Life, Neoliberalism, and Everything

From a conversation with Andrew Sullivan

Recently, I sat down with Andrew Sullivan for an episode of his podcast, The Dishcast. I’ve known Andrew for some time, and I imagine most of you are familiar with him as well, so it was high time that we got on the mic together. Our conversation traverses many topic: my upbringing on Chicago’s South Side, faith and loss thereof, my early work on social capital, inequality, and others.

Below I present transcriptions of a few segments from our conversation that I think are particularly rich. As you can probably see, with the first draft of my memoir now complete, the past is still top of mind, but so is the future. Andrew asks how we can close the racial wealth gap, but I think that conceiving of inequality as primarily a racial matter obscures the real issue. If we want a society with less inequality, political majorities will have to be assembled in order to pressure lawmakers to do it. It doesn’t seem possible to do that kind of political organizing if the policies being advocated for benefit only some members of the coalition. In other words, if we want to close the racial wealth gap, we need to stop conceiving of it in racial terms.

---

This post is free and available to the public. To receive early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

---

ANDREW SULLIVAN: I wanna talk to you, first of all, about exactly what you're writing about, which is a memoir, which is how you came to be who you are and the interactions you've had as an intellectual and also as an African American in your life's journey. You're 74, and writing a memoir now must be a very interesting thing, a very sort of sobering thing, a way to look at all that you've been and done. Tell us first of all about your childhood on the South Side of Chicago. It sounds like both an extraordinary, alive, vivid, social, cultural explosion of things, real life and, and how it affected you and, and, and how you came out of that.

GLENN LOURY: Well, okay. There's a lot to say there. That's largely what this book is about. Working class, lower middle class, some shopkeepers, some artisans, mostly laborers, secretaries. Black, '50s and '60s. It was hip, vivid, stylish, a lot of action, a lot of life, as you say. My mother, a songstress, a nightingale's voice.

Really?

Oh yeah. She was a beautiful jazz vocalist who bounced from one relationship to another. Never could quite find her footing. Her sister, my aunt, the matron of the family who maintained an immaculate household into which eventually my mother, my sister and I—my mom and dad were divorced when I was young—moved. My mother, my sister and I moved into a small apartment upstairs in the back of a grand house that my aunt presided over, and we got a little bit of a purchase on stability and on middle-class life in a predominantly black neighborhood of single family and small scale apartment buildings. Lawns in front, you could leave your bicycle out overnight, fruit trees in the backyard, more or less idyllic. Not far, just a stone's throw from much more hardcore and problematic ghetto life in Chicago.

I knew both sides of the line, both sides of the street. Respectability, but also something that was less than respectable but that was a part of the milieu, and I was influenced by both sides of the line. One of my uncles was the father of 22 by the time he got done. Four different wives and multiple families that he was juggling and whatnot. Another of my uncles was a graduate of Northwestern University Law School in the early 1950s. He had matriculated at Morehouse College overlapping with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was a great success. Until he wasn't.

And your Uncle Moonie, who pops up, who seems like quite a character. Tell us about that.

Uncle Moonie was my mother's sister's husband. It was at his house that I grew up as a young kid and as an adolescent. He was a shopkeeper. He was a barber and a hustler. He did what he needed to do to make money. Some of it was legal, some of it wasn't entirely legal, but all of it was more or less respectable. He was a fiercely independent guy. I mean, he was a guy who would bring home the Muhammad Speaks newspaper. This is the Nation of Islam. This is the so-called Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Not because he was a devotee, not because he believed the craziness of the Muslim ideology, but because he saw in the dignified, straight-backed, self-reliant determination to live honorably that he saw from the Muslim community something to be emulated.

He's a guy that was ambivalent about the Civil Rights Movement. I mean, you know, he wasn't against it. But his idea was, “You can call me when they start integrating the money.” Integration for its own sake, sitting next to white people, living next to white people, going to school with white people. Well, okay, whatever. But call me when they start integrating the money. That was Uncle Moonie.

When you say your aunt kept an immaculate household, I'm just fascinated by this black family, that is the mother is keeping everything absolutely in order. The husband is all in favor of independence and self-help and dignity and also a kind of slight conspiratorial element to that, which is quite common. Where did they get this? Where did that come from?

Well, in this case, I don't know too much about Uncle Moonie's background before he and my Aunt Eloise married. But on my mother's side, there were the great aunts. And uncles, but mainly the great aunts. There was my mother's mother's family. My mother's mother, my grandmother Nettye, died of cervical cancer while still in her '30s, leaving four children behind. But her sisters and brothers, there were a dozen of them, Andrew, and they had all migrated from Brookhaven, Mississippi through Memphis, Tennessee, up to Chicago in the decade after the First World War.

So by the time my mother was born in 1928, this cadre of siblings, they were the Goodens, they were pretty well-established as migrants in Chicago of the late 1920s, early 1930s. And they built lives for themselves as migrants in Chicago. They were Negroes, blacks, colored. They were subject to all manner of imposition and exclusion and discrimination, but they nevertheless persevered. And by the time I came along—1948—many of this initial generation of migrants had finally really established themselves as property owners, small business owners, and hustlers of one stripe or another, who were making their way into a bourgeois, middle-class, black Chicago life.

They prized their cars, their furs, their silverware, their mahogany, their crystal, their lace curtains, so to speak, black version of the lace curtains. And they wrought out for themselves a life of dignified striving. And my mother was the beneficiary, and her siblings were, to some degree, the beneficiaries of this successful generation.

It feels a little like the immigrant experience in America. They're migrating, in a way, to make their lives better. It has aspects of that story in it.

Is it Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns? I think that's the book in which she chronicles this migration. And she singles out a half-dozen families for in-depth case study. But yeah, they they were internal migrants, African American migrants coming out of the rural South and poverty into the Promised Land.

---

---

You were kind of entranced or at least influenced by neoliberalism in economics. That was a period in which neoliberalism was kind of reviving in the academy. This is when free markets and some of the critiques of the welfare state and planning were becoming more potent. It was a very exciting time in many ways on the right and center-right in America and in the UK for that reason. When did you first feel any conflict between these thoughts and your core, where you were from?

I mean, one of the things that you focused on in your early academic career was something you called social capital, for example, which is a slight critique, isn't it, of neoliberalism in as much as it says there are other issues involved here, there are other structural questions—social, cultural, economic—that have kept African Americans back in ways that are slightly nebulous to nail down but nonetheless very real. And I'd like you to unpack that early thought you had about social capital and how, when you look back at that idea, how you think of it in retrospect. How does it compare in your mind to the concept, for example, of systemic or structural racism?

Okay. There's a lot there. Neoliberalism, social capital.

Yes, forgive me. I know that your brain can tackle a million different subjects at once.

Well, no, thank you. First of all, lemme just say that I was trained as an economist at MIT. Now, it was not the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago had a very well-defined tradition of classical liberal thought in a number of fields, but especially in economics, influenced by people like Friedrich von Hayek and one of his proteges, Milton Friedman. And they were worshipers of the market and suspicious about government activity, whether it'd be Keynesianism on the macro management side or it be socialism and the centralization of economic decision-making. They were suspicious.

I ended up at MIT, not at Chicago, even though I was born in Chicago. My teachers encouraged me to avoid the University of Chicago because they thought it was too rigidly ideological and right. So I ended up at MIT, and my teachers were people like Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow and Franco Modigliani and Peter Diamond and other people who have been honored for their accomplishments as economics researchers. They were not Chicago free-marketeers, but they were certainly neoliberals in the modern-day sense of that word. I mean, they believed in private property. They believed in capitalism. They believed in relatively unfettered market dynamics, determining how resources got allocated. They understood that corporations were complex legal entities, but they didn't take it for granted that corporations were evil or whatever. It was an interesting set of problems to study.

So when I left MIT in 1976 with a PhD in economics, having written a thesis in which I did introduce this idea about social capital, about which I'll say more in a moment, I didn't think of myself as being right-of-center. I thought of myself as being an economist, that is, as someone who had a professional training in modern economics and who appreciated the subtleties and complexities of the way that that markets work. To affect more or less efficient resource allocation, not without a concern about distributional issues, not without a worry about market failure—not unfettered markets, not cowboy capitalism—but nevertheless, even though they would've been somewhat to the left of Chicago, the MIT school of economic thought was deeply respectful of markets.

I got onto the social capital idea because I wasn't satisfied with the account that economics was providing a persisting racial inequality, which was largely one of a focus on human capital, skill acquisition, education, training, work experience, professional development, and so on, and on discrimination, the conventional market discrimination where employers, because they're racists, won't treat the labor of blacks with the same remuneration as they would the labor of others, because they—as Gary Becker argued in a classic work from the 1950s—because they need to be compensated for having to endure the presence of blacks in their workforce. That was one account of the persistence of racial inequality, and I thought it had some merit. But I didn't think it went deeply enough. I was interested in what was going on on the supply side of the labor market, on where skills were being formed and acquired, where human productivity was being developed. And I thought that that process was embedded within social relations, within families, within communities, within peer groups, within networks of social affiliation. It wasn't simply an economic enterprise.

So for example, concretely, a child is conceived in the womb, nurtured, is born, is developed before, even well before, schools. And there are influences that affect the neurological and cognitive development of that child, the behavioral development of that child, so that by the time the child is five or six years old, a lot has already happened relevant to the productivity of that child later in life. And what that is, that process of influence on the child's development, is not mainly a market-mediated phenomenon. It's not about buying and selling. It's about relationships. It's about connection, it's about identity, it's about culture.

So I thought that if we wanted to understand how it was, late in the twentieth century, a decade or more after the end of the Civil Rights Movement, that African American disadvantage in terms of income and occupational achievement and other social indicators was still lagging, we needed to come to grips with the social context of human development that influences the acquisition of what the economists of the day were calling human capital. Social capital, human capital. That was the distinction. I mean, I don't want to take too much credit. I merely used a phrase. I didn't truly develop that idea.

But you were trying to get to the nub of it. You were trying to get the root of inequality, and you thought it had not been properly really figured out. There was something here that wasn't being accounted for. And early childhood is incredibly, it turns out, important. I mean, in some ways, one wishes it wasn't, because you would have much more freedom to correct errors and to remedy things. So what are those things that happened in the first five years of a child's life that would be different for your classic African American kid than say a classic Asian American kid. So what happens in that first five years, Glenn, that you think is important? Is it a function of inherited attention skills? Is it about ... I dunno, you tell me.

So one of my classmates at MIT back in the early '70s is an economist named Ronald Ferguson. He teaches at the Kennedy School now. We've been friends. He's black, was an undergraduate at Cornell. We came together in the same class in 1972. Anyway, I mention him because I was just talking to him about a program that he started called The Basics. The Basics is what he calls it.

I won't remember off the top of my head all of the principals, but it's basically teaching parents how to foster, in a maximally effective way, the cognitive development of their children before school. So it's things like—and these are obvious things—read to the kid, read and point at the pictures in the book to the kid, sing and talk to the kid even when the kid is in the womb, play with the kid, do your math puzzles and your shapes and your things like that with the child in order to promote their development. Because the brain is so elastic in the earliest years, and it really matters about this kind of stimulation. So that's part of it.

Values and norms. What's important in life? This is not just in the first five years, this is throughout the child's development. But values and norms. What constitutes your sense of right living? I hesitate even to say this, because it's so corny and so out of fashion to valorize that you would want to inculcate principles and norms about living in your kids, but of responsibility, of self-reliance, of the value of hard work. These are things that I think are very important in talking about racial issues, not unaware of the family structure: out-of-wedlock birth, single-parent family, father absence, and so on. So these are some of the things that I would point to.

You were yourself brought up essentially by an aunt and uncle, to some extent.

Yeah.

You live in a world in which the older generation of women are doing so much of the work in terms of taking care of kids. It's not a pattern that's not been recognized, but it does have an impact in a capitalistic society in which the very values that you're talking about will lead to greater success in the economy. We just know this for a fact. And so when Asian American kids are brought up in a certain way, in some ways in a very different way, they're kind of ahead before they even begin.

Well, yeah, that's true. I want say on my own account here that I have not in my life always been an exemplar of the principles of responsible parenthood. I had a son out of wedlock when I was quite young whom I did not acknowledge and develop a relationship with until he was a young adult. Alden Loury, my son, who, I'm very happy to report, I now share a wonderful relationship with him and his children. But it took many years before that happened, I mentioned my uncle, father of 22, who was, for all practical purposes, a polygamist for much of his life. One of my themes in the memoir is that many of us live on both sides of the line. And you know, I wanted one in the same time, and I did this as I came out in my early neocon phases in the 1980s and '90s when I was writing for the New Republic. You want to affirm certain principles about right living. But being humans as we are, we don't always adhere to the principles that we would extoll.

---

---

How do we solve the racial wealth gap? I know it's a big question to you, but how would you begin to do that?

You know, I wouldn't take it as a goal of public policy, to be honest with you. I mean, why the racial wealth gap? Why not simply address ourselves, to the extent that we're concerned about the lack of wealth in some quarters in the society, to the lack of wealth? What's race got to do with it? This is a theory of history, isn't it? We think that the racial wealth gap is a reflection of historical racial disadvantage of one sort or another. And certainly it is to some extent. But I'm not persuaded that that's, as a social scientific claim, the whole story.

Wealth doesn't fall from the sky. Wealth is created by human creativity, ingenuity, risk-taking, and entrepreneurship and all of that. Surely the studies show that there are hangovers from historical discrimination that are reflected, in part, in asset holdings. You can talk about property values and redlining and so on. You can talk about how the housing market works and so on, about inheritance and so on. But it's a very, very dynamic system that we're in. The backward-looking focus on rectification of historical mistreatment, I think, is the wrong way to look at it. And the racialized focus, I think, is the wrong way to look at it.

So I would prefer to talk about what social policies are most effective and consistent with fostering the wellbeing of all of our people. And I don't say that as an ideological commitment to color-blindness as such. I say it as a moral claim. I don't see that blacks are any more deserving of public attention than whites or Asians or Latinos or anybody else because our ancestors were not always fairly treated. I say it as a political claim. It seems to me, if you wanted to actually get it done, whatever the “it” is, if you wanted a robust system of social supports in terms of healthcare for all of our people, if you wanted early childhood education universally available to families—including those who could not afford it—if you wanted various kinds of regulations of labor market and workplace, in terms of family leave or minimum wage or any of these things, you need political majorities. And the mustering of those political majorities requires formulating your claims in terms that are universally applicable to the people whom you're trying to persuade.

What am I saying? What I'm saying is, okay, you wanna solve a wealth gap? Let's worry about the people who don't have wealth, and let's not worry about what color they are. I'm also saying that, from the point of view, in my opinion, of what is most consistent, in the end, with the dignity and the honor of we African Americans ourselves. Don't make us into clients. Don't make us into wards. Don't make us into a project. Don't patronize us. Don't—in this dynamic country that's open to people coming from all over the world, and they're coming in droves and new lives are being made every year, every generation—presume we are incapable of making of the possibilities that are afforded to us in this great country every bit as much as anyone else who's a part of the society. I'm loath to go down there with you. I'm loath to follow you into that discussion for the reasons that I've stated.

I completely understand that there's a question here of dignity, condescension, treating an entire group of people somehow as inherently needing support or help. There is a way in which the discourse on the left has really regressed, in many ways, to this notion that the entire system is so stacked. So for example, if I ever bring up the question of family structure or early education or early childhood as issues that need to be [addressed], someone like Jamelle Bouie will literally just quote me and say, “Here he goes again, raising these completely irrelevant issues, where the only relevant issue with white supremacy.”

Two things. I'm just trying to understand a question and try and help find a solution. I'm not making any other statements. Secondly, if you dismiss all these actual possible ways of improving and insist instead on this rather abstract notion of white supremacy and the need to then artificially discriminate and favor one group against another as a response to it, you are actually not addressing the problem at all. You are avoiding it. There's this massive avoidance. And the extremism of the left on this seems to me to be absolutely in line with the notion that, in fact, everything we've done hasn't worked. And therefore, rather than addressing what hasn't worked, we are going to simply go to some abstraction called "white supremacy," which will explain everything that's wrong, and then we won't have to bother doing anything about it.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think it's a monumental error. I haven't followed every word that Jamelle Bouie has written, but enough, and his ilk, if I can put it that way. The error that I see here is that, on the one hand, you begin with the premise that the society is intrinsically racist, is contemptuous of your humanity as a black person, is vicious and unfair. But then you make the object of your advocacy to demand the society to solve your problem. You throw yourself on the mercy of a court, even as you loudly denounce the court for being intrinsically biased against yourself. I just fail to see the logic in that, and I fail to see how that makes you into anything other than a client, a ward. You are to succeed or fail by their leave, not as a consequence of your own agency.

And I want to say to such folks, the Charles Blows of the world, I wanna say this is not equality, the world that you envision. Even if you succeed in your demand for reparations and you're insistence on deference and condemnation of anyone who, 30 years ago had the N word in their yearbook, in your policing of the line of politically correct expression with respect to all of these kinds of issues. You can't talk this way about crime. You can't call the murderous criminal whose violent behavior is wreaking havoc on tens of thousands of people in a Chicago neighborhood by the T word—I mean “thug”—because to do so would be violative of some principles of etiquette. Even as you do this, you're not creating a world of racial equality. You're rather creating a world of hierarchy and patronization, where we African American victims are-- how does the political anthropologist James Scott put it—the book is called Weapons of the Weak. We are weak, but we're gonna leverage our weakness on behalf of our political goals. And I just have deep problems with that.

What's worse than that it seems to me is it does, it goes further and it deliberately stigmatizes people who want to talk about those questions. You wanna talk about how do we improve young childhood education, how do we talk about improving family structure, how do we deal with healthcare, how do we deal with childcare support for the very young, especially for parents who are overwhelmed with work, who don't have the time or the energy sometimes to be there for their children. And the idea that if you start talking about these very practical things, you are actually just enabling white supremacy and then you are frozen out of the debate. To keep you quiet about these things seems to me to be incredibly counterproductive to making any kind of progress.

Yeah. We're in agreement about that.

---