An Expansive View of Late Admissions

with Jim Rutt

One of the interesting things about talking with interviewers about Late Admissions and reading reviews of the book has been seeing what perspective my interlocutor brings to the text. Literary critics will focus on its literary elements, social critics will focus on the social and political content, economists will talk about the economics, and so on. So speaking with Jim Rutt was a bit of whirlwind. He’s a tech entrepreneur and Big Thinker with deep interest and knowledge of technology and philosophy but also politics, economics, physics, and any number of other areas. He’s a trustee emeritus and distinguished fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, which should tell you something about his intellectual range.

In this long conversation for his podcast, The Jim Rutt Show, he’s interested in more varied facets of Late Admissions than any one interviewer I can think of. You can find a complete transcript here, but I wanted to highlight two sections of the episode. In the first, he asks me about the relationship between the social dimension and the technical dimension of my early research. In the second, he asks me about my political development, and I lay out the three things that make me a conservative. But I do recommend the whole thing—we cover a lot of ground!

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JIM RUTT: I mean, it’s a big change from being a nerd math economist to spending half your time in African American Studies, which as far as I know, doesn’t have much math in it at all. I suppose you could apply Markov chains to it if you wanted to, but that must’ve been a big life decision to decide to cut your intellectual life into two parts. Tell us about your thinking and what brought you to make the decision to say yes to that.

GLENN LOURY: Well, they sold me on it, Harvard did. I was already walking a line and I try to describe that line in the book. I go back to my graduate school days and I talk about a talking to that I got from Dick Eckaus. Richard Eckaus, he passed away last year, development economist. So the man who trained the likes of Paul Krugman, Jeffrey Sachs, and other very prominent economists were mentored by Dick Eckaus. He was the faculty advisor to the outreach program that MIT established to try to recruit students of color—black students—to their PhD program. And I had a relationship with Richard. I would go into his office and talk to him about this or about that. And oftentimes he would take the initiative in those conversations with giving advice, because I was a standout student and I was black, I was at MIT, and Richard took an interest in me.

And he said, “There’s going to always be demands on you as a black person doing economics, even though your field of specialization might be specialized and technical, to have something to say about poverty and about inequality and about racism and discrimination and slavery and all of that. You should prepare yourself.” And in the decisions about what courses to take. Do I take urban economics or do I take monetary economics? Do I take development economics or do I take fiscal economics? Do I take economic history focused on the nineteenth-century American experience or do I take international economics that gives me an idea about how growth has been uneven in the global context?

There were all these kinds of decisions to make, and the years are 1972, ’73, ’74. Black power is still alive. South Africa hasn’t had Sharpeville yet. It hasn’t had Soweto yet, not really. The struggle still has decades yet to go in South Africa. It’s mobilizing people. People are political. “Are you an economist who just happens to be black or are you a black economist?” That’s the kind of question you’d get from people. “You’re privileged, you have access to this great citadel of learning. How are you using that privilege on behalf of social good?” is a question that you would receive. And I was always moved by those questions, and I took Richard’s warning to me quite seriously, and I fretted about, was I black enough as an economist and what did that mean?

And even in my abstract theorizing, I wanted to apply the theorizing. The theorizing was I have a Markov chain, continuous state, discrete time, stochastic process, which I can characterize by certain integral equations. What are the conditions sufficient to know that regardless of the initial distribution characteristic of this stochastic process, the asymptotic behavior of it will be of a particular kind, It’ll go to a stationary state with enough iteration regardless of where it starts out at? Because I want to use that stationary state as a sufficient statistic for the inequality-embodying content of the transition process, if you get what I’m saying.

Exactly. It’s an attractor state, right?

Yeah. It’s an attractor state for a dynamical system, and the move from state T to state T plus one, iteration T to T plus one, can be represented in a certain mathematical way, and I want to know what specific qualities of that mathematical representation are sufficient to ensure a unique globally stable attractor. And I set up a framework, and I proved this kind of thing.

But what’s the framework? The framework is inequality in society because the stochastic process is modeling the outcome of dynamic income-producing processes for individual families, and there’s an element of chance in that and that generates a random system and that allows me to carry out this program. Anyway, you can see that it’s very abstruse, but it’s about inequality and that’s kind of like where I was. So that was one chapter of my dissertation.

Another chapter of my dissertation, where I introduced the phrase social capital, I’m saying I want to know whether the blacks will catch up if you discriminate against them in the past but you stop discriminating against them at a certain point in time and otherwise the system of economic interactions is fair. Does the weight of history eventually wash out? Under what circumstances will the weight of history eventually wash out?

And what I was able to prove in my formalistic way was that if you had social as well as economic processes that were going on side by side, and they were both consequential for economic outcomes—the social processes are things like stable integrated neighborhoods, residential neighborhoods where people don’t move, friendship and commercial and business interactions that cut across the racial lines, peer groups [with] informal interaction, families where the internal non-market processes are materially consequential for personal development—and if you had race infecting those processes as well as economic market processes, then the economic inequality wouldn’t necessarily disappear even if you had complete equal opportunity on the economic side. That was another one of my problems that I set for myself in my dissertation.

Sorry to go on so long, but just to say, you asked me how did I get to taking up this bifurcated intellectual portfolio. I had already, for a decade before I got to Harvard, been worrying about how to be a black economist, how to be both a technically proficient and renowned contributor to the canon of economic theory, but also a person whose intellectual work could be counted on as part of the effort to make the world a better place.

This is maybe a tough question, but is that assumption that you have to go that way unfair to a black person who wants to be a serious scholar? White people don’t have that thing hanging over them, that they need to be both a very top economist who is black but also be a black economist. Is that an unfair burden to put on a black economist?

It’s a burden for sure. I think unfair is a separate question. I talk in the book about how a couple of Jewish guys, Steve Shavell and Meir Kohn, they were a couple of years ahead of me as graduate students when I got to MIT, but my reputation preceded me and I did well on the first semester, and so they knew that I was up and coming. And I’m black, and that made me stand out.

And they took me aside. We were chatting over lunch one day, and they asked me if I knew who David Blackwell was. David Blackwell is an African American, he’s now deceased, a great statistician who was the first black person to have tenure at the University of California, Berkeley in any discipline. And he got tenure there in like 1955 or 1956 or something like that. But David Blackwell was a contemporary mathematical statistician, a contemporary of Kenneth Arrow, the great economist. And they actually overlapped in the work groups at the Rand Corporation, which used to have a very distinguished high-level mathematical statistics study group there. Blackwell and Arrow were colleagues there.

Anyway, David Blackwell. They asked me if I knew who he was, and I did know who he was because he was a great statistician and he was black, and I discovered him when I was an undergraduate. I actually wrote him as an idol, somebody I really admired, with a naive question for academic advice, because he’s black and he was a distinguished mathematician and I was a math whiz when I was in college. I had written him and he responded to my letter, so I knew who David Blackwell was.

And they said to me, these Jewish guys, “You want to do something for your people? Be like David Blackwell. Be the best technical economist that you can be. Don’t let your research be driven by your desire to do something for black people. Do something on the problems that you’re interested in at the highest possible level of technical virtuosity and let the chips fall where they may.” That was their advice to me. I didn’t, of course follow that advice, but I juxtaposed that advice to the advice I was getting from Richard Eckhaus, because that captured perfectly the tug-of-war that was waging within myself, and it explains why I produced a dissertation that is ostensibly about inequality, but which is really about the behavior of discrete time, continuous state, Markov chains as T goes to infinity.

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We’ll get back to the next turn of the screw, but first, let’s go back to politics. You described yourself at that point as a conservative. You said previously you had really not played the politics game. You go to the Kennedy School and you’re hanging out with guys like Bill Bennett and who was the other, little Kristol? I think it was the younger Kristol.

Yeah, William Kristol. Yeah.

Yeah, the son. Those guys are kind of right, but not nut-right like we have today, but like traditional conservatives. Is that where you picked up the more conservative perspective? Or just tell me the story about your political journey in how you’ve thought about things. Because I will say before I go into that, when I was reading you in the New Republic, one of the reasons I always looked forward to reading your essays was you used the word—and I would use exactly the same word—they were “heterodox.” You couldn’t say, was this guy a lefty or a righty? He was a guy that looked at a problem and really looked at it. And very few people do that anymore. And that’s what I remember most about your writings. And the fact that you were a black academic and weren’t obviously left, probably made people think you were a conservative more than you really were. At that time, at least.

Well yeah, I’ve gone back and forth, and there are reasons even to this day to wonder just how conservative am I based on this or that position that I might take. But the conservatism that I’m talking about has three dimensions to it. One is strictly Hayekian, that’s Friedrich von Hayek, that’s The Road to Serfdom Hayek. That’s a—

The Austrian School.

The Austrian economist, philosopher, also a Nobel honoree, as it happens, but mainly a sustained arguer on behalf of economic liberty. And I always had respect for that tradition. I can remember reading Karl Popper when I was an undergraduate in philosophy courses and learning about that tradition. And as I said, I read Ayn Rand. I didn’t become a devotee, but I became aware of this economic liberty argument. I was influenced by Capitalism and Freedom. That’s Milton Friedman’s collection of essays, political tour de force, I mean a real brilliant piece of public intellectual writing. He anticipates so many things—school choice, negative income tax, volunteer army, et cetera—in that book. And I can remember being influenced by that tradition.

And in economics, we’ve kind of posed the problem of market-mediated, decentralized allocation of resources versus planned, socially controlled, politically mandated allocation of resources. And I come down on the side of the former. I mean I’m a respectful appreciator, not without limits, of the virtues of economic liberty. And that predisposed me to being amenable to influence by the supply side revolution, which accompanied Ronald Reagan’s rise in the late ’70s and early ’80s, which is the time that we’re talking about. I was reading those guys. The low tax people, the people who said “let ‘er rip.” I was reading them and I was taking them seriously.

That was one aspect. I said three. Another was, culturally, while I subsequently became more religious than I was in this period that you’re talking about in the early 1980s, I had a lot of respect for the cultural conservatism of the black Christian, Protestant religious tradition. I wasn’t an avid feminist. I was a 30-year-old, 25-year-old guy in the late 1960s. I mean, do with me what you will, the early 1970s. I wasn’t completely onboard with the nouveau, latter day, let’s redefine our relations and how we get along with them and what we value and how we do things. I was resistant to it. I was being dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century on some of the cultural stuff.

And then on the race thing, I was done with the mournful recitation of the wrongs of America’s past, with the kind of bloody shirt of racism, lynching, slavery. It’s all bad, black people can’t get ahead. It’s all Jim Crow, it’s Jim Crow. And I was like, the year is 1984. This was the year I published my breakthrough essay in the New Republic. We’re twenty years past the civil rights movement, have you looked at what’s actually going on in these ghettos? You got fatherless homes, you got violent crime, you’ve got social irresponsibility, you’ve got parents not raising their children, you’ve got school failure, you’ve got people not looking for work, you’ve got welfare dependency. I’m not asking you to agree with this, Jim, I’m telling you where I was coming from in those years.

And it was like the glass is way more than half-full here in the United States of America, under democratic capitalism at the end of the twentieth century. We had better man up and woman up. We had better take responsibility for building our communities, for raising our families, for getting the trash off the front of our street and stop this mournful recitation of historic victimization. I’m saying it in my words today, I wouldn’t have said it exactly that way in 1984, but that was the spirit of it. The spirit of it was, the Civil Rights Movement is over.

There was a Malcolm X dimension to this. Stop asking white people to save your bacon. Nobody is coming to save you. You think if you have to depend upon the generosity and the beneficence and the humanity of white people, that you have a secure foundation for your own prosperity and that of your children? You do not. So it was self-help, not anti-discrimination and anti-racism that was my guiding light, and that made me conservative. The cultural reticence made me conservative, and the economic free exchange orientation made me conservative. And that’s why I called myself a conservative.

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