Not by Bread Alone

An intellectual history of my work in the Journal of Free Black Thought

It’s always flattering to have your work read closely by a smart, attentive thinker. But Ben Peterson, a professor of political science at Abilene Christian University, has gone above and beyond. He’s read through seemingly everything I’ve ever written, and he’s produced a monumental retrospective of the “social, moral, and spiritual” dimension of my thought. He takes my ideas about social capital, biased social cognition, the black family, wokeness, and many others topics and synthesizes them into a coherent and illuminating essay. Ben created a daunting assignment for himself, and the result is outstanding.

Ben’s essay is rather lengthy (it covers 50 years’ worth of material!), so I won’t take up too much more space here. Below you’ll find an excerpt, but you can get the whole thing over at the Journal of Free Black Thought. I encourage you to read the essay and to subscribe to Free Black Thought—if you want to learn more about it, check out my recent conversation with its co-founder, Erec Smith.

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Not by Bread Alone

Glenn Loury’s lifework as a social, moral, and spiritual project

by Ben Peterson

If by keeping the old warm one can provide understanding of the new, on is fit to be a teacher.

—Confucius

Yet it is natural for man, more than for any other animal, to be a social and political animal, to live in a group.

—St. Thomas Aquinas

The task of the social scientist and theorist is to help us learn about ourselves, about the determinants and implications of human behavior. Often, the social scientist and theorist can help us evaluate our public policies and priorities. Professor Glenn C. Loury, an increasingly prominent economist and public intellectual who is currently Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, has made significant, policy-relevant contributions to scholarly and public discourse in this vein, particularly in matters pertaining to persistent racial inequality, crime and punishment, and social policy. Professor Loury engages these questions and issues in an interdisciplinary manner with a level of rigor, depth, and clarity to which academics and public intellectuals should all aspire. To tell a stylized and much abbreviated story of Loury’s career, he began by proposing the concept of social capital to explain differences in the supply of marketable skills among black and white Americans, which led him to the importance of moral authority, which has led him ultimately to the crucial significance of spiritual values. He has journeyed from the economics of the labor market to the deep struggles of the inner life of the person, pointing out connections along the way.

In this essay I identify and develop three themes that embody lessons we can learn about ourselves. Loury himself often identifies the Enlightenment inheritance he seeks to preserve and develop; here, I emphasize the even older themes his work keeps warm. No doubt my own interests and proclivities as a political theorist and adherent of Christianity inflect my reception of Loury’s work, but I will try to show how these lessons, highly relevant to contemporary social problems and policy challenges, can be gleaned from a good portion of his writing and speaking:

1. We are social.

2. We are moral.

3. We are spiritual.

These may appear unlikely lessons from the pen and mouth of an economist. Yet, Loury’s training and skill as an economist, combined with his attention to the disciplines of history, sociology, political theory, and philosophy have allowed him to integrate his work into a framework for humane and wise policy analysis, leading to what I will call a “politics of empowerment,” the opposite of a politics of dependency. Such a politics does not necessarily eschew public spending on social welfare and other services or perhaps even spending calculated to improve the lot of members of racial minorities, but it recognizes that spending has to be carefully tailored to empower rather than infantilize recipients. Government services and programs are embedded within a broader ecology of initiatives and institutions that together constitute our common life, and these require constant attention, support, and renewal.

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More broadly, our common life depends on the renovation of philosophical and spiritual orientations that teach us to respect more fully the dignity and value of our fellow citizens and human beings. Some of Loury’s insights on economics, society, and public policy have ancient roots. Aristotle famously described man as a “political animal,” and a host of medieval thinkers including St. Thomas Aquinas adopted and extended the idea, taking as axiomatic the idea that man is a “social being.” We are fundamentally interdependent, shaped tremendously by our social context, yet possessed of reason, will, and a spiritual transcendence essential to our being and the lives we live personally and publicly.

While these lessons have ancient roots, they are insufficiently acknowledged and too rarely blended. Our politics and political discourse tend either toward an excessive individualism or a theory of social conditioning that exaggerates environmental and social causes and exterminates the possibility of all human agency. Loury’s recognition of the human person as “freely choosing, socially situated, [and] spiritually endowed” offers a balanced and fruitful path forward that accords with the best of our intellectual and spiritual inheritance.

We Are Social

“Social capital” is a widely recognized concept from social science. While it has deep roots in political theory and sociology, and its popular diffusion is due in large measure to political scientist Robert Putnam and his 2000 bestseller Bowling Alone, Loury was one of several thinkers independently to coin the term, and he used it in a distinctive way, befitting an economist. In his dissertation—his most-cited work—and widely-cited papers building on it, Loury developed the concept and used it to capture something missing in standard “human capital” theory and its implication that establishing equal opportunity in the marketplace would be sufficient to set black Americans on a path to economic parity with whites.

Human capital refers to an individual’s investment in cultivating his or her own talents and abilities to maximize marketability in a labor market. In contrast, social capital captured the idea of inalienable or non-replicable experiences and inputs transmitted or mediated through personal connections. For example, a mother’s special bond with her child, a bond that begins even before birth, is a major contributor to human development and something no one but she can supply. This form of capital, as distinct from human capital, cannot simply be gained by choosing to invest more in a certain skill or form a better habit; it is socially mediated, a function of the community and network in which an individual is embedded. The capacity and choice to invest in human capital are, to a great degree, a function of social capital.

The importance of social capital helped explain how persistent racial inequality with regard to key social and economic indicators could persist even after legal equality had been secured for black Americans in the post-Civil Rights era. As Loury put it, the contemporary conventional wisdom that “the elimination of racial discrimination will result in the eventual elimination of racial economic inequality” was misguided because it did not “take adequate account of the effect of an individual’s family and community background on his acquisition of skills.” Doctrinaire free-marketeers were wrong to believe that establishing equal opportunity would be sufficient to set America on a path to equality of outcome. They were wrong because they failed to take into account the social context of human development. As Loury wrote in his dissertation:

The meritocratic notion that in a free society each individual will rise to the level justified by his competence must be tempered with the observation that no one travels that road entirely on his own. The social context within which individual maturation occurs strongly conditions what equally competent individuals can achieve…. An individual’s social origin has an obvious and important effect on the amount of resources which are ultimately invested in his development. It may thus be useful to employ a concept of “social capital” to represent the consequences of social position in facilitating individual acquisition of (say) the standard human capital characteristics.

The notion of social capital highlights the complex ways historical forces and patterns of interaction shape present realities. While the mother-child bond is one example of a form of social capital, other forms might accumulate over generations in a manner compounding inequality between groups, especially in a context like the United States where whites systematically excluded black Americans from social, political, and economic interactions of many kinds.

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Thus, throughout his work, Loury has attended to the ways social reality—the assemblage of conventions and relationship networks in which the individual is embedded and which he must navigate—shapes the economic and social prospects of individuals and groups. His mantra “relations before transactions” captures the importance of the social context of human life and market activity: “All human development is socially situated and mediated. In other words, the development of human beings occurs inside social institutions.” This broad perspective informs what he calls “the development narrative” that he proposes as an alternative to the “bias narrative” to account for and address racial disparities. While Loury originally critiqued the laissez-faire, market-oriented approach to persistent racial inequality on the basis of this insight, his attention to the social context of human development has also led him to a singular focus on the importance of the bedrock social institution: the family. He has regularly drawn attention to the breakdown of the two-parent family in many black communities and its negative consequences for human development and racial inequality.

Loury’s focus shifted, however, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He reframed his insights about the social context of human development to craft a sustained argument about the causes of persistent racial inequality and how our “social imaginary,” to borrow philosopher Charles Taylor’s phrase, needs to change in order to address them. In The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (2002; second edition, 2021), Loury argues against a strictly colorblind approach to public policy because it is insufficiently attuned to the intergenerational and historical effects of racial insubordination, the importance of social institutions and social capital, and the ways racial biases subtly operate to perpetuate racial inequality. Here is how he diagnoses the problem of racial justice in the post-Civil Rights era in Anatomy:

The unfair treatment of persons based on race in formal economic transactions is no longer the most significant barrier to the full participation of blacks in American life. More important is the fact that too many African Americans cannot gain access on anything approaching equal terms to social resources that are essential for human flourishing, but that are made available to individuals primarily through informal, culturally mediated, race-influenced social intercourse.

To provide a vision for a healthy and vibrant democratic polity, our political theory must shed its “liberal-individualist morality of race-blindness” and its attendant faith in a pure equal opportunity doctrine. Thus, “achieving racial justice requires at this point in American history more than reforming procedures so as to ensure fair treatment for blacks in the economic and bureaucratic undertakings of private and state actors.” Because of our “raced” past and its intergenerational effects—because we are social, in the full, historical sense of the term—we must instead embrace “race-egalitarianism,” and aim to “eliminate the objective disparity in economic and social capacity between the race-segregated networks of affiliation that continue to characterize the structure of American public life, and that constitute the most morally disturbing remnant of this nation’s tortured racial past.” The book critiques liberal individualism precisely because of its inability to account for the social and historically conditioned manner of human life and society. A richer, truer anthropology is required to pursue racial justice.

In Anatomy, Loury sets himself the task of explaining how racial inequality on a number of performance-related social and economic indicators persists in the post-Civil Rights era, while abjuring a race essentialism that would simply attribute these disparities to genetic differences in populations. Race itself, Loury argues, is primarily a social phenomenon—a social construct. It’s best understood as an equilibrium, an outcome of continual choices regarding mating preferences that perpetuate the existence of population groups with distinctive physical characteristics and bodily markings. Race would not exist if we did not perpetuate it with our choices about intimate partnership.

That’s not to say it’s not real! Social realities confront the individual and affect his or her life prospects: “‘Race’ is all about embodied social signification. In this sense it is a social truth that race is quite real, despite what may be the biological-taxonomic truth of the claim that there are no races.” That’s the point—the social context is an important reality for a person, even if the biological basis of race is scant.

Despite his current, relished persona as a “woke buster,” Loury’s 2002 book presents what amounts to a sophisticated theory of systemic racism. He explains how, based solely on the beliefs and perceptions rather than the racist preferences of actors, implicit biases can dramatically shape outcomes to the detriment of a group bearing a “racial stigma”—an aura of dishonor and otherness that attaches to black Americans stemming from the legacy of slavery and racial subordination. Moreover, these biases can become self-fulfilling prophecies, shaping the behavior of the stigmatized racial group’s members. As an example, imagine that a cab driver believes that black riders are more likely than others to rob him. He avoids picking them up. Black taxi-seekers know this and respond by not waiting for his taxi—except the few who do plan to rob him. The taxi-driver’s prejudice that black riders were more likely to rob him proves correct—but only because of his stigma-informed prior about black riders. We could apply the example to think about racial minorities’ low participation in banks and financial institutions. Racial disparities may be thus reproduced and perpetuated, even absent inherent differences between members of racial groups. They are socially produced or enacted in a self-reinforcing system—our attitudes and biases shape the incentives and behaviors of stigmatized groups, which in turn reinforce our attitudes and biases.

While Loury’s recent speeches and writings express skepticism toward the concept of systemic racism, particularly as invoked without substantiation for rhetorical purposes, Anatomy introduces a theme that he has continued to explicate: problems in the black family and black communities are related to segregated patterns of social interaction in American society. For example, the generally low level of interracial dating and marriage between black women and white men affects the intra-racial pattern of intimate relations. Since this “exit option” does not exist in practice for black women, they have no choice but to accept the status quo with black men, a situation which has continued to generate a high level of multi-partner fertility and out-of-wedlock births.

So, even the pathologies and problems among many black Americans are partly the product of a system, a product of repeated stigma-infused interactions. These problems are ours to shoulder, but racial stigma prevents us from doing so. Loury writes in Anatomy:

I maintain the following: If there were a comparable group number of young European-American men on beer-drinking binges, or anorexic teenage girls starving themselves to death [or perhaps an opioid epidemic!], and if these were situations in which the same degree of human suffering was engendered as is being produced in this case, it would occasion a most profound reflection about what had gone wrong, not only with THEM, but also with US: “What manner of people are we to produce such an outcome?”

The recognition of the social nature of human life and development, of our very identities and our sense of ourselves, leads us to an understanding of the problem of racial inequality focused on broadening opportunities for social exchange and participation in common civic, economic, and political effort—a focus on inclusion, rightly understood. Anatomy thus introduces a theme pervading Loury’s writing and speaking: the imperative to construct a broader sense of common identity in American society. The book also deals with the related interplay between personal and public morality, a subject to which we turn now.

Read the rest of this essay at the Journal of Free Black Thought