Glenn Loury on the Cover Story and the Real Story | Conversations with Tyler

Hello everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm here with Glenn Lowry, who needs no introduction. Glenn, welcome.

Thank you, Tyler. Good to be with you.

Would you like to start with economics or with music?

Why don't we start with music? I'm not sure what you have in mind, but I'm game.

Let's try some music questions. Let's say that your views, the Glenn Lowry worldview, were writ large as a political movement, what would the music be for that movement?

It would be bebop era jazz, late '50s, early '60s. It would be Charles Mingus. It would be Miles Davis. It would be a young John Coltrane. It would be a young McCoy Tyner. It would be Thelonious Monk. It would be in that space.

And why is that music the correct association with your political movement?

Oh, actually, it's an association with my life story and upbringing, and it was like the coolest and the hippest. And, you know, I was born in 1948, so I was like 14 years old in 1968. '62 and stuff was happening, and my uncles and cousins and whatnot, and everybody was listening to this stuff, and I would just import that into my political movement. There's no politics in that music that I'm aware of, but should we be looking for politics in music?

Well, I think it's whether we're looking for politics in you, right? Okay, let's say we take the more narrowly Chicago R&B tradition— Curtis Mayfield, Chi-Lites, Jerry Butler, Major Lance, The Dells. Right? Does any of that become the music of your movement?

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's in a different register. I'm dancing now rather than sitting back nodding my head to the, you know, exquisite improvisational runs. I'm dancing to that, and, and I'm, I'm dancing with a girl, you know, so it's going to be romantic. It's going to have all of that kind of adolescent stuff stuff in it. But yeah, I could, I could get to Curtis Mayfield and the Shy Lights and, um, well, and Motown too, which was right down the, down the street from Chicago. It was sort of part of the same world.

Why has Stax faded more than Motown with time for listeners?

That's an economist question, isn't it? I actually don't know the, I don't know the data well enough to Uh, to, to answer that, um, but, but everyone still knows Diana Ross, The Supremes.

Otis Redding is somewhat known, but a lot of the Stax sound was maybe too gritty or not polished in the right way. It's not played in, in Muzak as often, I think. That's my impression.

Yeah, uh, or just Smokey Robinson, um, or some of these others, uh, but I don't know. I mean, this is beyond my my knowledge. I wanted to credit the organizational and marketing genius of Berry Gordy at Motown as part of the story. But it might be that it was too gritty. What about the sound of Philadelphia, since we're going back? I mean, there were other, you know, R&B studio dynamics that were going on, and they haven't all fared as well as Motown has done. And I agree with that. I'm not sure why.

Al Green still turns up in movie soundtracks, I notice, but a lot of the rest of it maybe not.

Did you ever see Jackie Brown, that Quentin Tarantino, early Quentin Tarantino film, Jackie Brown?

Of course.

Yeah, it has a— isn't it a TSOP soundtrack? I don't think so.

We'd have to ask GPT, right? GPT or Google.

Oh, okay. Okay.

Yeah, these days it's GPT.

I'm still in Google, man. I got to get with it.

Should we listen to Michael Jackson with the same emotions as we did before, or is he cancelable?

I don't know how you cancel Michael Jackson. I mean, you probably listen with something firing in the back of your brain about warning, warning. But you still listen.

The songs seem much sadder though, right?

Yeah, yeah, they do. But, but the pop icon Michael Jackson, it wasn't just the lyrics, it wasn't just the tune, it was the whole— it was the whole thing. It was the performance, it was the dancing, it was the tragic, uh, arc of, of this celebrity life. Uh, it happened that I was in Bogotá, Colombia, teaching summer school when Jackson died. And our host took us out to one of these 4-hour lunch extravaganzas at a restaurant out in the countryside that it was beef, beef, beef, and more beef. And it just kept coming. And all of the waitpersons were dressed as Michael Jackson impersonators. And there were big screens playing Michael Jackson videos. Uh, everywhere you looked, uh, and this was in Colombia. But, uh, you know, such was the force of Michael Jackson's celebrity and, and, uh, genius, musical genius and personality and whatnot. I don't know, I don't have a problem listening to Michael Jackson, although you're right, I don't hear it being played on the radio.

At what age would you let your daughter listen to Prince's Dirty Mind album?

I'm going to tell you, I don't know what's in Prince's Dirty Mind album.

Well, this from the title of the album, perhaps.

And I'm going to, I'm going to acknowledge, uh, while I do have two daughters, they're in their 50s, so the time when I can have anything to say— yeah, I think they're old enough. Uh, but nowadays, can you really control what your daughters listen to?

If you tell them, I think in some cases it has an impact, at times a negative or reverse impact, right? But words matter. Would you put it on?

Maybe you should tell them another way. If you don't want them to listen to Prince, that they have to listen to Prince, that it's a mandatory rite of passage to listen to Prince. That might get them to not listen.

Do you ever enjoy bluegrass music? What's the whitest stuff you listen to a lot and really like?

You know, I don't listen to as much music as I used to, and, you know, I'm partial to jazz, blues. I work out Monday, Wednesday, Friday with a trainer who has a small studio with a good sound system. We listen to hip-hop. We listen to blues. We listen to a lot of blues. Bluegrass? Now, I love a brilliant banjo solo as much as the next guy. I mean, I can really get with it when it comes up in the soundtrack of a movie that I'm watching or whatever, but I wouldn't have gone out of my way to find it. It's just something that comes across my screen. So I'm not very knowledgeable at all about bluegrass or about country. For that matter.

Do you like the movie Deliverance, speaking of banjo solos?

It's been a long time since I've seen it again, but, you know, yeah, it was disquieting at a very deep level.

I'd like to go back and revisit your early career in theoretical economics, see what some of your current thoughts are on those pieces. Are you game?

Okay. Yeah, I'm game.

Do markets exhaust natural resources in the ground too rapidly or too slowly under competitive conditions? What's your current view?

Well, in that you haven't internalized the environmental externality, I'd say probably, if I had to answer that question, too rapidly or too slowly, too rapidly.

Because there'll be too much of the environmental externality now, whereas you should spread it out over time. Is that the implicit belief?

Well, no, just my thought, my thought process was that the price level, the initial price level would be higher. The theory tells us that the price is supposed to rise at the rate of interest or something like that because the supplier can substitute supplying today versus supplying tomorrow. So he has to anticipate a return in price terms that's comparable to what he'd get if he sold it all today. So I don't know that anything about the environment influences the rate of increase of prices in the pure theory of pricing of natural resources, but the level is too low.

So should we be happy when a lot of those resources perhaps are held by monopolies because the monopolist will restrain output, right? And that brings us closer to an optimum or not?

Yeah, well, I think it's— I think that's worth exploring. If the quantitative magnitudes probably matter, maybe the monopolist monopoly is so strong that he overshoots in terms of internalizing the kind of Pigouvian, you know, tax that you'd want to slap on to the market price in a competitive environment. So it might be the monopolist is too much of a monopolist, but at least it's worth, I think, thinking about. Better than relying on monopoly would be having a government that could estimate what the right, you know, non-priced external cost of the use of the fuel is and then slap that tax on, but that's a political impossibility.

Sure, and governments very often subsidize, say, fossil fuels more than they tax them. Now here's a 19— I think '79 release from Glenn Lowry. Are large or small firms better at innovation? What do you think these days?

I think that that was a nice little paper in the QJE Circuit, 1979. I was proud of it. Uh, I took, uh, this problem that guys like Mike Shearer, the, uh, distinguished IO guy at that time, or Mort Kamien or other people had been worried about— its market structure and innovation, what's the relationship between the two.. And I had a nice, you know, little stick figure model where I could analyze that issue, but I never got beyond an industry with identical firms. And there were either n of them or n plus 1 of them. And that was my parameterization of competition, more firms, more competition. I didn't get it at all into real industrial organization, which would have to do with oligopoly and a size distribution of firms in the industry and so on. And, you know, I'm trying to remember what I had to say about the relationship between number of firms and rate of innovation. I think the rate of innovation is increasing in the number of firms But I think that's what I found, but it's a long time ago, Tyler.

When you were researching those papers and writing them, what did you see then as your career trajectory? What did you think what the 72-year-old Glenn Lowry would be?

I thought— this is, by the way, before Glenn Lowry becomes at all political. I was just an applied theorist. I was a student of Bob Solow, Peter Diamond. MIT in the 1970s, I thought I was just going to write papers more or less like that, uh, for the rest of my academic life. I thought, you know, getting into a top 5 journal, uh, and getting elected a fellow of the Econometric Society and, uh, getting grants from the National Science Foundation was the be-all and end-all of, of my professional life. So I was at Northwestern in my first job in the late '70s, and get this, the year that I was hired, Roger Myerson was also hired in the theory group at Northwestern. The next year, Bengt Holmström showed up. The following year, Paul Milgram showed up. Leonid Hurwicz was always around because he and Stan Reiter were were very close buddies. Leo was up at Minnesota, but he was always around at conferences and seminars and stuff like that. I was right there at the birth of mechanism design and, you know, information economics and the revolution in theory of auctions and bargaining and stuff like that that was going on in my midst. And I didn't appreciate fully at the time the extraordinary and, you know, revolutionary character of the developments in economic theory that I was in the midst of. I was still, you know, using my differential calculus and, you know, just trying to write down these little silly models. And I didn't have deep questions. That's what I'm trying to get to.

Several Nobel laureates in your list of names, as you know.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Now, when you meet promising young economists today in graduate school, is your first thought, "Oh, let the person stay on that path and be the next Roger Myerson," or do you a bit want to shake them and say, "Well, I want more of you to go the Glenn Lowry way and be public intellectuals or some of the other things you've done"? What's your gut reaction to that?

No, I don't, I don't do that. Um, I, I, I want them to get jobs. Um, you know, I, I want them to have a, uh, a successful launch. Uh, so I want to get them focused on a question and writing. Uh, and now I must say I'm not advising very many graduate students these days and haven't for some years now, but I want to get them focused on producing a dissertation that's marketable. So I want them to ask a good question. And I want them to use rigorous methods appropriate to the, you know, high standards that we have. But these days, my kind of applied theory life that I took up more or less successfully in the decade after I left graduate school is passé. Everybody is calibrating and estimating, and they're looking for the natural experiment or quasi-natural experiment or whatever it is, and they're doing the kind of empirical work that you can do now with the computing power that we have and the data availability and whatnot. The profession is completely different. So I wouldn't advise a young graduate student to follow in the path of writing papers like the papers that I wrote because A, they're not going to get in the AER, and B, there's the, you know, you want to get a job. I mean, you know, you want to be able to sell yourself. But I confess to being a little bit alienated from the profession these last years, especially as my public intellectual profile has risen. I don't spend that much time worrying about what to tell graduate students. I don't teach graduate students. I used to teach microeconomic theory to our first-year PhD students, but 2 years ago I stepped aside from that. We have like 8 theorists in our department and the younger 4 professors weren't able to get at the graduate students in the first year. You know, there's, there are 8 of us and there's only those 2 courses, so you know, I thought it was time for me to make room for some other people to teach theory to our graduate students. So I'm not doing very much interacting with graduate students these days.

What's your favorite Thomas Schelling story? Okay.

This is a story about me as much as it is about Tom Schelling. The year is 1984. I've been at Harvard for 2 years. I'm appointed a professor of economics and of Afro-American studies. And I'm having a crisis of confidence thinking I'm never going to write another paper worth reading again. Tom is a friend. He helped to recruit me because he was on the committee that Henry Rosovsky, the famous and powerful dean of the College of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, who hired me, the committee that Rosovsky put together to try to find someone who could fill the position that I was hired into, professor of economics and of Afro-American studies. They said Afro-American in those years. So Tom was my connection. He's the guy who called me up when I was sitting at Michigan in Ann Arbor in this early '82 and said, you know, do you think you might be interested in a job out here? So he had helped to recruit me. So I had this crisis of confidence. Am I ever gonna write another paper? Am I ever gonna write another paper? So I'm telling, I'm saying this to Tom and he's sitting sober, listening, nodding, and suddenly starts laughing. And he can't stop, and the laughing becomes uncontrollable. And I am completely flummoxed by this. What the hell is he laughing at? What's so funny? I just told him something I wouldn't even tell my wife, which is I was afraid I was a failure, that it was an imposter syndrome situation that I could never measure up. Everybody in the faculty meeting at Harvard's Economics Department in 1982 was famous, everybody. You know, and I was 6 years out of graduate school and I didn't know if I could fit in. He's laughing and I couldn't get it. And after a while he gains— he regains his composure and he says, you think you're the only one? This place is full of neurotics hiding behind their secretaries and their 10-foot oak doors, fearing the dreaded question, what have you done for me lately? 'Why don't you just put your head down and do your work? Believe me, everything will be okay.' That was Tom Schelling.

He was great. I still miss him. I have a few questions about America for you. Where's the best place to raise a family in the United States today?

Oh gosh, I mean, it's going to sound like a cliché. I'm going to say something like a small town in Ohio or Missouri or someplace like that, where there's a Presbyterian church or a Lutheran church on the corner, where it's suffocating in the sense that everybody knows everybody else's business, but people are, you know, schools are halfway decent. You can let your kids play until the sun goes down without worrying about their wellbeing. And you can leave your back door unlocked if you dare. But that's corny. Doesn't that sound corny to you?

Yeah, but corny's good. What about Providence, Rhode Island, right? That's where Brown is. What do you think?

You know, I was past the kid-bearing age by the time I got here in 2005, but I see my younger colleagues, and if you can get past the problem that the public schools are challenged and, you know, you have to work really, really hard to find a school and a program and a community that you could be confident sending your kids to. And so a lot of my colleagues send their children to private schools and it, you know, it's costing them $50,000 a year per kid or whatever it costs, which ain't nothing. If you can get past that problem, Providence is not, it's not so bad. I live on the East Side of Providence and Brown University sits up on a hill. You go down the hill, across the river into the flatlands, and that's where the quote unquote real city of Providence is. And it's a working class town. It's doing better than it had been doing 30 years ago. I think it's, you know, the restaurants are good. The economic climate here seems to be healthy. There are challenges, but up here on the East Side, it's a bedroom community of middle, upper middle class, mostly single, uh, family, uh, housing on decent-sized lots. It's quiet. There's crime in Providence. There's not so much crime on the East Side. Um, so, uh, it's not, it's not a bad place. And I like the smaller town. Providence is maybe 200,000 relative to— I lived in Boston for many years. I was born in Chicago. Uh, there are no traffic jams to speak of. Around here, uh, in Providence. When I wanted to vote, uh, and had to go to City Hall in order to cast my ballot, um, I could park my vehicle across the street from City Hall and walk in, cast my ballot, walk back, back out again, things like that. I like this myself personally, the, the smaller scale, uh, of, uh, this town that I'm living in.

Why do undergraduates today seem to have worse mental health issues than they did, say, 20 years ago?

You're asking the wrong guy, but I'll venture a response.

You teach them, right?

I do teach them, and they're under enormous stress. You must have noticed that.

But from what, right? Levels of wealth are higher. If they're going to Brown, their future, while not assured, is certainly not looking bad. What's really going on here?

Uh, okay. I, I, again, I confess ignorance, but I'll nevertheless plunge ahead. Uh, they all want to, uh, you know, get the brass ring. Uh, I agree with you that the prospects for them are rosy, all things considered, but not everybody is going to get into Stanford Law School or Yale Law School, um, or the Chicago Business School or get hired as a young associate at one of the investment banks or something. They're fiercely competitive. The grade grubbing is mind-boggling. And they seem to be driven by this idea that they have to be, that each and every one of them has to be in the top 10% when only 10% of them are going to be. So, You know, that's part of it, but you're asking the wrong guy. You need a culture critic to respond to a question like that.

You are a culture critic, Glenn. You've taught these people for so long. Now, is it different for the Black students at top schools such as Brown? Similar set of mental health problems or quite a different situation? What do you think?

I think it's a different situation. I won't qualify my response any further by saying I don't know what I'm talking about. Let's just stipulate that I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm going to talk anyway. I think they, they are for the Black students, the kinds of pressures that I mentioned, which might be moderately ameliorated by the fact that affirmative action, both in postgraduate admissions programs and in employment, gives them a leg up. A Black kid with a decent portfolio coming out of Brown probably is in a relatively advantaged competitive position for the next step. But, uh, they're, you know, they, they are, they're Black kids and they're in a, depending on the background now, they may feel exactly perfectly comfortable in an elite environment. Environment, if they come from the increasingly large number of prosperous Black families who are sending their children off to places like Brown. But I've known many kids of color, as they say, who didn't have those advantages and nevertheless find themselves because they're crackerjack smart and they got discovered here or there and channeled into the funneling mechanism that leads to them getting admitted to Brown who didn't feel all that comfortable socially in this environment, which is pretty high-pressured and high— you know, it's pretty elite, self-consciously elite, almost smugly so. But, you know, I'm in my 70s and the kids don't come and cry on my shoulder. So I don't know what's keeping them up at night.

Moving somewhat away from the elite, fentanyl is the driver of a high death rate in the United States. How's that one going to end? Do we just cycle through where all the people who can get addicted become addicted and a lot of them die and then it burns out after a generation? Is there something we can do? Will it continue to spread to Blacks and not just, say, whites in the Midwest? What's What's the equilibrium?

That's a good question. Uh, it could be very bad. Uh, it could be that we're not at the beginning of the end, that we're just kind of at the end of the beginning with it. I hadn't even thought about the contagion, uh, social, uh, contagion, uh, aspects of the question. I thought I was thinking mostly about enforcement issues. Can you keep it from coming across the border? Treatment issues. What do you do with people who are susceptible to the addiction and who find themselves in trouble about— well, there's some accountability for the opioid epidemic problem with the pharmaceutical companies and so on. That's the kind of thing that I was thinking about, but breaking through to other elements of the population, and you're right, it's not yet, as far as I know, anything like the crack epidemic of the '80s and early '90s was for urban Black America. But heroin is not an unknown, you know, drug of choice in those precincts. And I gather they're highly substitutable. So again, I'm going to confess ignorance, but I'm worried. You've got me worried now.

In your life, when you stopped taking drugs, did you feel you had lost anything positive, or was it just pure gain? Like, that was just a terrible thing, and once I could stop, I was just flat out better off. Or is there some kind of fun that you actually lose?

You know, that's a good question. I'm actually at the end stages now, finalizing my draft of my memoir manuscript that I'll be submitting to the publisher in a few weeks. Literally, this is actually going to happen. Anybody who's followed me knows I've been talking about writing a memoir for almost a decade. And, you know, people were saying, where's the book? Where's the book? Well, the book's going to happen. And in it, I tell the story of being addicted to freebasing cocaine, crack cocaine in the late '80s. And I went into treatment and I went to a halfway house and I went and I fought and Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, the support of my lovely wife, the late economist Linda Lowry. Uh, thank God for her, for the church, that community that took me in, and so on. And I kicked it, but I thought I was missing something. I, I thought that there was a kind of fun, you call it, a kind of excitement, a kind of sensation of you know, euphoria. And so having gone 2 years sober, I took myself back to one of my places where I would cop. I bought a little cocaine, I prepared it, and I smoked it. And the feelings of euphoria came back just as I had remembered them. But also with them came a sense of shame. I mean, there was no doubt that I was experiencing a titillation, a euphoric sensation. There was quote unquote happiness there. But having gone through, as it were, the valley of the shadow of death and having emerged from it to the arms of a loving wife who stuck with me and a young family that was coming along, my sons, Glenn and Nehemiah, who are in their 30s now, having done all of that, I realized— I asked myself, is this what you were willing to risk everything for? And I realized that the obsession— there was no doubt about the euphoria. The euphoria was certainly there, but my obsessive pursuit of it, which had nearly destroyed me, uh, was a way of living that was just undignified and, uh, contemptuous. Uh, and so I, I put the pipe down after a couple of hits, packaged everything up, threw it in the trash, and never touched cocaine again. So I was wondering about your question about what was I missing, uh, and I decided, uh, having done this thing, this unforgivable thing from the Alcoholics Anonymous point of view, it was unforgivable what I did, uh, but I just had to find out.

Now, this process of writing your memoir, obviously you had already lived those years, but to write them up, put them together, edit them, rewrite, what's the main thing you learned about yourself?

Okay. So, one of the motifs in the book is to distinguish between the COVID story and the real story. Because there's so many junctures in my life where living my life and thinking back on it unreflectively, just thinking back on it, I embrace a cover story. Oh, I did that because— and I, I— it's always self-aggrandizing. It's always not as craven, not as callow, not, not as vicious, uh, not as, uh, obsessively monomaniacally narcissistic as it actually was. I never remember it the way it actually was. So what I've done in producing this book and reliving these critical junctures, you know, for example, for example, I really did lose my nerve when I got to Harvard in the early 1980s. I didn't do what Tom Schelling advised me to do, which is put my head down and write my little papers about natural resources or imperfect competition or imperfect information or whatever. I didn't do that. I, I jumped ship. I, I left economic theory behind entirely and I became a Reagan conservative, uh, political pundit Black guy. I was pretty good at it. And I would say in retrospect, I was more often right than wrong in some of the political positions that I took. This will come as, uh, uh, a upsetting remark to some people who, who know and love me, but I, I think conservatives have the better of those arguments in those years, but Be that as it may, the real reason— I'm just giving an example. You asked me what have I learned about myself, and I've learned that my capacity for self-delusion is almost unbounded, and it's a very dangerous thing too, because I had persuaded myself that the economics department was cold at Harvard in the early '80s, and, you know, I didn't have any buddies except for Tom. I had persuaded myself that Harvard saddled me with these dual responsibilities in Afro-American studies and in economics, an almost impossible, you know, you're going to be a humanist and you're going to be a theoretical social scientist at the same time. It's almost impossible for anybody to do, let alone a 34-year-old guy who's, you know, barely got his legs under him. I had persuaded myself of everything other than the real story. And the real story was that I choked, I blinked, I lost my nerve. I was afraid of failure. I found something else that I could do that would generate a claim. I went from the economics department to the Kennedy School. They were very happy to have me at the Kennedy School of Government. It's a wonderful place, a wonderful place. It's just not a place if you're a serious economic theorist that you would want to spend most of your time. Uh, and, and, uh, it was just too easy for me to do Uh, now I could blame affirmative action, I could blame the larger political environment, whatnot, but I know within myself I was afraid of failing. Every time I opened up Econometrica and I saw another paper from Roger Myerson or Paul Milgram, I was asking myself, would I ever write a paper like that? And I, and I had it out here. If I go over to the Kennedy School and become a pundit, no one's ever going to ask me to write a paper like that. I learned that about myself through forcing myself to be honest in retrospect about what was really going on with me. And there are many other stories like that. I won't try to recount them all because I want to save something for the book.

I have a few questions about race for you. Do you have any interest in that topic? Let's take the part of the white right wing that really likes you. And I know there's different phases in your thought, but overall they really like you. What's the main point or insight they are missing when it comes to race that you would like them to know but they don't?

Thanks for asking that question. I think I have an answer. Those people who are languishing in the ghettos, the housing projects, uh, the lockups, the emergency rooms of the hospital wards, The ones who are doing the carjackings, the ones who are doing the crazy shit that you see when you turn on your television and you look at what's going on in Chicago or Baltimore or St. Louis or Philadelphia, those people are us. They're our people. Those are Americans. They are us. That's us. It's not them. That's what I'd like them to understand, that I don't think that they are my right-wing, um, you know, acolytes. Uh, I, I don't think many of them get that. I think they think this is an alien imposition upon an otherwise more or less pristine Euro-American canvas. They think there's shithole pockets of America that they need to protect themselves from. And true enough, they do sometimes need to protect themselves But those are our people over there. That's our failure. This is an American story, not a Black American story.

And why doesn't that lesson get through? Is it that it's not articulated well enough? The people are closed-minded? Racism? Or what's your account of why that remains insufficiently known?

Maybe human nature. Maybe it's very easy us and them. I mean, I could, by the way, flip the script on that and say to the radical Black activists who are rah, rah, rah demanding Black Lives Matter justice, that the working class, struggling white truck driver, gas station attendant, guy that's working or woman that's working, who's attracted to the populist rhetoric and who might wanna vote for Trump, that those are people too, they're people not so differently from ourselves, that they have a story, everybody has a story, that a little bit of generosity would go a long way. I could say that to Black activists and they would have a hard time hearing it. It may be that empathy and a kind of suspension of disbelief, a kind of interrogation of your gut visceral instinct to react with an ad hominem and react with a with a categorical dismissal and with a stereotype, it may be that the impulse to resist, the ability to resist that impulse is difficult for anybody to come by. I would also say that, and I speculate here a little bit, but you're not going to let me stop speculating, that the political interests of various actors who have to marshal majorities at the electorate and who have to develop narratives that get the juices flowing in one way or another for their supporters, militates against that kind of more moderate and self-effacing and humble posture. I'm not the Christian that I used to be when I was coming out of drug addiction. I was, you know, more, much more observant and fervent, but it seems to me that in the teachings that I can recall from my encounters with Christianity about humility, about walking, thinking, doing, and acting as Christ would do, as he would have us do, that there's just a lot there. And I, you know, I think that it's not as— it's a lot easier to talk the talk than it is to walk the walk on that.

Which aspects of the U.S. Black experience do you wish that you knew more about?

By the way, let me just comment. I like your technique. I like your podcast interview technique. I may well emulate it. All I need is a list of 20. All I need is a list of 20 questions and we could talk on forever. I have this ongoing conversation with my friend John McWhorter at the Glenn Show where we talk about Omar. Omar is a type. He's just a stand-in representation of dysfunctional, probably on the wrong side of the line in terms of law enforcement, bragging about having babies by 3 different women. Can't keep a job, dropped out of school, uh, et cetera. Uh, problematic kid in the ghetto. And John says, Omar makes me sad. And Omar makes you mad. He says this to me. This is one of our things. How do we react to the fact of this dysfunction that is so prevalent in low-income Black communities that creates such problems for others who share those communities with them and for society more broadly, that redounds to the discredit of African American society. You can't be proud of a quote, thug, close quote, can you? Our reaction to this dysfunction, he makes me mad. I don't understand him. I don't understand How you take a pistol, fire it out the window of a vehicle in a residential area where you know people are sitting on the front porches and you have no idea where that bullet is going to land and then crow about it. I don't understand. I don't know what those frustrations are. I don't know the story. I don't know Omar's story, not really. I know stereotypes about the story. Cartoon representations of the story. Is he angry? Is he disconsolate? Does he have hope? What does he believe in? And I'm saying he, and I'm saying Omar, but of course it doesn't just apply to the guys. I don't really know, I don't really know what's going on. And when I meet people, social workers, cops, nurses, religious people who are working on the ground in these communities. They're trying to tell me a little bit about what life is like and so on. And, you know, I wish I knew more about it. I wish I could have more factually grounded empathy for the people who I am so quick to castigate for creating the problems but whose genuine life stories I don't know so much about. And I wish that the creative arts and the journalistic practice would get grittier, wouldn't be so much in the service of a quote-unquote progressive political program, but would just tell me what's going on. I want to go inside those housing projects and find out what people are actually saying to each other and doing to each other and how they feel about it. And I don't trust the reportage that I get because it's all too tendentious and in the service of making sure that Donald Trump doesn't get any more votes than he might otherwise get, or that Black Lives Matter comes out looking, smelling like roses. I wanna know the real story, which I, if I flatter myself with this, forgive me, think would allow me to be less mad and more sad when I encounter the mischief that Omar is creating throughout the country.

Now, we've had John McWhorter on this show, and I know you and he have had many, many dialogues. If you were to boil down the differences between you and him and your views to the smallest, most abstract number of dimensions possible, to what would you attribute those differences? Like, what's the key difference and where does it come from?

He cares what his colleagues at the New York Times think about him, and I stopped giving a damn about that a long time ago.

And before he wrote for the Times? That's pretty recent, right?

Yeah, the Times is just the last year or two, but I mean, he lives there in New York, he goes to the cocktail parties and stuff. I mean, I I'll give an example. I don't think I betray his confidence in saying this. I cannot get John to discuss the transgender debate, uh, in our conversation. I'm not asking him to agree or disagree with anything. I just want to take up the question. Uh, he refuses to do so. God love him. Uh, and he says there's no— you know, it's a, it's a complete losing that. I mean, you know, all that is going to happen is if I say what I actually think, a ton of bricks is going to fall on me. And so I won't, I won't talk about it.

Who is your strongest critic on race? The best critic of you?

Uh, okay, you're gonna think I'm dodging your question. My wife, Luanne Lowery.

It's not a dodge at all. It's probably an excellent answer.

Not that I know.

I'm thinking it makes sense to me.

I think it's correct, frankly. Every time I go into one of my rants at the Glenn Show and I start, you know, complaining about whatever— affirmative action or the defund the police movement or critical race theory or whatever— she will say that, you know, she'll say something like The real structural issues here have to do with economics. They have to do with a decent social provision. They have to do with corporations getting away without paying any taxes. They have to do with inequality. They have to do with the defects of capitalism to which you are seemingly indifferent or unwilling to acknowledge. And all of this culture war stuff that you engage in— this is my wife talking to me about complaining about critical race theory or whatever— is just a dodge. It's a, it's a smokescreen from confronting the underlying power dynamics that generate and sustain inequality and privilege and disadvantage and whatnot in the society. And that's what I want you to talk about. I want you to talk about why people can't pay the rent, about why the wage is so low, about why they can't get decent healthcare, uh, and, and about why the fat cats get away on Wall Street and everywhere else with, uh, you know, practically they get away with murder. They, they, you know, and no one ever holds them to account. You're an economist. Why aren't you developing and, uh, expositing critical theories that address yourself to the real foundation of disparities of power, influence, and success in our society instead of shooting fish in a barrel. I, I paraphrase, but this is pretty much her argument. She, she doesn't really disagree with me, uh, about, uh, a lot of this stuff. It's just that she thinks it's the wrong target.

But is she right?

That's the last chapter of the memoir.

In your own evolution of your views on religion, am I correct in thinking you've moved from a Christian evangelical to some kind of agnostic, or how would you describe it?

Yeah, I think that's probably accurate.

How did that change your views on abortion, that evolution?

Not at all, frankly. I was always one of these people who thought, um, that the fetus before it's viable outside the womb, that's one thing. And people might decide to terminate the pregnancy. I could have a private conversation with someone about that, but that the law shouldn't intervene. But that late term, that's a human being, and you can't just dispose of it for your convenience. I've always thought that. I thought that even before I was a Christian.

So which of your views did change the most due to the evolution of your religious opinions?

I'd say this off the top of my head here, my willingness to hold myself to account and accept responsibility for the way in which I was conducting my life. Uh, I mean, I thought— I don't know if you remember, uh, The Bonfire of the Vanities. The Bonfire of the Vanities, that was, uh, Tom Wolfe. Comic novel from the mid-1980s, and he had in there, uh, I can't remember the protagonist's name, but a bond trader guy, uh, who had made a lot of money, uh, and, uh, got himself caught up in a series of unbelievable fiascos that ended up ruining him. And the bond trader guy was a master of the universe, and I always thought of myself as a master of the universe, notwithstanding my a crisis of confidence when I moved to Harvard and whatnot. I was a high flyer. I had shaken hands with the President of the United States. I had spoken on 5 continents. I had, you know, I was making money and I was famous. Uh, and I would, and the world was my oyster and I was accountable to no one, not to the loving woman who was by my side and whom I did not respect. From the way in which I conducted our marriage for years. Not to the people from whence I had come off of the South Side of Chicago who were looking to me for a certain kind of leadership that I was not interested in providing. I had no real connections with community. I mean, I had these folk communities that I would flit around with, but I didn't have real deep personal relationships that went across class lines or racial lines for that matter. I was a performer. I was self-absorbed. I was a narcissist. And I didn't take responsibility for that. And it ended up getting me into the cul-de-sac into which I ultimately wandered. And the only way out—

Okay, then you become religious, but moving from religious to agnostic, How does that then change your views?

Oh, I'm sorry, maybe I misunderstood the question. No, no, uh, and agnostic is not atheist, right? And it's a saying that it's— there's a kind of mystery there, and there's a kind of awe, and it's, it's a— you have a suspension of disbelief, which I certainly indulged when I became religious, and there's a kind of suspension of belief I mean, what, what am I asked to believe as a Christian? I'm asked to believe literally that a man born of a woman was divine and that on the occasion of his death, he was raised from the dead and he lives on to this day. I can't believe that. I don't know that I ever actually believed it. But there's a mystery here, and I don't know. And I think the quest for belief is noble. And I think the arrogance of a kind of presumption of omniscience on my part— well, you know, I know that that's just a lot of bunk— offends me. So, an old dear friend of mine was the great sociologist Peter Berger, now dead, but for many years a great man who wrote many books about many things, including about the sociology of religion. And he was Lutheran, and he became alienated by the Lutheran clergy because they were too postmodern-y liberal and relativist and whatnot in his view. But he used to go to a Greek Orthodox church in Brookline, Massachusetts, and sit in the back pew and listen to the music and smell the incense and hear the bells. And he just immersed himself in that milieu. And he wasn't looking for an answer. It wasn't a logical proposition. It was, it was simply being in the midst of the faithful. And I do that sometimes. I don't go to church on a regular basis, but especially in the years after my late wife, Linda Lowry, passed away in 2011, I found myself sometimes just, you know, wanting to be in the midst of people whose belief was firmer than my own. So I don't know if I'm answering you or not. Tyler Cowen. I am not an atheist is what I'm trying to declare. And I'm to some degree in awe of the majesty and the dignity and the humanity of these people who are seeking to have a relationship with the Creator of the universe.

What's your favorite novel?

Okay, it's Mario Vargas Llosa, and I've got two. One of them is "The Feast of the Goat," which is about Trujillo's rule in, uh, in Santo Domingo in the 1950s, and the other is "The Dream of the Celt," which is about Roger Casement, an Irish, uh, uh, Diplomat and humanitarian who served the British crown in the first decades of the 20th century, exposing terrible humanitarian disasters in the Congo where the Belgians were doing what they were doing, and in the upper Amazon where the Spanish were doing what they were doing. And he got knighted Sir Roger Casement, but he was an Irish patriot. And he— and also a closeted homosexual. And he ends up being executed because he gets caught in a scheme collaborating with the Germans in 1915 to try to stage some event that was going to be the occasion for provoking an Irish revolt, etc., etc. Long story, but it's Mario Vargas Llosa, a master of this kind of historical narrative. And I just Love both of those novels. American Pastoral is another one that I'm really very fond of. Philip Roth. I could go into details, but let's leave it with Vargas Llosa.

What's your favorite movie?

That's a hard question. What is my favorite movie? Uh, Chariots of Fire.

Why that one?

Well, my wife Linda and I, may she rest in peace, she passed away from metastatic breast cancer in 2011. We were married in 1983. We first met in 1974. Uh, we were together for 37 years. Uh, And that was her favorite movie. And I love the movie. Uh, so, you know, you know the story of the movie. I, I, I, I, I, it, it, it was an era in Hollywood of moviemaking that I, I don't think it will ever see again. I don't know if we're ever going to see it again. Uh, uh, wonderful characters, wonderful human, uh, aspiration, competition, uh, excellence, the pursuit of excellence, dignity. What's his name? Harold Abrams. Abraham Abrams, the runner, you know, Jewish guy in upper-class British society. He was, you know, somebody that I could identify with. But there, I like that movie a lot. I also like Pulp Fiction. I mentioned, I like, oh no, I mentioned Jackie Brown, but I do like Pulp Fiction. I like The Godfather 1. Uh, I was going to report that I just saw a fantastic movie that reminded me of why I like movies. It's not my favorite movie. It's The Banshees of Inisherin. This is a, a, a movie set in Ireland, uh, about a friendship that goes rotten, and I won't even try to say anything more about it. And it's quirky and weird in a certain kind of way, and yet it's deep and, and, um, it's unpretentious in a way. It, it, uh, I like that kind of movie. Maybe I shouldn't. And what is another movie like that kind of movie? They don't make them like that anymore. They don't make movies anymore. They— it's all whiz-bang.

And what is there in the Black visual arts that is especially important or meaningful to you? Uh, Black visual arts, of course, but I suspect your answer is different.

Yeah, I don't know anything about Black visual arts. We, we need my late wife Linda on the scene. Every piece that I have in this house of that sort of sculpture or sketching or painting is something that I inherited from a previous life when I was the green eyeshade guy worrying about my research and whatnot, and where my wife was a fine researcher in her own right, was also had an aesthetic sensibility that she cultivated assiduously. And it wouldn't have only been Black, but the Black visual arts would have come into it. So I, I, I'm going to beg off. I don't know anything.

Very last question: Do you think you will do a good job facing death?

I sure hope so, but I've got my doubts. So I've mentioned my wife Linda, my late wife, and she did pass away 11 and a half years ago. And of course, we were together in that room pretty much continuously for the last few months. And I watched her wither and die. I watched her suffer. And bravely and in a dignified manner and without self-pity. Almost, almost without self-pity. Um, and I asked myself as I was watching this, were I in the same situation, knowing that there was no hope, that I'm going to die, that I'm going to die from this cancer in my liver and in my brain, that it's going to kill me, and the question is when. And the when doesn't measure in years, it may not even measure in months. Could I have carried myself with the courage and the dignity that she exhibited it? I've got serious doubts about it. Um, I, I think right now, I, I don't know what will happen when this moment comes because it's coming, but right now I imagine that I'd be furious Beyond consolation. Why me? Uh, that I would be impossible to deal with. Um, nothing anyone could do solicitous of my, uh, needs, uh, would be enough because I'm the one that's gonna die. That all of this stuff that they tried to teach me when I was becoming a Christian about grace and about belief and about acceptance and about faith would be of no consolation whatsoever. Nietzsche would be my friend, you know, not the New Testament, I imagine. And that bitter old dying man feeling sorry for himself, angry at his fate, is not who I want to be in my last days. I don't want to be that guy, but I fear that that's the guy that I would be. And I fear further than that, that my stepping away from Christianity makes it more likely that that's the guy that I would be. And even though I think it's ridiculous to assert that a person lives on after they die, the person is the brain and the consciousness which will go to dust. There's no life there. I think that's an absurdity at one level. On the other hand, it may be that only by embracing some such belief could I manage to pass away as I must, uh, in a manner that is honorable and dignified. And so I don't, I don't know. I, I, I am worried for myself as that moment approaches. It will come.

We're all looking forward to your memoir. And Glenn Lowry, thank you very much.

Been my pleasure, Tyler. It's been bracing, but enjoyable.