Glenn Loury Does Not Disagree With Affirmative Action. He Hates It.

Glenn Loury does not warm up. Before Lex Fridman has even introduced him, the Brown University economist says he hates affirmative action — not because he merely disagrees, not because he thinks it violates the Fourteenth Amendment, but because it is a band-aid. It is a substitute, he says, for developing "the capacities of our people to compete." The offer on the table is a separate program, a side door, a pat on the head. That does not make African Americans smarter, more creative, or more fit for the competition already unfolding.

Fridman, who calls King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech the greatest in American history, reads the famous passages aloud: the creed that all men are created equal; the table of brotherhood in Georgia; the four children judged by character rather than skin. Loury puts the speech back on a calendar. King is talking in 1963, exactly a century after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Four million enslaved people of African descent had been declared free, but they were not yet citizens. The equality King wanted, Loury says, is equality of *status* — membership in the nation as free and equal citizens of the republic, after a social system that had marked them as serfs, landless, uneducated, unfit.

Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal while himself a slave owner, Loury notes, and he did not have the enslaved in mind. By 1963 King was demanding that the same sentence include their descendants. Fridman adds a Soviet contrast: in Hitler's accounting, a captured Slav might be worth a hundredth or a thousandth of a German, a ranking of basic human worth rather than a tax policy. Loury accepts the extension but keeps the 1963 march inside its American fight over votes, housing, jobs, and citizenship. King's ethic, he adds, was broader than that afternoon. In the five years before he was killed, King spoke against the war in Southeast Asia from universal principles. He was a pacifist of sorts, a humanitarian, and in some degree a socialist who thought the poor should not go untended and that the value of a life does not depend on skin, mother tongue, or sex.

Asked what the history of American slavery teaches about human nature, Loury offers two answers. The first is the capacity to look the other way. The United States was founded on a compromise: half the country found slavery abhorrent, the other half had its wealth invested in African captives and their children as property. To make a confederation, slavery was allowed to persist in the South for seventy-five years after the founding, until the crisis of the late 1850s produced civil war and emancipation. People lived inside a morally monstrous practice and called it their institutions.

The second lesson runs the other way. The enslaved were chattel, bought and sold like horses or cattle, and yet their humanity was not destroyed. After emancipation, Loury says, the freedmen and women built, over decades, a foundation that became the mid-century civil rights movement. "Human nature can countenance awful evil, but human nature can also survive in the face of terrible evil." Fridman wants to know how many ordinary people, in 1840, knew it was wrong and how many talked themselves into thinking there was nothing to see — because the same species is looking away from something now. Loury's guess is unheroic. Most people thought that is just the way it is. They were not moralists or revolutionaries. Some were troubled and saw no lever. Some told themselves the Africans were not really like us, and would be worse off in Africa.

That is why a movement is required: the uneasy need to discover they are not alone. Loury also refuses American exceptionalism of the dark kind. Enslavement, the trafficking of human chattel, is global and ancient. Sociologist Orlando Patterson's 1982 book *Slavery and Social Death* traces the institution across 2,500 years — Greece and Rome, Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, South Asia. The impressive fact, given how wrong the practice was, is that it was eradicated. Some 600,000 died in a country of thirty million between 1861 and 1865. A century and a half later, African Americans are for practical purposes full citizens. Loury does not know a historical parallel for that climb from human property to membership in the republic, and he thinks the achievement is worth celebrating.

Loury is, sitting there, a Black American: brown skin, coarse hair, a broad nose, thicker lips, descent from populations of the African continent. He can also recite the case that these are superficial facts — melanin, bone shape, a reaction to ultraviolet light — a barbaric basis for a self. Why, then, does he need a people? Why a racially defined story of descent? His eyes are brown too; he does not invent a brown-eyed nation. He weighs 290 pounds; he does not join a body-size tribe. He was born in Chicago and has not lived there since 1979; he wears that origin lightly and would not fight to the death with someone from Cleveland.

He gives two answers, one external and one internal. Other people will deal with him according to what they see, whether he affiliates or not. A cop who stops him at 2 a.m. for a broken tail light, a reach toward the glove box, a misunderstood command to show hands, a statistical fear that a Black man in that town at that hour might have a weapon — and he is bleeding out because of his skin. So he keeps his hands on the wheel. In a high-end clothing store the salesman may treat him as a thousand-dollar commission or as a possible shoplifter; he dresses up before he shops so he will be taken as one of those Black customers who is ready to spend. The other answer is a story for his children. Almost every African American has European ancestors; a 23andMe kit will show it. His name, Loury, traces to Scotland, but he does not know those people, and he cannot trace his enslaved ancestors far into the nineteenth century either. The story he tells will still be colored, in both senses, by race.

He has been reading Cixin Liu's *Three-Body* trilogy. When the Trisolarans come for the third rock from the sun, the differences among Chinese, North Americans, Europeans, Africans, and South Asians collapse. We should not need an invasion to notice that we walked out of East Africa as one species. He can see both sides: race as irrelevancy, and race as something he holds because presentation changes how he is treated and because everybody needs a story. Tell him you are Jewish and he does not know how genetically deep that is; he knows it is culturally deep, for some of the same reasons. They will not let you not be Jewish when the roundup starts, and you still have to tell the children who they are.

In an essay titled "The Case for Black Patriotism," Loury's claim is almost too simple: we are African Americans, and the emphasis should fall on *American*. He does not even much like the hyphenated frame, though he will not fight over it. The African American population, he says, came into existence in North America through the cauldron of slavery. Slavery in the United States ended in 1863; the struggle that produced King's speech happened here. This is a nation of immigrants on land taken from an Indigenous population, built by wave after wave — Irish, Italian, Greek, Slavic, Russian Jews, Asians, Latin Americans — and by Black Americans descended from slaves. It is a continental power, rich and dangerous, for good and ill. There is no other home. The 1960s Republic of New Africa fantasy of southern states handed over to Black people is, in his word, a joke. Nobody is coming. The World Court will not litigate the dispute. The United Nations will not set up a desk. The argument has to be worked out with fellow Americans, which means compromise and a politics broader than racial identity.

That is not a demand for silence. It does not mean refusing to fight or to protest. It means not rejecting the framework, because there is basically no alternative, and because, viewed in full, the United States is a noble and unfinished achievement. Fridman then puts his finger on the other story. King is often cast as the nonviolent peacemaker, Malcolm X as "by any means necessary." Where, in Black patriotism, does anger live — the "get your knee off my neck," forget the promissory note, the founders were slave owners anyway? Loury says that story is alive in Black Lives Matter, in riots going back to the 1960s, in Los Angeles in 1992 after Rodney King. He can relate. He grew up in 1950s and 1960s Chicago and remembers Malcolm's murder in 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in real time.

He was raised in a house owned by a successful aunt and uncle. Uncle Mooney — James Ellis Lee, moon-shaped protruding eyes, a barber and tradesman, a legal hustler, not especially schooled but intelligent, disciplined, a provider — admired the Nation of Islam. He had no time for Christian ministers and a blond, blue-eyed Jesus who did not even look Mediterranean. He was not a Muslim, but he brought home *Muhammad Speaks* and respected the posture: build your own schools and businesses, get the knee off the neck, stand up straight, raise your children, do not take welfare from the white man, put down the fried chicken. Elijah Muhammad's little book on green vegetables, no pork, no pills if you would only own your diet, delighted him. When Uncle Mooney died in 1983, the bequest was not money. It was a complete set of Malcolm X speeches on six 33⅓ LPs, so the nephew would not forget: do not depend on the white man; pick up the trash in front of your house; get busy. Self-defense was part of the respect too — arm yourselves if the Klan comes. Loury says that blood is in him. The "but" is dated 2022: he does not think violent rebellion gets anyone anywhere now. There are no night-riding Klansmen at the door. The net effect of the so-called rebellions in American cities is negative. The George Floyd protests that became arson, he argues, set Black America's agenda back. Schools that fail and police who do not respect citizens are real, and they also afflict white Americans; the way through is alliance, not a racial frame, and not a riot.

Fridman turns to what he calls one of the most powerful and contested words in English, and to the campaign against his friend Joe Rogan for saying the full word, often in a meta discussion of comedians and the power of language. Loury can say it, he notes, because he is Black and because he listens to hip-hop; he heard it constantly as a boy in Chicago, including as a term of endearment and as the grim verdict that "niggas ain't shit." Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote a book with the word as its title, a history of a provocative slur that was also a Jim Crow fighting word — we don't want you in this restaurant. As for whether owning the word empowers Black people, Loury's honest answer is that he does not fully understand it. It has become symbolic. The prohibition, including the Rogan case, in which Rogan was not calling anyone the word but quoting speech that contained it, is a silly test of racism. Rogan's "Planet of the Apes" crack about walking into a room of Black men was an insult; people had a right to be offended; Rogan apologized; Loury accepts it. On *The Glenn Show* with John McWhorter, they concluded Rogan did not really do anything wrong. The idea that he is a racist, Loury says, is kind of ridiculous.

The broader weapon is the accusation itself. Racism is real, including Black racism; the American history is blatant and still echoes. Throwing the charge is nevertheless a power move, an epithet, not an argument. A professor says the physics department has few Black students because too few are qualified on the tests; a student calls him a racist. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist, wrote in *Newsweek* that racial balancing is unethical and that selection should be on merit; MIT canceled a distinguished lecture after protesters branded him a racist for that view. Charles Murray, in *The Bell Curve*, chronicled Black-white gaps on mental tests and speculated about genes; the Southern Poverty Law Center calls him a white supremacist. Murray may be wrong about everything, Loury will stipulate. He is addressing a factual question. The issue then becomes his character. That, Loury says, is a lot like calling him a witch.

He offers a hypothetical a person might actually say: crime in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington is out of control; the shooters and carjackers are mostly young Black men; after George Floyd, North Michigan Avenue boarded up. The person might be right or wrong. Calling them a racist is exactly not a rebuttal. It is an attempt to take the conversation by accusing someone of bad character for saying what makes you uncomfortable. You may shut them up. You will not change their minds. They will vote, move the store, keep the children away, and talk in private. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was called a racist in the 1960s for writing about the Negro family; seven in ten Black children born without a husband is still a fact that silence does not repair. Linguistic policing, Loury says, is a sign of weakness, a false Black power: you don't want that word, I won't use it; you don't want it said in public, I won't say it. Nobody's mind moved. Better overt disagreement than a polite surface over subterranean resentment — especially when violent crime is part of the situation at hand, and a cop is afraid at a traffic stop for reasons that will not be fixed by telling a reporter covering it that the story is racist.

How do you fight a charge that works — one article, no trial, and the world moves on? Loury does not pretend to have a tactic. He remembers when calling someone a communist could ruin a life. Then he reaches for Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's *The Spiral of Silence*. Some views are defined as unfit to hold. People who do not want shame keep quiet. Others, hearing no one, conclude they are almost alone, so they keep quiet too. A widely held attitude can sit in a stable equilibrium in which the emperor is naked and everyone collaborates in the charade. Then a child speaks. The point is not that he speaks, or even that others hear him. It is that everybody knows that everybody else heard him. He creates common knowledge: not mere knowledge, not even widespread knowledge, but comprehensive knowledge of other people's knowledge. The equilibrium can then snowball apart.

The child, Loury says, could be someone like Donald Trump, only smarter and shrewder — someone who notices how many people hated Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, or a raised fist and "burn this bitch down," and who makes it safer to say so. If the pent-up view is vast, you can wake up in a different country. On racial issues he fears the United States is in that condition, and that the unraveling could be ugly or, if handled otherwise, better. Fridman nods at Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter that week as another candidate for the child's role. Loury notes that the left is right to worry the platform may open to speech it had suppressed. He knows two files that were real news and were sat on: the *New York Post* story about Hunter Biden's laptop, which could have affected an election, and the lab-leak account of COVID-19's origin. Fridman adds that the power to stamp something "misinformation" is delicious and corrupting, especially inside a company that already leans one way. Loury, for his part, is glad Musk is making the move. He is looking forward to the fun.

The same fight, he has told Jordan Peterson, is inside the university. A university is dedicated to truth, to young people entering that pursuit, to research and teaching under free inquiry and civil discourse: follow evidence and imagination; argue with people you oppose in order to get to the bottom of things. It is a relatively modern, magnificent institution, a nursery of technology, cosmology, humanistic understanding. The barbarians at the gate are those trying to shut inquiry on behalf of a particular view. Studying population differences in cognitive ability is fair game. So is gender dysphoria. So is a history of colonialism that is not only plunder but also, someone should be free to argue, a diffusion of literacy and of what that person takes to be the best in a civilization — Loury is not adopting the thesis, only insisting a campus must be able to pursue it. Climate, too: one person sees carbon danger, another sees two centuries of enrichment and bets that ingenuity will manage what we cannot now imagine. Calling the second person a denier and closing the file is against the spirit of the place.

"The barbarians at the gates," he says, "has to do with the people who think they know what the right side of history is and try to make the university stand on the right side of history." His position is that you do not know, and the purpose of a university is to equip you to think. Identitarians want the institution to kowtow. Brown, like others, now marks Indigenous Peoples' Day rather than Columbus Day; statues come down. He is not litigating Columbus. He is saying that forcing a particular sensibility about identity onto the enterprise threatens its integrity. Fridman locates the problem in an overgrown administration that writes rules from a set of beliefs and then deputizes a slice of student activism to shut dissenters down. The beauty, he says, is faculty and students on salaries too low for the curiosity they are paid to follow. In Loury's phrasing, the administration is the barbarians at the gate. Smaller bureaucracies would be the start of a remedy.

On his Substack conversation with Peterson, titled "Wrestling with Cognitive Inequality," Fridman asks why this topic is so dangerous. Because, Loury says, it sounds like calling Black people inferior, like justifying outcome gaps by intrinsic genetic defect. Stack three claims — cognitive ability exists, it matters for social outcomes, and it differs substantially by racially defined populations — and you get the conclusion that racial gaps in results are partly natural. People find that completely offensive. Fridman asks him to steel-man the case for being careful. Loury does it on three levels.

First, what is cognitive ability? Intelligence is not a single dimension measured by *g*, the general factor cognitive psychologists extract from batteries of tests. IQ will not capture temperament, emotional intelligence, grit, or impulse control; reciting a digit span backward is not the whole of a mind. Second, social outcomes are what we actually care about, and many things besides mental ability move them. Visual acuity varies, is measurable, and is partly genetic — and corrective lenses level the field. Educational and early-childhood interventions, he says, have been shown to improve life outcomes even for people with low measured intelligence, which would make group differences in endowment less decisive. Third, the politics: talk like this and you feed something ugly, so do not frame the discussion around racially defined natural differences. Loury is conflicted. Part of him thinks the refusal is just racist panic. Part of him understands the calculation.

Then he refuses the calculation anyway. Imagine he sits at the National Science Foundation. A team proposes to study how people and racial groups differ in intellectual performance, and how genes and environment interact. He declines the grant because the subject is too sensitive, because they might get the wrong answer, because white supremacists might be encouraged. That is omniscience: presuming the result and its politics before the work is done, treating the public as children. It is telling Einstein that special relativity might yield bombs, telling Oppenheimer to skip the Manhattan Project, telling genome researchers to stand down because cloning might go badly — when the same knowledge might cure cancer or generate power without carbon. He wants rules for dangerous pathogens in a Wuhan lab or anywhere else; he does not want laissez-faire there. Shutting inquiry for fear of political weather, though, is a road to ignorance. We have to take our chances with inquiry, about intelligence as much as anything else. If earlier ages had done otherwise, he notes, we would not have Darwin, or Copernicus, or nuclear power.

Loury was trained at MIT in what many would call neoliberal economics: markets, the virtues of free enterprise, profit as a possible road to growth, private property as a creator of inequality and also of opportunity and of command over the physical world. They read Marx. He thinks *Capital* belongs in a full education. At the end of the day the free-marketeers have the better of the twentieth century. Central planning failed; China's rise has a lot to do with prices, markets, and property, however complicated the political system. That does not exclude a safety net. He does not want the old abandoned, or health care and education fenced off by ability to pay. The mixed economies of northern Europe and North America balance enterprise against decency. That solidarity, he argues, requires a nation and a border. You cannot run a safety net for the globe, only for a bounded people who see themselves in a common project and pay taxes to sustain it. Corporations are not incarnations of evil. They are a legal nexus for organizing workers, capital, suppliers, and customers — the fiction Mitt Romney got in trouble for calling people, and the reason phones sit in pockets and aircraft almost always land.

Do markets collide with "all men are created equal"? Markets produce inequality. The creed is about intrinsic worth, not about the scoreboard after free people interact. People differ, and luck differs. Two investments can look equally promising *ex ante*; *ex post* one of you is rich. He started as a South Side Chicago Black kid and a liberal Democrat, then hit MIT and the Reagan-era fights of the late 1970s and early 1980s. He found much to admire in the supply-siders: get the government out of the way, worry about debt, worry that transfer programs wreck incentives. There was a war on poverty, he says, and poverty won. Markets eliminate the inefficient because they cannot cover costs; governments can, because they have a hand in your pocket and a tax collector who seizes what you will not pay. Prices tell you when costs exceed benefits. Ignore them at the scale of a society and you get stagnation — the post-colonial development story of the later twentieth century, in his telling.

Race completed the turn. The civil rights movement began as a demand for equal membership in the polity. It became, he argues with trepidation and no pleasure, a systematized cover for deficiencies inside Black American society that only that community can correct. The family is in trouble: marital dissolution, births out of wedlock. Homicide is an order of magnitude more prevalent among African Americans than in the country as a whole; that is behavior. Schools fail. Affirmative action is a band-aid on gaps in intellectual performance that are only partly "natural intelligence" and largely a matter of time use, values, discipline, parenting, and peers. Asian students who score off the charts, he believes, do it because they work harder and because parents insist, not because of some mystic surplus of IQ. Under the Democratic Party's wing, civil rights became an organized apology for failing to seize opportunities that exist now and did not exist in the first half of the twentieth century — an avoidance mechanism against responsibility.

He is tired of the bellyaching. White supremacy, as an all-purpose account, is in his mind a joke, and he laments how seductive the rhetoric remains. "At the end of the day, nobody is coming to save us." MIT, Caltech, Stanford — the places where the future is happening — are about mastery of what civilization knows in the twenty-first century. There is no substitute for acquiring the material. There is no substitute for being patronized, for lowered standards, for killing the test, for the side door. Do you want to be 10 percent of the population carried along for the next hundred years, a ward of the state in the late twenty-first century? The Chinese are coming, he says, meaning the world is being remade every decade; the slave-ancestor excuse will only work so long. He hates affirmative action because it is a substitute for becoming competitive. He would rather they try to keep him out because he is so damn good, as with Asian applicants, than beg the Supreme Court for a dispensation in the name of diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Belonging-as-complaint is a position of weakness. Only political correctness, he says, keeps people who can see this from saying so out loud.

Candidate Biden promised to nominate someone of extraordinary qualifications, character, experience, and integrity — and, in the next breath, the first Black woman ever named to the Supreme Court. Fridman asks whether Loury wishes he had stopped after the first sentence. Yes. Even if the intention was always the second sentence, Loury wishes Biden had said only that a nominee would be superbly qualified, kept the demographic aim to himself, and then named an African American woman. He does not doubt Ketanji Brown Jackson's credentials: D.C. Circuit, Harvard Law, a distinguished career. You do not have to be a world-class constitutional theorist to sit on that Court; Earl Warren was a politician as well as a jurist.

Biden could have limited the shortlist to Black women — a few percent of the potential pool — and appointed one. Saying it out loud, Loury argues, puts an asterisk on the seat. Jackson can live the asterisk down, as Clarence Thomas has lived his down by the work. What Loury disliked was the pandering: seeking Black votes by treating Black people as children. Why should he care what color the justice is? He should care what opinions she writes. Identity politics at the summit of American law rubs him the wrong way. If he were a liberal Democrat, which he is not, his first question would be whether the nominee can advocate liberal views among six conservatives, not whether she is a woman or Black.

He reads the episode as a piece of a larger strategy: cobble a coalition, talk "Jim Crow 2.0" about state fights over election rules, frighten Black voters into thinking a Republican win means rights confiscated. That, to him, is an infantilization of African American politics. Black people should care about character and ideological center of gravity, not skin. Biden did not have to say it. He said it because he wanted the vote. As leadership, Fridman calls it kind of disgusting; Loury has already said it treats them like children.

Thomas Sowell is in his nineties, still writing, still producing books. Loury thinks he is a great man, and, race aside, one of the hundred most significant economists of the twentieth century. A large part of Sowell's subject has been the deep causes and consequences of racial disparity. He is a social philosopher, an economic historian, a combatant in the argument about how to think about society. He did not merely wag a finger at affirmative action; he studied its consequences in societies around the world and wrote the books. He is skeptical that redistributing income has proved a solution to racial gaps, and he believes in small government.

The Nobel committee has not honored him and probably will not, Loury reckons, because he is controversial: a politically focused Black conservative would bring blowback the committee would rather not invite. There is also method. Sowell attends to data but does not do statistical modeling; he writes more like a social historian than a mathematically trained analyst, which puts him off the cutting edge as the profession now scores it. He is nonetheless Chicago-school, with Milton Friedman and George Stigler among his teachers, working the price-theory lessons: no free lunch, people respond to incentives, demand curves slope down, competition works when entry is free. He is also a philosopher in the line of Friedrich von Hayek. Loury especially admires *Knowledge and Decisions*, an extension of Hayek's case about the limits of central planning.

The biography, as Loury has it: born in Louisiana, raised in New York, Harvard College, military veteran, University of Chicago Ph.D., a Black conservative social scientist of high stature, one of the great intellectuals of the century. Does that imply a Nobel? Yes. Hayek received one. Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote the two-volume *An American Dilemma* on the status of Black Americans, received one. Daniel Kahneman, not even an economist in the usual sense, received one; Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist, shared one with Oliver Williamson. Sowell, Loury says, could be put in that company quite easily.

In 2008 Loury was not yet as conservative as he is now, still in transition, and at first excited by Barack Obama's candidacy — then skeptical, because "he's not Black": Kenyan father, white American mother, a man who identifies as Black. Loury finds it interesting that the first Black president and the first Black vice president, Kamala Harris, whose father is a Jamaican immigrant of partial African ancestry and whose mother is Indian, neither descend from American slaves. Blackness, he says, is flexible; you can put it on. He recites the slogans — our time has come, hope and change, we are the ones we have been waiting for — and cannot believe he bought that crap. Fridman pushes back: a Jew is a Jew when Hitler comes; a slave owner would have counted Obama as Black. In that sense, isn't Obama Black in the most powerful way, a measure of how far King's vision has traveled? Loury grants it, a bit tongue-in-cheek. He also thinks Obama carefully manufactured a public persona, like every politician, and that racial identity was one instrument.

In retrospect the campaign looks like a pie-in-the-sky fairy tale. Grant Park was going to be a new day, a new regime; it was American politics more or less as usual. Obama was not the messiah. Race relations, Loury says, were set back on his watch. A Black president could have told people burning a city to get back in their houses. He could have told the Al Sharptons that the time for grievance advocacy was over, because election to the highest office had proved the institutions open. Instead, "if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon" — words Loury deeply regrets from the presidency, however meant as sympathy — and then Attorney General Eric Holder went out to enforce the narrative. Loury thinks the story of systemic racism in policing that terrorizes Black people because of skin is demonstrably false. The central threat to Black lives, in his account, is violent crime largely perpetrated by Black people against other Black people. Police brutality exists and should be regulated; it is second-order for quality of life. After Freddie Gray in Baltimore and after Michael Brown in Ferguson, when a grand jury did not indict Darren Wilson, Obama could have said: we do not mob courthouses in this country. He did not.

Fridman objects that this is a job for the second Black president. The first one's example, given his skin, was the most powerful thing; hard Sowell-Loury talk may have been too much to ask of a man who had to win and then win again. Most of Loury's bill of particulars falls in the second term, when Obama was not facing voters. Loury's reply is the post-presidency: inaugurated at forty-six or forty-seven, mid-fifties when he left, decades still to live, already thinking about how to be enshrined. The persona he now embodies, dependent on a racial narrative Loury and Sowell reject, was in the foreground when he made decisions the country still lives with. Fridman insists the door is open: a Black candidate for president is no longer a metaphysical event, and the office is also theater, King's "I have a dream," the speech that makes you believe. Loury takes the point. Obama is a smooth operator who beat Hillary Clinton and John McCain; hats off; he remains iconic. Then Loury puts Clarence Thomas on the same ledger. Thomas's story is also extreme poverty overcome; he has served longer than any other sitting justice; nine justices, three equal branches, so in Loury's arithmetic he personifies one twenty-seventh of the American state. He is very conservative. So what. His name is not on many schools; Obama's will be. The same logic that extols Obama's ascendancy, Loury says, should have a place for Thomas. And the next Black president, if the first was not going to say those hard things, is more likely than not to be a Republican. Fridman agrees. That, he says, is why it will be super fun.

Advice to the young, from a man Fridman asks to put on a sage's hat: the world is your oyster. First order of business, you are not a victim — not by color, sex, or orientation. You sit in a free, rich country; everything is possible; you can do anything. Second, mastery of the medium we are embedded in is the key. Get educated, focus, work hard, acquire the skills to navigate the century. The Chinese are coming, he says, meaning nothing against China and everything about a small world getting smaller; move, and move quickly. Identity, coloration, category are not the most important facts about you. He gives this speech to his own children and quotes James Joyce. In *A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*, Ireland is "an old sow that eats her farrow"; Stephen Dedalus is told that ethnic inheritance, Irish nationalism, is a net. The challenge is to turn the nets into wings and fly into modern open sky. Do not be your grandfather. Do not wear the thing so heavily that you cannot receive what is new. Everybody comes from somewhere. It does not have to be where you end up. Live big. Wear your history lightly. He adds Ralph Ellison's *Invisible Man*: Black Americans come from slavery, and that is not what they are. Skin and bone are superficial. The spirit, the light inside, is the work — to live in the fullness of it rather than inside an inherited template.

Then Fridman asks if he thinks about death, if he is afraid. The timing is not abstract. Five days earlier Loury had been at the funeral of Eugene Wesley Smith, sixty-eight, his sister Leonette's husband; she had died in August 2021. Wesley, a metals trader with counterparties around the world, dropped dead of a heart attack that came out of the blue. Two of the three sons, in their late thirties, are severely developmentally disabled and not independently viable; the family had refused to institutionalize them. That burden now falls largely on the surviving son. Loury spoke at the funeral from a template he rehearsed: straight back, broad shoulders, huge heart, great mind, a spiritual seeker ordained young, a master of the Christian canon who also read East and thought God showed himself in many ways. His main thought was that life is precious and fleeting, that death is part of a life, that one should have affairs in order. Wesley did not; there was no will, and things are going to probate. Loury does not want his own survivors scrambling.

Is he afraid? He has been reading Stephen Greenblatt's *The Swerve*, the story of Poggio Bracciolini's recovery of Lucretius. Lucretius argued it is irrational to fear death: it is coming, you do not control it, fear wastes the day, so live fully. These are just words, Loury says. He does not want to die. He wants to live forever and will not. He does not want to suffer. He watched his late wife, Linda Datcher Loury, professor of economics at Tufts, a Black woman from Baltimore he met in graduate school at MIT, die at fifty-nine of metastatic breast cancer in their bed, sons on either side, the dog at the porch door. He is likely to suffer before he dies and to see it coming. He read Richard John Neuhaus's book on dying aloud to her — a Christian minister acknowledging dread, refusing to pretend the end of the self is easy, and holding a hope Loury calls spiritual rather than scientific. Loury used to be a Christian and a theist. He is no longer, not really. He is with Lucretius: no magic, no unseen hand. The sun will die. The earth will not exist in a finite number of years.

So what is the meaning of life? Economists are not especially equipped, but he answers anyway. We try to live well and meaningfully in our time. We bond, we reproduce, we pass something on, we accept limitation and mortality, we contribute through children and through work. We are not in this alone. He gets gratitude from teaching; students will outlive him and have students of their own. He is a writer; the writing may outlive him, though he doubts he is the Joyce of the twenty-first century and does not expect to be read in a hundred years the way people will read *Ulysses*. He wants a dignified legacy. And love? Without it, what have we got? We do not have family. We have missed it if love is not central. Then he tells Fridman to stop asking questions like that. Fridman thanks him for being fearless on *The Glenn Show* and in the work; Loury says the pleasure was his, even if four hours has worn him out.