Late Admissions

Glenn Loury’s “Late Admissions” memoir is superb. Read it. Better, get the audiobook, read by Glenn, and listen to Glenn tell you about his life in his own voice, as I did for 1400 miles.

It is most notably a confession. And it is a confession of biblical proportions. St. Augustine is a piker by comparison. Dante’s descent to hell and back again has nothing on Glenn Loury. It deserves to be a classic of timeless stature.

Dwight Garer’s New York Times review missed the deeper meaning, but gives an abstract

Glenn C. Loury’s new book, “Late Admissions,” is unlike any economist’s memoir I have ever read. Most don’t mention picking up streetwalkers. Or smoking crack in a faculty office at Harvard’s Kennedy School — or in an airplane at 30,000 feet. Or stealing a car. Or having sex on a beach in Israel with a mistress and attracting the attention of the Israel Defense Forces. Or later being arrested and charged with assaulting her. Or cuckolding a best friend.

Or abandoning children born out of wedlock. Or becoming estranged from the children that weren’t. Or writing computer code to win at blackjack. Or having a porn addiction. Or keeping a bachelor pleasure dome decorated with a bearskin rug, a brass four-poster bed and a fat marijuana plant. Or sidling around in a paisley smoking jacket with a matching ascot because it “radiated suave sophistication and Hefneresque cool.” Or sneaking into dorm rooms as a professor to suck face with much younger women. Or entering detox clinics, finding God when it was convenient, appearing on “The 700 Club,” then ditching God.

I’m surely missing a few things.

He is.

But the stories of self-destructive depravity are not the point. Why would you care? Well, as with Augustine, one man’s quest carries lessons for us all.

I found Glenn’s brutal honesty immediately striking. Rampant infidelity and drugs involve a lot of lying and self-justification, to one’s self as to others. Glenn just states, sadly and calmly, here is what I did.

The book is a self-discovery; trying to figure out how he was thinking at the time, understanding his motivations, how he could be so hurtful to others as well as himself. There is the “problem of self-regard:” He liked feeling a “master of the universe,” allowed to break all the rules. He recognizes in his professional life that he enjoyed too much hearing accolades for saying things that he might no longer believe. The book represents his triumph of honesty over stories we tell — “there is the cover story, and there is the true story” — and over ego and its desire to tell a nicer story.

That is why it is a great work for the rest of us. We all have shortcomings, little lies we tell ourselves and others, past actions and current habits that we paper over. Glenn’s descent and recovery, dramatically further than any of us will go, inspires the rest of us to analysis and self-discovery too.

The book seems to follow that standard narrative of sin and redemption, on steroids. (On crack!) And as such it’s a great read. Time and again, I thought, well he’s learned his lesson now, surely he won’t…. and then he does! Redemption is a hard road, with a lot of false steps.

But as it closes, it doesn’t quite fit the standard narrative, and that is an additional bit of honest brilliance. We expect a final redemption, a final state of grace. But Glenn’s quite clear that it never arrives. The enemy within is never completely vanquished. The problem of self regard is endlessly self-referential. Maybe confession is in pursuit of accolades. Glenn said other not-quite-true things in public, in order to gain fame and accolades? Maybe this too? The preface and the postscript warn you explicitly. Has Glenn actually been totally honest? Is this the true story, not the cover story? Are you being manipulated by what appears to be brutal self-immolating honesty, in order to accept other views? He’s even honest that he doesn’t totally regret all of his infidelities, and he’s a little hazy on just when they ended. The angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other will never really go away. The game between them might even be illusory. We are each only one person after all. This final nebulousness, this doubt, is in the end a deeper understanding of the human condition than a pat tale of total redemption.

Still, none of us with a past anything like Glenn’s would be able to say, let alone write, with anything approaching his honesty. However, he does not describe how he came to that state. I hope to ask him. Perhaps he can write a later essay on that transformation. How, Glenn, did you become able to look at yourself so dispassionately, put your ego aside, and say to others around you what you have done, let alone write it for the world to see? It must have been agonizing.

It is also true that without a certain burning ambition, desire for recognition, and a bit of narcissism about how that may hurt others, Glenn would not be where he is. Being a teenage father, working a full night shift at the RR Donnelly plant, sleeping a few hours, and going to the Northwestern library at 7 am wouldn’t leave any room for modern notions of paternal involvement, even if Glenn had not also been stalking the pool halls of the south side. Raising his hand in classes, admittedly to show off how smart he was as well as to ask the question, did bring him to the attention of important mentors. A certain amount of “the heck with the rest of you, I’m going to go pursue my work” is a characteristic of many successful people, despite its costs for those around them.

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The memoir is also an intellectual biography, and would be a worthy read for that alone. Glenn explains his major economic contributions in clear language. Economists will also appreciate how economic theory infects a lot of his personal analysis. She knew, I knew she knew, she knew I knew she knew… common knowledge shows up a lot.

It’s also a biography of Glenn’s shifting political and ideological views and attachments. The same mind that is able, slowly, to see himself through a fog of lies, sees the world around him much more quickly. Glenn is from the start brutally honest, intolerant of hypocrisy, BS, and tribalism. As a young man, he finds himself suspicious of the pretensions of 1968 radicals vs. the straightforward views of the white ethnics at the RR Donnelly plant. He doesn’t get along well with the fashionably left-wing prosperous black students at Northwestern, setting off a lifelong tension with “negro congnoscenti.” [His word. Also, the NYT reports Glenn prefers lowercase b, so I shall use that here.] He sees and writes about the dysfunction of the black inner city, including crime and single parenthood, which the civil rights establishment is ignoring while trying to relive the glories of the 1950s and 1960s. He also despairs at their unwillingness to address obvious issues in order to buck up partisan alignment with Democrats. He aligns with conservatives in the Reagan era, though understanding how useful he is as a black conservative and that he is perhaps valued a bit too much for that marketing. But in the 1990s, he finds the conservative establishment too willing to take the social critique, and a superficial reading of Charles Murray’s findings of the genetic heritability of intelligence, as an excuse to wash their hands of the steadily worsening conditions in places like his old neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. Appalled by the number of young black men in jail, he becomes a leader in the movement questioning mass incarceration. Initially he admits he loves being welcomed back home in the left- (and more crucially Democratic-) leaning society of black cognoscenti. But as their race and policing attitudes steadfastly ignore the huge problem of black on black crime, and in response to the cancel-culture attitude of shouting down and “deplatforming” speakers, he moves back to being a conservative. He even finds himself supporting Trump in 2016, recognizing some of the hypocrisy of the Obama era, and how Trump actually listened to deplorables. Like his old buddies at the RR Donnelly plant. He finds religion as a way out of cocaine addiction, but his probing mind cannot leave that faith unquestioned. A funeral for a colleague, whose end was truly tragic, is the final straw, as he cannot be simply joyous that she has ascended to heaven.

The world’s tribalism sadly percolates through his academic stories as well. His mentors as an undergraduate at Northwestern urge him not to go to the obvious place for a young man with a family on the south side — the University of Chicago. You just can’t go where those dreadful conservatives are. Forks in the road make interesting alternative lives. I wonder how Glenn might have turned out had he gone to a graduate school less enthralled with mathematical theory, more empirical, and more obviously suited to his intellectual habits. But maybe the nearby temptations of the south side would have been even worse, and overcome the better support of family.

The contingency of life also shows up in Glenn’s mentors. A math instructor at a community college noticed Glenn’s talent and sent him to Northwestern, something he would never have considered. He would be an accountant somewhere otherwise. His northwestern professors sent him to MIT. Tom Schelling stands out as friend and mentor at Harvard. You can change lives, often with very small actions.

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This isn’t just a memoir of an economist, it’s a memoir of a black economist, and consciously so. Glenn wrestles with the question what it means to be a black economist. Can he be just an economist, coincidentally black? What does he owe to the advancement of “his people?” Must he focus on black issues? Many do. Some do not.

This is important reading, especially if you, like me, are white and your ancestors escaped poverty hundreds of years ago. We are a spaceship that orbits the planet of black America. We can observe, and try to understand, but we can never fully appreciate the experience of being black in America. There is such a thing as “white privilege.” One element is that I never spend a minute thinking about my white identity, whether my peers think I’m white enough, whether my work advances “my people.” To even think such a thing would be, rightly, an atrocious act of racist nonsense.

There are lots of books about the black experience, of course. But there is only one about the experience of a black conservative economist, born of the 1950s lower-middle class black south side of chicago. A white conservative economist born of the 1960s consciously integrated south side (about 20 blocks north) finds much to learn.

So dip in, as our spaceship takes a low orbit thanks to Glenn. Glenn felt the tension, and in the end much of his most impactful work has been on issues related to race. Perhaps the next generation can feel freer to just be economists who happen to be black, if that is their interest.

Much of what Glenn faced came from a mix of class, economics, and race. J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” tells a similar story of his own rise, and a different group that had migrated from country to city a generation earlier.

Glenn’s memoirs also implicitly tell a story of some amazing women, especially his wives and aunts, and of families. Glenn’s grandparents moved to Chicago from the south. His parents generation worked hard at difficult and physically demanding jobs. But many, such as his father, also attended night school, lived frugally, and gradually moved to a white-collar accounting job at the IRS. Glenn is a standout, but his best friend Woody also made it through law school. And Glenn’s children and their cousins are all going to college and settled in professional jobs. And this far-flung contentious family still sticks together.

Glenn felt throughout his life a longing for the south side of his youth, and a feeling of belonging. That desire for belonging drew him to a lot of his dysfunctional lifestyle. The book closes, though, with the sad comment that the black south side of his youth, where he could safely bicycle around the neighborhood, is gone. Home will always be a memory.