Glenn Gets Freaky

My conversation with Stephen Dubner

I’ve been hugely gratified by the response to Late Admissions. It was published less than a week ago, and there are still reviews rolling out and more requests for interviews coming in. Not every book gets this kind of response, and I’m extremely grateful for it. If you want a taste of the writing in the memoir the New York Post published a short adapted excerpt from the book. The Washington Examiner published a review and, in their magazine, a touching essay about the book and my teaching from a former student, Jesse Adams. There’s also a review in National Review.

But I today want to draw your attention to an episode of the Freakonomics Podcast on which I appeared. A while back, I sat down with writer and host Stephen Dubner to talk about the memoir, and the conversation is one of my favorites so far, because Stephen doesn’t take it easy on me. He presses me to respond to some tough, probing questions about the incidents I describe in the book, my motivations for writing it, and my conflicted position as a writer and narrator. What results is a conversation that goes beyond simply retelling the stories from the book.

I’m presenting a transcripts of a couple short excerpts from the interview below, and you can find the episode and a full transcript for free over at the Freakonomics Podcast. If you sign up for their premium content, you’ll find additional material from our conversation behind the paywall. Many thanks to Stephen for a fun and bracing discussion!

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STEPHEN DUBNER: So if I didn't know any better, I might look at Glenn Loury and Barack Obama and think they're both, let's call them black intellectuals. Both have some Chicago history. Both are politically attuned. And I might think you'd be a big fan of Obama. But in fact, you write that he was “little more than a political operator whose self-presentation as an icon of American blackness was absurd.” Talk about not necessarily Obama as a person but the Obama presidency and what's your assessment of it now that it's in the rearview mirror a good bit.

GLENN LOURY: That remark that you quoted, I believe, was made in the context of me describing my reaction to the emergence of Obama as a political figure in 2007, 2008, when I thought of him as an opportunist and a carpetbagger. I knew the Altgeld Gardens—Far South Side, low-income black enclave—where Obama got his start as a “community organizer.”

I knew those people. I knew the housing projects. I knew the streets. And I thought, okay, some fancy people at Harvard Law think that this is a very bright young man. He's nice and shiny, clean, and well spoken. And he's got Chicago. He runs his campaign. He announces in Springfield, Illinois. He's got Abraham Lincoln. And I thought, oh man, yeah. Okay, okay. It's a sales pitch. I get it. It's America, P. T. Barnum, whatever. But come on, really? You're black from the South Side of Chicago? Not really.

I think a historic opportunity was missed. If he's going to make Al Sharpton his ambassador to Black America, what's the point of having a black president? Joe Biden could have done that. On that question, the question of how does America deal with the unfinished business of incorporating the descendants of slaves fully into the body politic, the role that. can uniquely be played by a black president is to tell the country the truth about these issues. Not to gaslight us, not to guilt trip us, not to virtue signal us, but to tell the country the truth.

You are not at all pleased by the Black Lives Matter movement and their prominence. Explain why.

They don't much like the nuclear family. They don't like capitalism. They think about America as a imperial power that's profoundly corrupt, morally bankrupt, and contemptible. They're radical with a capital R along many of these dimensions.

So now, if you were a white guy and said those very words, what would happen to you?

I don't know. I should hope nothing. But I expect, depending on the context, uttering those words could cause me a lot of grief. If I were teaching a class on American social life at an Ivy League college with a third of the students being of color, and I said something like that, I might find myself being brought up on charges, students complaining about a hostile classroom environment.

What do you feel are the costs to American society of how difficult it is for anyone who's not black to talk about certain black issues?

At the end of the day, it depends on what kind of conversation one is trying to have. I think it's deadly in a university that we would constrain argument and the exchange of ideas and discourse by these ad hominem, identitarian prohibitions. I think that's a very bad thing for a university, which is where that kind of critical engagement with facts should take place.

I think a politician who tempers what she says in the interest of not inflaming uninformed racist ideas in the population or signaling to a vulnerable community a set of sympathetic consideration for the interests of that community and awareness of their vulnerability, I think a case can be made. I don't think political correctness is ipso facto a bad thing. Every instance of modulating in the interest of not giving the wrong impression, not offending sensibility, sometimes that can be the only way to sustain a conversation long enough for it to ever be able to evolve and mature into a more considered disputation about controversial issues.

This question has come up for me recently because I interviewed Amy Wax, the University of Pennsylvania law professor who has gotten herself into trouble for taking conservative takes on some racial issues. And she believes that it's an important thing to do to call to people's attention the difference in the distribution of cognitive ability as measured by IQ tests within racially distinct populations, with the black population mean being roughly 15 IQ points—about a standard deviation—lower than the white population mean. She thinks that's a very important thing to call to people's attention.

I think it can be a very destructive thing to call it to people's attention, depending on the context of what kind of conversation you're trying to sustain with people. But I also think it's true! I don't mean to pile on Amy Wax, who I think is being treated very badly at the University of Pennsylvania, where they're running her out of town on a rail, in effect, for having opinions. I don't necessarily share the opinions, but I think you should be able to have them.

She says, “There are no black physicists in the physics department at Harvard. How could there be? Look at the IQ distributions.” And I want to say two things. I want to say, one, you don't know that the IQ distribution difference is what accounts for the absence of a black physicist. And the other thing I want to say is, even if it were the case, the aspiration to bring blacks into the physics department at Harvard is a defensible social goal. You haven't said anything that refutes that as a social goal. So you're not engaging in the moral conversation: what kind of country do we want to be? And you're extrapolating beyond the data because you think you can explain this thing with one variable, and there are many variables at play.

But in any case, that whole discussion, it doesn't get very far at all if the person who introduces the fact that there are differences in the distribution of cognitive ability by race in the country does so with their lip curled up and with a sneer.

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The people that you were friends with and worked with and sometimes feuded with and sometimes got alienated from, it's a really impressive list of people. And it seems like it stood you in good stead, at least a lot of times. You had a lot of people who were very loyal to you and good to you. And I'm sure you were often, if not always, loyal and good to them, too.

But it strikes me that people are having a harder time in this digital-first age of forming that kind of relationship and having that kind of conversation. You might call it soul searching or confessional, right? Do you have advice for people on how to make yourself more likely to engage in that kind of deep relationship?

Yeah, it's a nice observation that I'm proud to hear you say. It is an impressive, distinguished pantheon of personalities over these decades, and yeah, left, center, agree, disagree, but mutually respectful and learning from each other. So how to cultivate that? It seems to me that the technological transformation of social media looms large in our current intellectual climate and that ...

Costs and benefits though, right? Just look at the way you communicate now with the public, YouTube, podcasts, Substack, etc. So there are benefits for sure. It sounds like you're saying the costs, however, can be substantial.

I don't have a real empirical basis for making that assessment. It's a hunch. What I'm thinking is, take my friendship with the late Abigail Thernstrom and Stephen Thernstrom, which goes back to my early days at Harvard, and which ended when I critically reviewed their book, America in Black and White, in a long review in the Atlantic, and they broke off with me.

Now, we had been exchanging ideas through correspondence and personal conversation, but nothing on Twitter, nothing that brought the attention of the world to what it was that we had to say to one another, nothing that left a permanent record. And I think while we did end up falling out, there was a long period before the falling-out, before I went public with my critical review of their book, when we disagreed vociferously and we went back and forth about it. But we did so on the down low. And I'm wondering whether technology's communication today makes it less likely that people's exchanges are of that sort. But I'm over my skis now and I'm outside of my area of expertise.

Now that you've come out on the other end of all these experiences with a little bit of crime, a lot of drugs, a lot of sleeping around, along with a lot of other very let's call them pro-social things as well, do you have any advice for people who are in the middle of the trouble for a way to take a step back and reflect and maybe change while you're in the act as opposed to waiting until it's all over and writing about it?

My response is, “This above all: to thine own self be true.” That doesn't exactly originate with me, but I think it actually captures the spirit that I want to try to convey. Who are you fooling?

There's this quote from Václav Havel, the Czech playwright politician, which describes the way of looking at the world of the East European dissidents back in the Soviet hegemony days. And he says, let's not flow along with the crowd down the river of pseudo-life. Let's tell the truth as we understand it. And I want to say that the main audience for the truth-telling is yourself. Don't delude yourself. Be honest with yourself. Maybe if I had been, I could have avoided some of the fiascos that I report about in the book.

And you write about this, how being smart—and prima facie, you're a very smart person on a number of levels—but being smart, it seems, can really get you into trouble, because you can reason your way into things that you want, even though you know they're not good. And I'm curious if you've maybe overcome that or you still get yourself in trouble with that.

I think I'm better. I got that from my sponsor. One of my sponsors, when I was in the alcohol and drug recovery movement, where he said, “You're a very clever fellow. Maybe too clever for your own good, because you can rationalize and you've got your theories and you can convince yourself of stuff. But the basic issue here is don't use. That's all you have to really worry about.”

Did that strike you as too basic, “Don't use”? Did it strike you as too simple? “I need to complicate it because I'm a smart guy?”

Yeah. I think that was my initial reaction. Although, holding on by my fingernails, living in a halfway house full of drunks, being tempted every day by the streets of inner-city Boston to go back to the corners where I used to cop, but knowing that I took my life in my hands every time I did and that I was at risk of throwing away everything. The simplicity and clarity of the “don't use”—“today,” by the way, today is the only day you need to worry about—was exactly what I needed to hear. I didn't need a whole lot of theory.

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