Glenn Loury

Glenn Loury was born September 3, 1948, on Chicago's South Side, in a neighborhood the federal government had redlined a decade earlier. He fathered two children as a teenager while working at a printing plant and married his first wife, Charlene, before following an unlikely academic path. He attended Southeast Junior College, transferred to Northwestern University on a scholarship, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1972. He went on to MIT for a doctorate in economics, studying under the Nobel laureate Robert Solow and writing a dissertation on the distribution of income — there he also met Linda Datcher, an economist he would later marry. He finished the PhD in 1976, one of a small number of Black economists working at that level of economic theory.

Loury became the first Black economist to hold tenure at Harvard in 1982, at 33, arriving as a rising figure in Reagan-era Black conservatism who argued, in a widely read 1984 New Republic essay, that civil-rights-era liberalism could not fix failures he called internal to Black communities. He held posts at Michigan and Harvard's Kennedy School, spent 1991 to 2005 at Boston University running its Institute on Race and Social Division, and has taught economics at Brown since 2005. His scholarship, mostly technical work in welfare economics and game theory, produced a public strand on race and inequality that culminated in The Anatomy of Racial Inequality in 2002. He now co-hosts a webcast on race and policy, arguing, against whichever label was last attached to him, that neither affirmative action nor reparations solves what he calls America's racial predicament.

In June 1987 Loury withdrew his name from consideration as Reagan's Undersecretary of Education after an assault and battery charge stemming from a relationship with a woman named Pamela Foster became public, and that December he was arrested for drug possession. The collapse came from a man who had spent the mid-1980s telling Black America, in print, that its problems were substantially self-inflicted and required a change in behavior he was not, at the time, managing to model in his own life. He later described the episode as the bottom that led him into evangelical Christianity and a period of genuine withdrawal from public argument, and returned to the same terrain years later, in his own words rather than euphemism, in his 2024 memoir, Late Admissions.

Loury remains hard to place on purpose. He backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, blamed Trump for the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack while opposing his second impeachment, and by 2020 the New York Times was describing him as conservative-leaning again after years in which he called himself a Black progressive. He won the Bradley Prize, a conservative-aligned honor, in 2022, the same year he was elected to academic fellowships that have nothing to do with politics. At 77, still broadcasting from Brown twice a week, he has spent four decades resisting every label put on him, which is either principled independence or a moving target, and the argument over which one is still open.

Glenn Loury's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• A New American Dilemma article
  Essay in The New Republic on internal failures in Black communities 1984
• The Anatomy of Racial Inequality book 2002
• Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative book
  Memoir addressing his 1987 personal crisis directly 2024
• Self-Censorship book 2025

• September 3, 1948 aged 0 Born in Chicago, Illinois
• 1972 aged ~24 Earns a BA in mathematics from Northwestern University
• 1976 aged ~28 Earns a PhD in economics from MIT under Robert Solow
• 1982 aged ~34 Becomes the first Black economist tenured at Harvard
• June 1987 aged 38 Withdraws from a Reagan administration nomination amid a personal crisis
• 1991 aged ~43 Joins Boston University, heads its Institute on Race and Social Division
• 2005 aged ~57 Joins Brown University as the Merton P. Stoltz Professor
• 2022 aged ~74 Awarded the Bradley Prize
• 2024 aged ~76 Publishes his memoir, Late Admissions

• Thomas Sowell b. 1930
  Economist and social theorist at the Hoover Institution whose conservative writings span race, culture, and policy. frequent ally and rival of
• Cornel West b. 1953
  Philosopher and public intellectual whose work bridges race, democracy, and American pragmatism. public sparring partner of
• Ronald Reagan 1911–2004
  40th president whose conservative domestic program and assertive Cold War strategy reshaped American politics. nominee withdrawn under
• Barack Obama b. 1961
  44th President and first African American to hold the office, known for the Affordable Care Act. public critic of