right you you grant that you work hard but only after expressing gratitude three or four times in a row did you come to how hard you worked that's i i'll come back to that that that that strikes me as a kind of fundamental piece of your outlook about life glenn but we'll come back to that a lecture you deliver delivered in richmond 2005 you discussed the 1968 kerner commission which issued a report on the riots during the long summer of 1967 the commission as you know blamed the riots on racism failed social programs and a lack of economic opportunity and this is what glenn lowry said in 2005 speaking in richmond's to a significant extent the kerner commission's recommendations were heeded there is not one significant institution in american political or economic life which has been unaffected by the push for diversity and the emphasis on multiculturalism which now dominate discussions of race relations blacks wield vastly more political clout at all levels of government today than was the case four decades ago yet it is arguable that conditions are worse the prisons of the nation overflow with young black men two-thirds of black babies are born to unwed mothers nationwide close quote why what went wrong the kerner commission said reasonable things the country responded and you say it is arguable that conditions are worse it's a hard question that you're asking i think peter i think the vision the vision of the anointed as our friend thomas soul would say the vision that we could solve this problem by expanding the great society by enacting more anti-discrimination laws by doubling down on affirmative action and so forth was is in error this problem is a development problem this is the way that i would put it now not a bias problem this is uh a issue of empowering and uh envisioning um a uh confrontation with the consequences of our history that have left the african-american population large swaths of it not performing in ways that allow us to take advantage of the opportunities that have been created as my friend shelby steele is fond of saying the problem before us now is not a problem of oppression it's a problem of freedom it's a problem of seizing opportunity it's a problem of taking responsibility i mean let's just look at some of those statistics outsized rates of criminal uh participation of violence of um of uh the kinds of in uncivil behavior that get you locked up in prison that's why the jails are overflowing with african-americans not because there's a conspiracy in the state legislature or in the several police departments to go around locking up black people but because too many of our youngsters of our young men are behaving in ways that end up leaving them in confrontation with the law and leaving them susceptible to imprisonment in education the skills development gap is reflected in test scores or the representation of african americans in certain elite educational venues the kind of circumstance that people want to invoke affirmative action to repair are to a large extent a result of the failure of public institutions of educational service delivery to deliver for their clients but also a reflection of patterns of behavior of the allocation of time of values of communal norms of the extent of parenting of the uh emphasis on developing the intellectual potential of our population uh look at the family you say two-thirds of kids born women who are not married you should look at the abortion rate amongst african-americans it's stratospheric um the gender relations between men and women which is the central uh focus of how it is that societies reproduce themselves in a healthy fashion is deeply deeply troubled so whereas in 1968 it was a compelling argument to say two nations separate and unequal that's what the kerner commission said white america must own up to its responsibilities in 1968 that could have made a lot of sense in the year 2021 the ball is in our court i speak now about african americans this is basically a level playing field that we're dealing with right here in the freest most prosperous most dynamic society on the planet that millions of people are willing to risk everything just to get into we are birthright citizens here the ball is in our court glenn could i let me take you through events of the last couple of years honestly i just made notes on events i'd like to hear you talk about i just want to know how glenn lowry thinks about certain events okay two quotations here's the first one from the we believe page of the website for black lives matter quote the impetus for our commitment was and still is the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state close quote here's a the second quotation this happens to be from an article in newsweek about a year ago but i could have chosen dozens of sources here's here's what news we get on sunday may 30th 2020 chanel hawk's store was one of dozens looted in atlanta and many more across the u.s amid days of protests following the death of george floyd as a black business owner black business owner hawk said she was shocked to learn looters targeted her store at a time when protesters were taking to the streets to call on the government to address systematic racism close quote so what do i know i'm just a white guy and a layman looking at this and i said black lives matters it's it sounds noble in some ways it sounds aspirational but the what is happening in the cities what just how do you think about that well violence against black people i think is hysteria i think it's wild hyperbole i think we have to keep the issue that they're talking about which is that sometimes police acting badly or outside of their legitimate authority take black life that does happen it has happened in the country we can tick off the examples on the other hand it's a country of 330 million people there are tens of thousands of arrests that take place every day in this country we're talking about a handful of incidents that become viral events on social media in which there can be some question about inappropriate behavior by police toward black people but the metaphor that al sharpton invoked at george floyd's funeral america take your knee off of our neck it's fiction it's a lie it's not an apt description of the actual circumstance for a black person to fear going out of their door uh that the police might somehow reprimand inappropriately uh treat them it's like not going outside because you're afraid of being struck by lightning uh so that's objectively an inaccurate characterization of the circumstance and if you lay that alongside the actual threats to black life which are sadly coming from the possibility of violent criminal victimization in the neighborhoods in which they live often by other black people the hyperbole the schtick that they've got going here the narrative that they're pushing i'm talking about black lives matter i'm talking about anti-racist activists who take the unfortunate few incidents of police mistreatment of black people and use it as a general characterization of the circumstances of black people in the country um it is uh something that a woke buster like myself is willing to devote a little bit of time uh debunking glenn chicago again i just want to just throw things up to you to see how you think about them but chicago during the last 12 months 790 people have been killed 626 of them almost 80 percent were black shouldn't i mean there's isn't there an argument that and this is a a city where the uh superintendent of police is african-american yeah um and the mayor i checked the statistics that about 30 of the city is african-american only about 20 of the police force but the superintendent of police is africa anyway it just i think to myself why aren't there protests calling for more police these those neighborhoods only not only calling for more police and making public safety of black people in that city a primary issue but condemning relentlessly the despicable behavior of a few people which is making that city so unsafe for everybody else instead too often we find intellectuals and political leaders some black some white all progressive making excuses saying there's nothing to see here turning away from the obvious failures within society that are manifest in this despicable behavior i mean think about it taking a human life hundreds of times a not small number of these victims are children this is barbarism this is unacceptable behavior i don't think i am out of school simply to say condemn it we're better than that we african americans where is the leadership who talk about african american society saying of this issue we're better than that this is not us this is not what a healthy african-american community would produce condemn this behavior glenn once again that lecture that you gave in richmond i'm quoting you liberals insist that these problems derive ultimately from the lack of economic opportunities conservatives like charles murray have argued that the problems are the unintended legacy of a welfare state if the government would stop underwriting irresponsibly behavior poor people would be forced to discover self-restraint and then you write these polar positions have something very important in common they both assume that economic factors lie behind the behavioral problems what are you up to there on being a christian and an economist was my subtitle for that lecture uh and what i'm up to is i'm an economist and you know we do things that we do we have our theories about human behavior we are uh basically uh in our moored of the idea that people respond to incentives as they do and we want to get the prices right as we should so we have a pretty deterministic and a pretty materialistic outlook on things left or right but in those years i was a better christian perhaps than i am now i was on fire and it occurred to me notwithstanding my training at mit and notwithstanding my positions in the universities that i've worked at that there's more to human motivation than getting more than greed than satisfying what then maximizing utility then accumulating wealth there's also something called right living there's something called being comfortable with the way in which i am living my life there is a spiritual dimension what people believe what they take to be significant where they draw meaning in their lives is also a fundamental aspect of human culture and of human civilization and i simply wanted to give voice to that idea that everything's not about getting more or about what you know charles murray whom i respect as a social scientist says that uh the we had a war on poverty and poverty won he says this in his book losing ground reflecting on the inadequate uh outcomes associated with the great society he's right about that he's right that the incentives of the welfare state often were poverty promoting as opposed to poverty alleviating but that's not all that's going on when i look at two-thirds of kids being born to an african-american woman being born to a woman without a husband that's not all that's going on when i look at the rates of violence that we were just talking about a moment ago there's space for appealing to people at the level of their spiritual responsibilities and urging them to look differently at how it is that they should live their lives i say in that essay what a program could be more effective at encouraging parents to take responsibility for their children than persuading them that they're god's stewards in the lives of their children a clever economist can come up with all kinds of schemes to motivate them financially but if they embrace that idea that this is a precious responsibility this is a sacred obligation they're going to get the job done that we want them to get done i'm quoting you again raising the issues of morality and values is vitally important the family and the church are the natural sources of moral teaching indeed the only sources close quote okay if we were a tent meeting i'd have converted now listening to preacher lowry this is very moving and it feels to me right you're saying true things about human beings what is the government what if you say that it's church and family those are organic either they're there or they're not i don't know how government puts together puts the family back together how i certainly have no idea how any government program can reassert the centrality in african-american life of the black church so i i guess what i'm saying is it's powerful and moving and it sounds like the clarion yeah sound of a trumpet but there's a sense in which you could let everybody off the hook and say well you know it's the black it's the black church and the family and if they're not there there's really nothing we can do about it do you see what i mean no i do see what you mean because the ability of the state through law and through policy to tell people how to live is limited because we're a pluralistic society we don't have a state religion we don't tell people what to believe at that level so therefore given that what they believe is important to how they function and that the state can't dictate to people what to believe there's a conclusion there which is that there's a limit on what the state can achieve in the face of this problem and that if we really want to see this problem ultimately resolved we have to encourage the development of institutions from the ground up um we have to in our rhetoric and then our public leadership extol the virtue of these institutions so let me be very concrete education okay big city uh public school teachers unions basically control the flow of resources to the for the delivery of those services to youngsters there's nothing written anywhere that says that the only model for educating young people is large public union-driven institutions delivering the services you could have a thousand flowers blooming ten thousand flowers blooming a million flowers blooming they could be charter schools with some public funds going in they could be parochial schools with a particular religious conviction that they might have they could be home schooling there's a there could be 20 families getting together and deciding to pool their resources in a way to educate their children i don't know all the possibilities that lie there i do know that the entrepreneurial spirit and the convictions that people bring about their responsibilities to their children have unlimited potential this is what i believe so there the government just has to get out of the way because people are paying taxes but it would give parents the autonomy to redirect those resources in ways that they saw uh were best well let me quote to you from a column that tom sol now 91 years old and still swinging tom sowell just wrote a column published a column this month wow yes i should be so lucky well you will be at least those of us are going to get on the phone and say hey lowry what's another book please a lot of us all right so here's here's tom soul quote when school propaganda teaches black kids to hate white people that is a danger to all americans of every race low-income minority students especially cannot afford the luxury of having their time wasted on ideological propaganda in the schools when they're not getting a decent education in mathematics or the english language when they graduate and go on to higher education that could prepare them for professional careers hating white people is not likely to do them nearly as much good as knowing math and english close quote oh i couldn't agree more he's absolutely right about that the ideological temper of much of the educational establishment which wants to spew its propaganda over our children uh is a waste of time because we don't really have that uh luxury to uh to indulge given the serious impediments to african-american children's participation in our society that comes about from their failure to get a decent education but i would go further we're americans here black people african-americans we're 10 12 of a population of a dynamic growing constantly changing country we need our fellow citizens onside with us on behalf of any program of any worth that we might want to pursue hating white people is madness in this country i mean it's simply a losing strategy it is akin to a toddler throwing a tantrum when he doesn't get his way it gets us nowhere the intellectuals the the people who i could name names but i'm it's not about personalities here who's who throw this kind of stuff around whitey is your enemy are already living high on the hog of this society they can afford to alienate their colleagues but people who are dependent upon basic functioning of social institutions to further their uh effort at achieving prosperity those black people working class black people lower class black people uh people were just barely holding on need our fellow americans on side alienating them gratuitously with this racist and its racism this racist rhetoric hating white people hating people because of the color of their skin blaming them for the sins of their fathers or the supposed sins of their fathers it is not only a waste of time in the schools it's a it's it's a political distraction that we really can't afford glenn let me take you back to your your day job as professor at brown okay last spring you conducted a seminar at brown called quote free inquiry in the modern world close quote and you were kind enough to send me the syllabus and i showed that syllabus to my research assistant who by the way is a recent graduate of yale sister school sister ivy school of brown and my research assistant could hardly believe his eyes he said this is the most courageous syllabus i think i have ever seen so could you just take me i know the seminar lasted a whole semester at brown but i'd like to ask you a few questions tell me the significance tell me why the items i'm going to mention are on your syllabus and by the way seminar you've described this as a seminar how many kids were involved 20. so this is not a lecture class no there's nowhere to hide you're running a conversation you're calling on kids they have to participate all right um socrates apology quote and this i'm quoting from socrates or i'm quoting from plato's yeah you know what i'm calling it another apology of psyche tj i prophesy to my murderers that after my death punishment far heavier than you have inflicted on me will surely await you for the noblest way of life is not to be crushing others but to be improving yourselves close quote yeah what do the kids make of that they loved it i should mention david sacks here who was my teaching assistant because this course he's an undergraduate at brown uh he's a great concert pianist and he's also reading greek and latin that's he's a classics major at brown you know kids that smart really annoy me glenn and you know he's a contrarian and he walked into my office one day and he said you're one of the two or three professors around here i think got his head on straight can i talk to you would you mind giving me some time this is just out of the blue a couple of years ago he walked into my office he said i i want to break free from the groupthink can you help me so we put together a reading list and we over the course of a year did an independent study just him and me reading some of the works that ended up in this course so we'll come back to this course yeah i really want to come back to the course but wait this kid is reading greek and latin he's a smart kid he got into brown he's reading greek and latin yeah plays the p he's smart and he's talented and i want to break free of groupthink yeah why is a kid at one of the most elite institutions in the country feel shackled in his mind intellectually subjected to groups how can this happen now this was a kid who thought that every republican politician was not necessarily a fascist this is a kid who thought the capitalism might not really be the road to hell a kid who thought that while he's jewish and not especially observant religious people actually have a place within society isn't there something interesting about the fact that people constantly seek meaning in these mythological and and you know fanciful systems of belief he and and what he's getting all around him in the dorm uh at the lecture hall in the classes the other classes that he's getting is this kind of left of center secular uh ultra woke uh mantra he's getting and he knows that it isn't quite right it certainly hasn't hit his mind as being right and he's looking for an alternative and he found out you know he followed my podcast a few times his parents encourage them because they follow the podcast go talk to lowry and so he walks into an economist office uh to say can you help me you know can can i breathe i can't breathe around here can you help me i can't get some fresh air i can't breathe that's just anyway all i want to say is the course that you're referring to came about after that year of reading with david and we sat together and said you know we can make a course out of this why don't we and you can be my ta even though he was only his third year he's in his fourth year now he's in his third year and there were seniors sitting in the class so he was junior to some of the people whom he was ta but he's a cracker jack smart kid they loved being challenged to think about what does a philosophical life mean what is an examined life what you know what was socrates about as plato presented in the in the dialogue um so they it was scintillating the questions the discussion that went on within the class was really deeply rewarding and i've gotten some uh tributes from students after the course of read me saying's best experience in my educational career by far milton eriopogetica quote give me the liberty to know to utter and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties the liberty to argue freely above all liberties some of the kids at brown make of that paradise lost well you know he's trying to invade against the idea that the crown should license the printing of books the printing press is 100 years old or so at the time he's writing and books are pretty dangerous things you know and he's saying look at i don't want to live in a society in which political commissars decide what it is that i can read and what i can't read there's freedom in those books there's immortality says milton in that great essay in those books you write a book that says something really important about life you may die but that book lives forever as long as they don't ban the printing of the book keep your hands off my books vaslav havel thoughts love hovel the dissident in czechoslovakia becomes president of czechoslovakia after the communist regime falls he writes a book called the power of the powerless quote in everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along down the river of pseudolife so the kids read this and say wait a minute is professor lowry telling to tell us we're all accommodationists no they got it they really did and i love that essay by havel and i love that particular quote um they so if your uh audience doesn't know michael havel who was a playwright and became president of the czech republic uh was a dissident at the time that the soviet union was dominating political life in countries like czechoslovakia he was a part of the underground sami's dot producing critique of the status quo and it was life or death i mean you could lose your livelihood you could end up losing your freedom if you spoke against the party so it was a very closed very cloistered uh uh system and people were being you know betrayed by their loved ones and things like this because they weren't adopting the party line and he says we're dying over here these are my words but this is what he's saying we're living in unfreedom and believe me we are the ones who produce the system going along with it is making the system possible to work we have a choice to make are we going to live or are we going to die are we going to embrace life are we going to embrace what is in effect spiritual death the power of the distant dissident comes in his or her relentless affirmation of life by standing for the truth come what may and you know what that's more powerful than those tanks at the end of the day this is falcon however and the kids loved it they they could see the kernel of the idea which is that the truth teller is a very subversive and a very dangerous fellow glenn one more from your syllabus you entitled week number 12 the case of clarence thomas clarence thomas mr justice thomas supreme court justice and you assign for that session justice thomas's memoir my grandfather's son why what do you hope for the students at this elite university to learn from his example uh a very interesting question peter i'm so glad you raised it because it's not necessarily what you would expect which is these kids you know their pro-choice and in terms of abortion and you know pro-gay rights and things like that a conservative catholic long-serving jurist on the u.s supreme court is an unlikely hero for them my point was you may agree or disagree with this or that opinion of the great justice clarence thomas let me tell you about his life born off the coast of georgia in one of those sea island situations where gichi speaking and what not dirt poor scraped his way along etc you want a model of african-american heroism you want an ideal of what it is that we should teach our kids to aspire to i don't see how you could do any better than the life of justice thomas but guess what when the national museum of african american history and culture decided to stand up a museum they didn't even have an acknowledgement of the existence of clarence thomas in it until people started complaining about that and guess what if you go to any liberal law school and you ask civil rights professors who teach about civil rights law what they think about justice clarence thomas they'll say he's a sellout and he's an uncle tom and you can't find in hollywood you can't find in the tv scripts you can't find in the novels that are being produced by these publishing houses any affirmation of the heroic character of this man's life why he's a black conservative he's off the reservation he's thinking for himself i had them it's not on the syllabus look at the film from that testimony that thomas gave at his confirmation hearings as i'm sure you're familiar with it in which he very valiantly and powerfully affirms his right to think for himself justice clarence thomas was on my syllabus because he thinks for himself he's iconic representative of the cost you pay for thinking for yourself and i wanted my kids to be able to look at his life in the hole not filtered through what uh the talking heads at msnbc might have to say about glenn last question you gave a lecture to oxford that contained the following two sentences first of all let me repeat what i said at the beginning you've traveled places you've traveled intellectually but you've also made a socio-economic journey you're in your 70s now you do not look it and you do not act it but you are thank you and you have some wealth and a tenured position and kids clearly who love you and here's the here are the two sentences that your oxford lecture contained i am a black intellectual and i must stand with my people why why not just glenn you don't have anything to prove to anybody you could just relax and enjoy yourself well i guess it's my upbringing south side of chicago 1950s and the 1960s as you said that peter it reminded me of something that my uncle alfred now deceased my mother's brother a patriarch in our family i i loved him he was a wonderful man in so many ways and early in my flirtation with uh reagan reaganomics in the 80s when i started moving right he pulled me aside and he said son we could only send one from the south side to mit and harvard we sent you and we don't see us in anything you do and it crushed me i wanted him to see me as a furtherance of the river that's flowing along of our human existence of our culture of our family of our quote unquote people i wanted to be seen as a black man making it in the world and making the world a better place for quote unquote his people now in that very same essay i acknowledge that when i say my people the antecedent is is ambiguous i mean my people i'm an american so my people are the american people as well as the african-american people and maybe a hundred years from now a man like myself with uh the same kind of background of dissent of africans wouldn't feel it so necessary to affirm as his people that subset of the american nation which is the african-american people i expect that if you were of irish descent or italian descent or jewish descent now perhaps not so much the latter but the the need to affirm peoplehood in your ethnicity is less than 2021 than it was in 1921. i hope for the sake of our country that that'll be something that we can also say about blackness in 2121 but i don't think we're there yet with the jails overflowing and the et cetera et cetera and i just feel as a part of my own identity a call of the tribe and i'm not resisting it entirely professor glenn lowry woke buster thank you my pleasure peter i'm peter robinson for uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and fox nation thank you [Music] you

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 185,655

Keywords: Hoover Institution, Hoover Institute, Glenn Loury, Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Brown University, Harvard, woke, woke culture, groupthink

Id: n8MN3Ba5VXo

Length: 38min 8sec (2288 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021