Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture | Lex Fridman Podcast #285
i hate affirmative action i don't just disagree with it i don't just think it's against the 14th amendment i hate it the hatred comes from an understanding that it is a band-aid that it is a substitute for the actual development over the capacities of our people to compete they want to tell african americans uh pat us on the head uh we're gonna have a separate program for you we're gonna give you a side door that you can come into that doesn't make us any smarter it doesn't make us any more creative and it doesn't make us any more fit for the actual competition that's unfolding before us the following is a conversation with glenn lowery professor of economics and social sciences at brown university he is one of the great minds and communicators of our time writing and speaking about race and inequality i highly encourage you to listen to his show on youtube and stack simply called the glen show this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's glenn lowry martin luther king juniors i have a dream speech i think is the greatest speech in american history if i may i'd like to read a few words of it sure and uh ask you a question about this dream i have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal i have a dream that one day on the red hills of georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood i have a dream that one day even the state of mississippi a state sweltering with the heat of injustice sweltering with the heat of oppression will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice i have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character i have a dream today first of all damn i mentioned to you offline i immigrated to to america and this is why i love this country this is one of the great species that represents what this country is about yeah so what is this ideal of equality uh that we should strive for as a nation this that all men are created equal what does that mean to you this equality well if we put this in historical context king is speaking in 1963 when he gives that speech it's exactly 100 years after abraham lincoln signs the emancipation proclamation declaring the enslaved people to be free they're not yet citizens in 1863 but the end of slavery is has become the position of the federal government when lincoln issues that emancipation proclamation so putting it in context enslaved people four million or so african descended enslaved people how do they become citizens how do they become in this uh status of subjugation and domination and stigma and exclusion how do they become citizens it seems to me that that's the that's this the heart of it the the equality that king is talking about is an equality of status as members of the nation as free and equal citizens within the republic now i think it's really important to understand that slavery was not merely a legal order but it was also a social system that had the symbolism attached to it they had a big journey to make from their subjugated status as serfs as landless people as uneducated unfit for citizenship really in the minds of many so i think that's what in 1963 100 years later that king is appealing to this idea that when thomas jefferson in the declaration of independence writes these words all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights he didn't thomas jefferson a slave owner didn't have in mind when he wrote those words the people who were slaves but by the time you get to 1963 king is invoking this idea all men and of course he means all persons he doesn't only mean men he means men and women are created equal he wants this idea to be embraced by the country in reference to the descendants of the african slaves that's his dream that's his idea the legacy of slavery would be erased uh that that the uh position of african-americans would be equalized within the political community which is the united states of america that's my sense of it in any case so on a very basic level the worth of a human being is equal it's just literally the worth of a human being so i mentioned to you offline that i came from the soviet union my grandfather fought in world war ii and for hitler the worth of a slavic person as they were captured there's different numbers but it's in the hundreds to one german in terms of the value of the person to the great germany so he wanted germany to expand and conquer a large part of the world and within that future world that third reich the worth of a russian or slavic person is one hundredth or one thousands of a german person of a pure german person so that has to do with not some kind of public policy or politics or all that kind of stuff it has to do with the basic worth of a human being and that's what dr king is speaking to that all people on some kind of deep level are worth the same if you're somehow weighing uh the value of a person we're equal and that's basic fundamental worth yeah i think that's correct i think that's very well said i don't know that he had in mind the position of slavic people in central europe in the middle of the 20th century in the first part of the 20th century king i don't know that he had that in mind he might well have done but certainly that's the idea so you don't think he was really thinking about this particular civil rights struggle and the particular struggle of against the backdrop of the history of slavery in america and thinking about african americans he wasn't thinking about the basic he wasn't speaking to the basic worth of all human beings no i don't mean to say that the speech in washington the dream in in 1963 at that march was within the context of the united states and he was it was within the context of the civil rights movement there was a movement that was going on he was a actor in a political drama that was american that had to do with the fight over equal rights for voting for housing for employment for uh citizenship of blacks in america but king was informed i think by a much broader christian ethic of uh the equality of all persons i mean he he gets killed in 1968. the five years after that speech in washington he spends uh developing his world view and the things that he had to say for example about the war in southeast asia that was going on at that time made appeals to universal principles of equality he was a pacifist to some degree he was against war he was a socialist to some degree he might not have worn that label publicly but he believed in a decent society where the poor would not go untended where health care would be available to people who needed it and this kind of thing a humanitarian who saw that the value of a life was not dependent upon the color of the skin upon the native mother tongue that might be spoken upon whether male or female all persons are created equal this this is very much the ethic of martin luther king on my understanding broadly speaking what do you learn about human nature by looking at the history of slavery in america oh my so what does that tell you about people well i think of two things right off the top of my head one is about the capacity of people for looking the other way in the face of uh unethical and you know morally profoundly problematic practice so i mean slavery was controversial it was controversial going all the way back to the founding of the united states of america the country was founded on a compromise where half of the country uh thought that slavery was uh was abhorrent and would not have had it uh countenanced in the constitution the other half of the country were steeped in the dependence on the labor of these african captives and their descendants the economy depended upon it they owned them as property that was their wealth their wealth was invested to some degree in the value of these human beings and in order for the united states to come together as a confederation of the several colonies there had to be a compromise made and it was made where slavery was allowed to persist and the people who were against it or who thought it morally problematic were able to countenance the practice in the southern states where slavery flourished and that went on for 75 years after the founding of the country until the crisis of the late 1850s that led to the civil war and ultimately to the emancipation so one thing i think about human nature from the fact of slavery is that the ability of people to live with terrible morally questionable practices and have that as a part of their institutions it took a a movement of a massive movement of abolitionists uh struggling against slavery for the better part of a century before um before that that practice could be eradicated but the other thing about human nature uh that i see is the ability of people to sustain their humanity under the most awful oppressive conditions um the enslaved persons the slaves um and their children i mean they were chatted they were bought and sold like horses or or cattle and yet they were not their humanity was not destroyed by that and they were able to sustain their dignity to some degree in such a manner that once emancipation finally did arrive the freedmen and women the the persons who had been enslaved and who were set free were able to over the following decades uh build a foundation for the development of african americans within the context of american society that eventually culminated in the civil rights movement of the middle of the 20th century and has led us into the present day so you know human nature can countenance awful evil but human nature can also survive in the face of terrible evil that's what i take from slavery that's that flame can burn even when uh this the world around it tries to put it out this there's still a little flame of human consciousness of spirit of culture of whatever the hell that is that makes humans flourish and makes humans beautiful that lives on that's what everyone said yeah i think you you put it very well there's got to be some poetic way of expressing that leave it to the poets yeah what about the people that look the other way how many people do you think just regular people knew that something is this is wrong or did do people through generations convince themselves most people most regular people convince themselves that there's nothing wrong all right yeah i asked this question because i wonder what we're looking the other way on today also because you mean you have to kind of if we're you have to ask yourself these difficult questions of assuming we're the same people we were yeah back then then we're we can be flawed in that same kind of way we can look the other the other way just as others have in history yeah you spoke of the european uh context and of the nazis and certainly a lot of people had to be looking the other way when the massive crimes that were committed by that regime were being undertaken i mean the railroad cars full of human beings being taken off to be slaughtered or to be worked to death in labor camps or to be gassed uh etc a lot of people had to know about what was going on and look the other way or enthusiastically supported the the persecution of the jews and the gypsies and so on and i don't know i wasn't you know i wasn't around in 1840 my sense of the matter is that like of many practices that are unjust most people thought uh that's just the way it is i mean that's the world that they inherited they they they were not moralists they were not revolutionaries they they just wanted to go along uh some people might have been troubled by it but thought there's nothing that can be done some people might have thought well they're these black africans they're not really like us and you know they are lucky to be here if they were in africa they'd be worse off still some people might have thought that some people might have been disturbed but not been able to see what it is that they could do about it they they might have thought oh this is you know this is disgusting this is uh you know not something i wouldn't want to have anything to do with but uh not knowing whether there's any practical way of opposing it that that's why you need a movement you need for the people who are troubled by the practice to know that there are others like themselves equally troubled and as they gather together collectively they can exert their their influence i mean debates about the the wrongness of slavery as i say go all the way back to the founding of the country uh there were abolitionists and there were people who were who opposed the compromise that led to the uh framing documents and uh institutions that created the united states of america opposed the countenancing of slavery in that in that situation um but it took a while before that could come to uh come to a head and produce the crisis which ultimately led to the eradication of slavery i would note that slavery is not unique to the united states it's not unique to the western hemisphere that enslavement of people the trafficking in human channel uh is something that one sees in on on a global basis one sees it going all the way back to uh antiquity so we might ask how is it that people finally came to turn their backs and eradicate the practice that that might be the thing worth really trying to understand because the practice itself is you know there's a wonderful book by the sociologist orlando patterson called slavery and social death that was published in 1982 which is a comprehensive history and social analysis of the institution of slavery over 2500 years going back to the classical greek and roman civilizations finding slavery in africa amongst africans finding slavery in the middle east finding slavery in the far east finding slavery in south asia the enslavement of people the practice of taking someone as a captive in war and then instead of killing them which you could do making them into your property was a very very widespread in human culture so i mean i'd like to make this point sometimes when we people are talking about how wrong slavery was and i agree without any question that the practice was profoundly morally problematic but i like to make the point that given how wrong it was think about how uh impressive was the accomplishment of the eradication of slavery now that was something there were 600 000 dead in the war between the states 1861 to 1865 in a country of 30 million people that's a that's a lot of dead people uh who gave their lives not to eradicate slavery and in every instance probably most of them were just fighting for uh you know they enlisted or were conscripted into the forces and they fought and they died but the net effect of their having fought and died uh was to push along a process that led to the eradication of slavery that's an amazing achievement the slaves themselves were largely uneducated and you know backward in their of course what else could they have been they they were kept in captivity they were uh prevented from developing their human potential and yet uh after the end of slavery that population that four million plus african descended people became the foundation for what a century later leads to martin luther king standing in the washington mall and giving that great speech and now here we are 150 years down the road and barack obama is president of the united states now he did not descend from slaves i think we must not lose track of that but he identified as an african-american and was a part of the population that consisted largely of people who descended from slaves and we are we african americans are for all practical purposes fully equal citizens of this great republic that has happened within a century and a half and i don't know that you can find any parallel to that kind of transformation in the status of people from human chattel uh to full citizens of the republic anywhere in human history it's certainly um worth celebrating the achievement of the eradication of slavery i would say and it probably started with a few people that inside their mind dared to rebel you know it's interesting to think about how it all started how in the state of injustice the the revolution percolates like where it starts you said people that see something is wrong find each other it's you know it's in the ideas of charismatic individuals that not only know that something is wrong but they're able to tell others about it and be convincing and then together gather and rise up it's interesting to make this kind of incredible progress from slavery to where we are today to live out the ideal of this all men and creed created equal yeah the power of individual because i i don't i don't know what you think about it but i tend to think that a few small individuals probably originated this like it's the power of the individual because sometimes we think there's injustice in the world what can i possibly do i tend to think one person can be the seed of starting to fix the injustice sure one person here one person there yeah um one thinks of course of frederick douglass the massively significant figure who was born in slavery who stole his freedom and uh because he was property and he he decided he was not going to be property anymore and he took it unto himself to emancipate himself personally and who became an educated powerfully articulate uh massively influential person in the united states and in england uh going around presenting himself as uh an embodiment of human dignity and commitment to ideals of equality and you know i mean he's just one person but there were others just one person all it takes is just one person so here we are on this topic of equality in uh the 21st century so what does equality mean today if you start to think about this idea of equality of outcome or the injustice of inequality at which point does equality of outcome is just at which point is it unjust sort of looking at our world today and looking at in inequality how do we know that some inequality is a sign of injustice and some is the way of life so what does equality mean when we look at the world today different from dr king's speech of the basic humanity i don't think king's speech i have a dream that one day my four little children will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character requires equality of outcome he says his children will be judged by the content of their character that's a conditional statement that is the judgment will depend upon the content of their character not the color of their skin but it doesn't follow from that that the outcomes whatever outcomes we consider wealth and economic power um position within the society representation in the various professions uh the various measures of social achievement doesn't follow from judging by the content of character and not color of skin that when we look at the end of the day at the social outcomes that they will be equal across the different groups in fact i think there's a contradiction in the idea that groups will be equal in all the various social outcomes that they will be equally successful in business that they will be proportionately represented in the various professions that they will have the same educational achievement that the occupational profiles will look the same if they are in fact distinct groups with their own cultural traditions and practices with their own ideals and norms um various immigrant populations people coming to the united states of america from all corners of the world uh the descendants of the african slaves the black americans here today who are ourselves various with different origins and so on the different religious practices and commitments that jewish or mormon or christian or whatever however we parcel up the total population into the various groups these groups are themselves different from one another they have different norms within their own cultural practice how would we expect if in fact we recognize that the groups are different from one another that in a world that is fair they would all come out equally represented in every undertaking they're not equally represented and that fact i'm arguing is in and of itself insufficient to justify the conclusion that they're not somehow being fairly treated fair treatment doesn't imply equal outcomes in a world in which the populations in question are themselves different with respect to their culture their practices their norms their traditions their beliefs their ideals and so on the fact of those different norms traditions beliefs cultural orientations and ideals will have consequences in terms of their different social outcomes so i just think it's a mistake that people are making when they think fairness of treatment implies equality of outcomes it does not is the process by which uh we're we're speaking now uh in the midst of the of the national basketball association's playoffs uh i confess to being a boston celtics fan i mean i'm just it's a very good team and i'm excited about my celtics we defeated the uh brooklyn uh nets i mean we defeated kevin durant and kyrie irving and company okay in a playoff series we whip them and we're on our way to you know the eastern conference finals and we're on our way to the nba finals and i'm you know if i were a betting man i'd put down a few bucks that the boston celtics underrated as we are have a very good chance to win in the nba finals okay so that's the nba that's the national basketball association i'm a sports fan i like basketball slightly biased prediction but yes yeah it is somewhat biased all i'm saying is if you take a look at who the star players are in the national basketball association you're going to find that there's some eastern europeans you know there's some really good basketball players coming out of uh eastern europe you know and more power to them um and there are a lot of african americans uh we're overrepresented uh they're not that many jews as far as i know no offense intended there lex but i mean the nba is not equally representative of all of the different populations in the united states now we could go into the reasons why but i'm just saying the process by which you get to be playing in the nba is fair if you can play you can get on the court that they all they're looking for is people who can play i think something like that is true in many different venues i expect if you're a really good technical engineer companies are going to employ you and if you can make money they're going to advance you and and you will be able to rise to the top of that profession i i expect that the people who are engaged in financial transactions who are actually making bets on the market by and large are the people who are good at that activity and if you're good at that activity in this world in this modern world you're gonna rise to uh rise to the top um i'm not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination of course of course there are of many different sorts but i'm saying that to expect that there would be okay i mean let's look at who's actually writing code let's look at who's actually trading bonds let's look at uh who's who's actually starting businesses um and so on to say that if that in a fair world i would expect that if black said ten percent of the population they'd be ten percent of every one of those things is to ignore the reality that the differences in the culture and practices and norms of the various population groups will lead to differences in their representation amongst people who are outstanding performers in one or another activity how do you know if the difference in culture accounts for the difference in outcomes or it's the existence of barriers especially barriers early on in life of discrimination that are racially based so if you think about affirmative action is in which ways is affirmative action empowering and which way is it limiting for these early development of the of the different groups but let's just speak to african americans we should say that you went to some no name northwestern university at first but then you ended up with a great university of mit uh so uh so that's that's your not early but middle development um so speaking of the development the opportunities the equality of opportunity how do we know we got that equality right yeah i'm glad you put it like that we were talking about results now we're talking about opportunity i was taking a position that when king says i have a dream and he envisions a world where his children will not be barred from the good things in life because of the color of their skin we're talking about opportunity not about results but opportunity is not just something that depends upon what the law is and what public policies are opportunity also depends upon the the social conditions in which people are are raised the social and economic conditions so the child of a poor family that has no resources it doesn't have the same opportunity as a child of a wealthy family to realize their full human potential you ask me how can we tell whether or not a difference in outcomes is a reflection of unequal opportunity or it's a reflection of differences in culture and interest and and practice and i don't know that there's a single answer to that question but i think one wants to look at the data one one wants to try to measure you know as a social scientist i would say you what you want to do is you want to estimate the uh the significance of various factors for determining the outcome if the outcome is how much money does a person make when they work in the labor market so you look at their wages and you think well that depends upon a number of things it depends upon how educated they are what kind of skills they have what kind of work experience they have and so on and those things are all legitimate factors that might determine how much they end up making in the labor market but you also want to perhaps con controlling for those things see whether or not the fact that they are black or they are latino or whatever fact that they are male or that they are female the fact that they do or do not speak english as their native language this kind of thing whether those factors also are implicated in determining uh how successful they are in the labor market and if you find that after you have controlled for the things that are legitimately determining uh success and failure in the labor market like skills and education and experience having controlled for those things the fact that a person is black or is a woman or is an immigrant or is of of a latino background also affects their earnings then you might conclude that to that extent they're not getting equal opportunity labor that kind of idea but i want to focus a little bit more here on what we mean by opportunity because it's not just whether employers treat the worker on a fair and even basis irregardless of the workers racial or ethnic background that's one opportunity issue but that's how that's at the end of the development process they are now presenting themselves to the market trying to find work and being employed at this or that wage that's the end of the line what about the developmental opportunity the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place that goes all the way back that goes all the way back to birth it even goes back to before birth um the mother carrying the infant in the womb she has certain nutritional uh practices she might be smoking or drinking alcohol or something like that i'm not saying she is i'm not saying she is and i'm just saying whether she is so she is and it will affect the development of the fetus uh the newborn uh now there's a question of environment uh there's a question of the development of their uh neurological uh potential do they learn how to read do are they stimulated verbally how many words have they heard spoken are they being nurtured in a home environment so as to maximize the possibility of them achieving their human potential what about the peer group influences what about the values and norms of the surrounding communities in which they're embedded do they encourage the young person to apply themselves uh in a systematic way to their studies and to their focus on their acquisition of language command and of their educational potential so development is not only something that is controlled by the society's practices it's also something that is influenced by the the cultural background of the individual and those things are not equal uh those things vary across uh groups in in a very uh significant way and that too will be a factor determining disparities of outcome so when i see outcomes that are different i see wealth holding that's different i see educational achievement that's different i see representation in the professional schools in law school and medical school that's different between groups one question is are the institutions treating people fairly but another question is do the background in social and cultural influences equip people in the same way and we know that the answer to that not in every instance do they equip people in the same way and so it makes the judgment the moral judgment that we make when we see inequality of outcome complicated inequality of outcome is a systemic factor to some degree but it is also a cultural factor to some degree i want to say and that's controversial i know a lot of people they think of themselves as being progressive uh they they want to point a finger at society whenever they see a disparity uh but i think that that's a mistake i think it misunderstands the the difficulty of the problem you think that if you get the right law uh if you have the right public policy uh if the right politicians are elected to office suddenly those disparities will go away and um i'm here to tell you that uh that that's uh a false hope um and and moreover it is probably the wrong goal uh but i mean we could go into that you were talking about affirmative action which is is something else altogether uh and you were talking about me and my education which is also something that's a little bit different and i'm happy to talk about those things northwestern university by the way was a great university i'm just joking it's one of the great universities of the world yes and i'd study mathematics at northwestern university which is how i ended up at mit in the first place and i got a very good technical training in mathematics when i was at northwestern so you love both mathematics and human nature and so which is why you ended up going into economics at one of the great economics programs in the world at mit and getting your pg there so one of the many hats you wear is that of an economist which allows you to think systematically and rigorously about the way the world and the way humans work at scale um trying to remove the full mushy mess of humans like a psychology perspective economics allows you to do well economics is one of the social sciences i i think there's value in psychology and in sociology there's a lot to know that doesn't come up within the study of economics we study markets and you know the dynamics of economic development and you know trade and um you know so on but uh yeah uh speaking personally as i was coming along i was fascinated by mathematics i was good at it and i ended up at northwestern and took a lot of courses there and you know functional analysis and logic and mathematics and uh dynamical systems and you know stuff that i ended up employing in my graduate studies in economics but you're right i was not satisfied simply to be proving theorems i wanted to be addressing issues of social significance and economics i discovered to my delight was a field of study that allowed me both to develop rigorous analytical frameworks you know modeling uh and precision of logical uh you know deduction and and inference uh on the one hand satisfying my mathematical uh interest but on the other hand could address questions of social significance like why does racial inequality persist why are some countries prospering and growing and others less so why do the prices of raw materials fluctuate in the way that they do over time and so on and so forth and i ended up falling in love with the application of mathematical analysis to the study of social issues what do you use beautiful about mathematics about mathematical puzzles about logic all those kinds of things because you it's still there the love for math is still there for you so is there something you could speak to what is the the kernel the flame of that love it's like magic i mean you know being able to prove something and uh i mean you know i think of uh offhand you know there's low there's no largest prime number okay so how do i how would somebody know that okay what's a prime number so a prime number is a number that has a whole number that has no divisor other than one there are no divisors of the number that makes it a prime number like 13 or 19 or 37 whatever okay so they're prime numbers there's no largest prime number their infinite number of prime numbers there's no largest prime number okay that's an idea you can get your mind around it in an instant it it doesn't take a whole lot of depth to see the question there's no largest prime number i wonder if prime numbers show up in economics i mean that oh they don't show up in economics but except if cryptography i understand that's important yes yes for code you know in in encoding stuff and that shows up in economics but in terms of models yeah um probably not that's that's so prime numbers are little um you know in uh uh um abstract algebra it's like they show up in all these places they're just like beautiful mathematical puzzles that don't immediately have an application but somehow maybe challenge you and as a result push mathematics forward like for mars last theorem you know as far as i know no obvious real world application but it has challenged mathematicians throughout the centuries indeed and and somehow indirectly progressed uh the field but uh that the rational numbers are countable they can be put in one to one uh relationship with the integers and you know but that the real numbers are not countable and there's a lot more real number more real numbers these are orders of infinity this is uh cantor gay or cantor and all that kind of that kind of stuff or girdles of uh theorem i i studied this as an undergraduate you know the incompleteness theorem that there are propositions within any logical system that's rich enough to accommodate uh accommodate arithmetic they're going to be propositions that you can formulate that are true but that you cannot prove to be true uh so the idea that you could systematically develop a logical framework for mathematical inquiry that could demonstrate the truth or falsity of any proposition is not a feasible goal this was hilbert's project as i understand it and uh girdle showed that there was no hope ever of being able to demonstrate the closure of of logical systems that were rich enough to accommodate the real numbers they gave an existential crisis to all uh mathematicians and scientists alike and humans because maybe you can't prove everything i remember you know when i was uh i was a junior college a community college student before i transferred to northwestern and i took a calculus course uh and it was a lot of fun and it was differentiating algebraic expressions and integrating and using trigonometric substitutions and it was a lot of simple problem solving i get to northwestern i take a course in differential equations and again it was a lot of formulaic you know applying if you get a differential equation of this structure like if it's linear you've got exponentials etc you can solve it and then i took a course that showed me you know where the question was not how to solve any particular functional expression but it was proving the existence of a solution to a differential equation where it was like x dot equals f of x and t and f is just some arbitrary function what do i have to assume about the function f in order to know that there exists the solution to the differential equation dx dt equals f of x and t and it's basically they called it a lipschitz condition it's a condition about the bounding of the the slope of the function f as a function of x that it doesn't uh that you can sort of uniformly bound the slope on that function and then you can use a iterative process to uh show that the sequence of you know partial solutions to the thing converges to something that's a solution to the real thing anyway again i'm not not going to bore you or pretend that i'm a mathematician i'm not but what i'm saying is the difference between a specific algebraic formula that you can manipulate and solve on the one hand and the abstract question of whether there exists a solution in the general case is like a huge was like a huge step for me uh in my study of mathematics and um the techniques that you have to employ to address these larger questions and and so on so i you know when i was an undergraduate i took the first year phd sequence in math analysis at northwestern from a brilliant mathematician named avner friedman and learned about measure theory and you know learned about uh uh some some early functional analysis ideas and when i saw that those ideas were being applied by advanced study and economics i was delighted i found an intellectual home so that one of the fascinating challenges of mathematics is to think how can you cons which echoes the challenge of economics what are the properties of an equation that allow you to say something profound and say it simply and so the question of economics is how do you construct a model where you can generalize nicely and say something profound and say it simply uh so one of the questions one of the challenges of economics is macro versus microeconomics yeah is um you know the world is made up of individuals so there's a connection to this our discussion of of race and discrimination and outcomes and all those kinds of things the world is made up of individuals but in order to say something general we have to construct groups in order to analyze the data we have to aggregate that data somehow we have to make an average over some set of people so what are the pros and cons of looking at things like equality of opportunity and equality of outcome based on groups versus based on individuals and uh what are the groups if there's any pros to looking at groups that we should be looking at okay well those those are big questions i mean in economics you're right i mean micro you have a an account of how individuals make decisions about spending their money on this consumption side and about how enterprises make decisions about uh what to produce how much of it what inputs to use what techniques of production and so on individual firms individual consumers and then you want to aggregate so there's a theory of so-called theory of general equilibrium where you know you think supply and demand in a bunch of markets you think prices that move to equilibrate but you recognize that the price in one market affects people's behavior in another the market's interacting with each other you realize that the behavior one individual affects the supplies and available resources and for other individuals so they're knitted together in some kind of systematic way and you you want to try to demonstrate the fact that notwithstanding all these interdependencies there exists a solution to the system of equations that equates demand and supply across all the different markets this is the existence of general equilibrium then you want to try to say something about the properties of an equilibrium if it exists is it efficient what do you mean by efficiency well the idea of so-called pareto efficient outcomes these are outcomes that cannot be uniformly improved upon everybody can't be made better off by an alternative outcome you want to demonstrate the efficiency of competitive equilibrium what do you mean by competition you mean that people take their actions to do the best for themselves that they can profits of firms well-being of consumers they try to do the best for themselves that they can but they do so in reference to a set of prices that they believe they cannot control that's the criterion of competitive market circumstance so does a competitive equilibrium exist do there exist a set of prices which if everybody recognizes them as given and responds to those prices on behalf of their own interest the outcome will be supply equaling demand in all the markets where people are interacting with one another and that requires the use of some concepts in topology fixed point theorems and whatnot that are familiar to mathematics not very deep mathematical results but important to economics that's all about general equilibrium and whatnot but you ask about groups by the way amazing worldwide summary of all of economics but yes go ahead that was that was great markets of competition of pareto efficiency anyway but yes groups and prices and prices and by the way there are some very beautiful you know uh formalizations of everything that i'm saying here you know you end up in vector spaces you you end up with sets of bundles of consumption and production you end up with convexity you end up with hyperplanes which are you know in in this uh finite dimensional vector space which are uh you know uh all of the bundles that have the same value at a certain price you end up with inner products you know and and you know it's just it's very pretty yeah but you almost forget that it's just a bunch of humans transacting with each other uh that that markets are made up of individuals markets are made up of individuals and in order to carry out this formalization you have to make assumptions about the individuals and the end result is true in a formal sense but may not be true as a representation of the reality because it depends upon assumptions that themselves may not hold but at least you know what it is that has to be true in order for your formal framework to be relevant which is already a step in the right direction i think i mean the formalization is better than the intuition the aren't your intuition where we sit back and we don't really know exactly what we're talking about because we haven't pinned it down um in in a precise way i'm in favor of the formalization people they think what is mathematics and the social sciences after all we're dealing with people people are not automata i agree with that but the analysis of the interaction of people i think to be rigorous requires us to be specific uh about what we're talking about about markets about consumers about firms about profits uh about technology about preferences and uh that's the language of economics um but people's behavior depends upon what they seek in life what depends upon their goals and their objectives those things are at play uh they can be pushed this way or that so i mean i you know nationalism fighting and dying for your country um religion uh sacrificing on behalf of some abstract ideal of the good or of you know what is the human situation and what is the meaning of life economists have to assume that these things are some particular thing before they can turn the crank on their machine to analyze the outcomes of human interaction and yet these things uh belief in my identity but the things that i'm willing to sacrifice and die for purposes of life that i affirm and pass on to my children are important preconditions for actually carrying out any economic analysis and they are subject to manipulation and to change over time and that's not something that economics has a whole lot to say about well is there some general things that are really powerful in terms of you said nation religion those are groups yeah can you group people nicely in helping you understand human nature so group them into nations based on their citizenry that's geography right the geographic location of your birth or your uh long-term residence or maybe religious belief what you what religion you believe over time is there groups like that and then race is that useful what are the pros and cons of looking at outcomes based on these kinds of groups race in particular i think they're pros and i think they're cons i mean i am myself glenn lowery sits before you right now a black american an african american i i quote unquote i identify as you know that's the way they talk about it nowadays i identify as a black american my skin is brown my hair is coarse my nose is broad uh relative to the way other people's noses look my lips are thicker that's a consequence of my ancestral descent from the human population resident in the african continent in millennia past my race uh here in the united states we have various quote unquote races uh defined crudely in the way that i just tried to define myself you could say and i think there is a very powerful argument that these are superficial differences i mean really why should it matter that your eye color or your hair color or the shape of the bones in your face uh or the color the tone of your skin the amount of melon and how it is that you react to ultraviolet radiation in terms of your skin what is that to bait the basis of anything i mean that's arbitrary that's not meaningful could there really be meaning in these superficial differences among human beings isn't that a archaic or barbaric way of thinking about ourselves to look at each other's skin color or hair texture and then to decide oh that's a black or that's a white or that's a latin or that's an asian or that's a whatever that's something that we should outgrow a person might say that's a relic of a kind of tribal society of a kind of pre-modern society where uh we built real structure on the basis of such superficial difference a person could say that on the other hand i am a black american i mean that's part of my identity that's part of my heritage it's part of the stories that i tell myself about who my people are why do i need a people why do i need a narrative of dissent in which i affiliate with a racially defined people do i really need that i mean i think that's an important question i i in fact this is a confession think of myself as black i could think of myself as simply human i could not identify specifically as black i could i could say my my eyes are brown too so what i'm a brown eye i mean you know i'm going to invent a group based on my eye color um i weigh 290 pounds i'm gonna have a body size group i'm a plus 200 and that's quote who i am close quote i don't do that i came from chicago yes i do have a certain sense of affinity with my hometown i'm a chicago-born person but frankly i haven't lived in chicago since 1979. that's a long time uh i wear my chicago origins very very lightly i would not go to war with someone from cleveland or st louis and fight to the death with that uh st louis person or that cleveland person based upon the fact that we come from different cities and you have even abandoned in your heart the chicago bulls there's some chicago that's still in me i suppose but it's not it's not very deep it it's not quote who i am anymore and i'm wondering uh i hear i'm trying to pose a question why is it that being a descendant of african slaves should be who i am so there's some answers one answer is people will look at me and deal with me differently based upon what they see i don't have control over that i'm going to be perceived as a member of a group whether or not i elect to affiliate myself with that group or not therefore i need to be mindful of the fact that regardless of what my internal orientation is the world will perceive me in a particular way and will perceive me differently based upon the color of my skin so a police officer who stops me at two o'clock in the morning because my tail light is out and asked me for my automobile registration and i reached quickly to the glove compartment to get my registration and the police officer says show me your hands and i don't quite hear what he says or i ignore what he says i'm getting my document out of my glove compartment but the police officer thinks because i have not responded to his demand to show my hands that i might be reaching for a weapon and the police officer sees that i'm black and fears that the likelihood that i might have a weapon is higher because in that town at that time a lot of the people who get stopped with weapons in their car happen to be black and male and so on and he pulls his weapon and he discharges it and i'm bleeding out there and i'm dead now and i all of that is a possibility that's very real and it's based upon the color of my skin and therefore when he stops me i keep my hands on the steering wheel and i don't go to the glove compartment and i'm fearful of the fact that he might mistake me for a criminal etc or i walk into a high-end store clothing store uh i see you're nicely dressed there lex uh i'm not but that's okay i i do have some good clothes at home i just didn't wear them here today yeah uh but you know what i mean and the clothes the the salesman in the clothing store either treats me like uh you know an old friend and is warm and welcoming and what can i do for you sir and let me show you this and that and what are you looking for and what because he thinks i'm going to spend a thousand dollars there that day and he's going gonna get a five percent commission or whatever it is and you know he either does that or he ignores me and looks at me with suspicion and thinks i might be trying to shoplift something or thinks i'm only going to spend fifty dollars and not five hundred dollars and therefore i'm not worth his time and i'm aware of the fact that when i go into the clothing store especially the high-end places where i can buy some buy a good suit or you know buy some really good dress shirts or slacks that fit me well and so on i'm aware of the fact that i may not be taken seriously by the salesman based upon the fact that he's looking at me and he sees a black person and therefore um i dress up before i go to go out to buy clothes to get you know because i want to present myself as not someone who just walked in off the street but as one of those black people who is really prepared to spend some money in the store so that i can be treated with respect and i have to carry the burden such as it is of knowing that i need to earn the uh being taken seriously by overcoming the suppositions that people may have about me based upon the color of my skin something like that or i ask myself what am i going to teach my children about who they are and where they come from what stories am i going to tell them about their ancestors who are their ancestors every african-american has european ancestors every black person in the united states of america i think that i can say that almost without exception we could go to 23andme and look at the dna they have european ancestors they're not purely african uh that's a fact and that's a consequence of the uh experience of african descended people because it's a mixed population my name is lowry spelled l-o-u-r-y but pronounced as if it were l-o-w-e-r-y and uh i gather if you trace the history of that name that it's uh scottish so somewhere you could identify as a scot all right well i could claim some scottish descent but i don't i don't know who those ancestors are and frankly i don't know who my enslaved ancestors are i i can't trace my family history back very far into the 19th century um but so what what stories do i tell my children about who we are about who their ancestors are i mean i want to tell my children some story and that story is going to be colored quote unquote by my race so even though it is superficial and in an ideal world you might think why would human beings i mean i read science fiction so that there's this chinese writer chiksan liu is his name i might not pronounce it exactly right c-i-x-i-n l-i-u chickson lou he has a trilogy of the three-body problem the dark forest and death's end those are the three books of chicks and lou's trilogy about how try solaris which is another star system within a few light light years of the solar system and earth get into a conflict and when the tricelerians come down to dominate earth suddenly all of these differences between the chinese and the north americans and the europeans and the africans and the south asians become kind of insignificant because after all the tricelerians with their advanced civilization uh whose star system is dying have their eyes on the solar system which has a planet the third rock from the sun that is pretty habitable and you know the difference between us become pretty insignificant so we shouldn't need for an invasion by extraterrestrial beings to have to happen before we would recognize the common humanity that we all share that is profound and is deep we all descend in effect from the same ancestral population of homo sapiens who walked out of east africa eons ago and have survived amongst all of the different possible you know variations of species and whatnot of humanoid population homo sapiens have flourished the others have died out and here we are and and you know we can just look at the genetic endowments that characterize our biological essence and we can see that uh we are all quote unquote the same beneath the skin and yet we end up uh freighting so much weight onto these superficial differences so i can i can see both sides of the issue is what i'm saying i can see the argument race is an irrelevancy because at the end of the day deep down it is but i can also see the argument that i hold on to racial identity because a my racial presentation colors how other people deal with me but because everybody needs a story you know everybody needs an account you tell me you're jewish i mean i don't know how deep that is i don't know how genetically profound that is i do know that it's a culturally profound identity for a lot of people uh based upon maybe some of the same kind of forces that i'm talking about a they won't let you not be jewish you you could say you're not jewish but when hitler is rounding people up what you say doesn't have a whole lot to do with the with what the gestapo was about and b you need to tell your children a story yeah you know that's the fascinating thing about this tribalism that you spoke about that we form tribes as humans throughout human history formed tribes and have directed hate toward other tribes and sometimes violence and destruction and yet tribalism allows you to tell a story to your children allows you to grow a culture there's something about defining yourself within a particular tribe yeah that allows you to uh have a tradition yeah um you have a um article that you wrote called the case for black patriotism oh yeah so i should also say it's so interesting because for me personally i feel identify as believe i am an american and yet within the american umbrella it feels that there's a longing for other tribes you mentioned jewish but what i honestly feel is i mean a lot of it is humor and culture and so on is russian and ukrainian because that's that's where i come from that's where my family is from you know there's like stereotypical things that are um funny humorous type of thing about russians that's showing no emotion um good at chess and math uh into wrestling okay uh drinking vodka i mean this is literally every single stereotype i'm in the embodiment of that so there's a you celebrate that in certain kinds of ways there's a tradition there within the american umbrella and some of it is humor some of it is uh little quarks of culture but now with the war in russian ukraine interestingly enough even that little thing it becomes also a source of uh tribalism but anyway uh that context aside what is black patriotism and why do you feel i mean i'm speaking in an article called the case for black patriotism in a particular context and i what i'm saying basically is very simple i'm saying we are african americans and the emphasis should be on the american i actually don't even much care for the framing african-american but i'm not gonna fight with people about it it it's you know i don't think it's worth fighting about that's not how i would just say we're americans or if you want we're black americans we're certainly not african that is the african-american population is a population of people who come into existence here in north america through the cauldron of slavery there are also immigrants immigrants from east africa immigrants from west africa immigrants from southern africa immigrants from the caribbean who descend from an ancestral population which is african we you know the history of the world since 1500 is a history in which people of african descent are scattered because of slavery throughout the western hemisphere and uh so here we are but the institution of slavery ended in 1863 in the united states the struggle that we started out talking about which um gave rise to martin luther king giving that speech that you say is the greatest speech in american history and i'm not going to argue with you about that happened right here in the united states yes we are this what is the united states the united states is a nation of immigrants the population of the north american continent was sparsely populated by an indigenous population which was destroyed in conquest by a european population has settled here in north america and appropriated the land and have built a civilization here which has been peopled by a large influx of individuals from uh europe the irish and italian and greek and slavic and jewish russian jews coming in large numbers and so on in wave after wave after wave of immigration asian latin american population of people who have come to reside here in the united states and we black americans who descend from slaves we african americans who descend from slaves so here we are this is a great nation i mean this is a monumentally significant political force which is the united states of america founded in 1776 1787 uh fought a war of independence from the british uh established a republic which is a confederation of these independent colonies which has grown into now the 50 states of the united states of america continental nation the richest and most powerful nation on the planet with massive influence throughout the world for good and for ill that's who we are i want to say to black people there is no other home for us the this fantasy of we being a people apart uh back in the day when i was coming along in the 1960s there was something called the republic of new africa movement and they wanted some states in the south given over to black people and we were going to have our own country and that's a it's a joke it's a fantasy it's it's uh it's it's a mythic uh uh un uh balanced unrealistic uh fanciful politics it's not a serious politics we're americans we're not going anywhere here the idea that and i want to say this in a number of different registers i want to say first of all we need to make peace with the fact that that's who we are and that's where we are so uh nobody is coming the world court is not going to litigate our disputes the united nations is not going to set up a desk for people of african descent who reside in north america we have to work out whatever our concerns are with our fellow americans right here within the context of american politics that means compromise that means looking for frame a framework for political expression which is broader than our racial identity etc so i i want to say that but i also want to say there's no reason to apologize for this there's something positive to affirm i take on this question about slavery i'm in in brief in brief because in fact slavery was awful and it was wrong and it was on the backs of the enslaved africans and it had consequences that endured that have endured long after the termination of the thing but i also want to say look at what has happened in the last 150 years for african americans and i want to say look at the vitality of the institutions here in the united states of america of the democratic republic of the united states of america again not perfect which are which are malleable enough these institutions to allow for the transformation of the status of african americans such as has occurred since the end of slavery and i want to say there's a lot to celebrate in that so this is our country we are uh full members of the polity uh we have uh burdens and responsibilities as well as privileges that are associated with our membership in this republic that does not mean that we should not fight for what we believe to be right although we are not one voice here we black americans it does not mean that we should not protest things that we think are deserving of protest but i want to say it does mean that we should not reject the framework that we're operating in because we basically don't have any alternative and because when viewed in full context a noble and profoundly significant achievement the united states of america and a beacon uh to the rest of the world i don't want to you know go off in some starry eyed kind of jingoistic celebration of america as the greatest civilization etc etc but this great nation uh is um our nation and i think we do best by beginning we black americans do best by beginning this is my argument in the piece by beginning from a framework which accepts that fact and then builds on it so black patriotism is if not exactly the same rhymes echoes american patriotism so a black american is first and foremost an american yeah a black american is first and foremost an american and it's a good thing too let me return to the question of dr king and another powerful impactful individual malcolm x to ask you the question well first people often perhaps inaccurately uh portray them as representing two different ideals approaches to the fight for civil rights so martin luther king for the non-violent approach the peacemaker and malcolm x is the by any means necessary what do you think about this distinction and broadly speaking in black patriotism in the future of black americans in the 21st century what is the role of anger what is the role of protest even you know violence encompasses a lot of things but just aggression and uh you know fuck the man we're going to have to make change force change okay i think you put your finger on something really important in the context of we were just discussing my black patriotism essay and um it's not the only it's not the only story there there is another story and malcolm x is someone you identify and his memory lives on and is powerfully influential uh and i think you see it in black lives matter and i think you see it in the protest and rioting and so forth that has broken out periodically going all the way back to the 1960s and before but especially since uh the 1960s he saw it in los angeles in 1992 in the rodney king civil disturbances that broke out there and the the balled up fist the radical uh afrocentric rejection of the american story that martin luther king he believed in he believed in a magnificent promissory note and a lot of people are rolling their eyes you know and saying you know as you say fuck the man magnificent promissory no i mean just get your knee off my neck that's what you can do for me don't ask me to believe in your bs about some magnificent promissory you know some founding fathers who were all slave owners anyway i mean just get your knee off my neck now i can relate to that uh as i mentioned i grew up in chicago in the 1950s and the 1960s i remember malcolm x i mean literally in real time i remember when he was murdered in 1965 in the audubon ballroom in harlem in manhattan in new york city um i remember my uncle i i was raised in a house where my aunt and uncle were the master of the house and my mother and my sister and i lived in a small apartment upstairs in the back of this of this big house that my successful aunt and uncle owned and my uncle was a small businessman a barber and a tradesman he was he was a hustler i mean legally i mean he did what he had to do to make money he was very enterprising not especially well educated but a very intelligent and disciplined and resourceful provider for his family which included myself my sister and my mother in their household and we called him uncle mooney because he had moon-shaped eyes that protruded and were around uncle mooney uh james ellis was his name uncle mooney james ellis lee that was my uncle mooney but i'm saying all that to say this he admired the nation of islam i mean king and malcolm x martin king and malcolm x differed along a number of different dimensions malcolm x was a muslim and martin luther king jr was a christian minister my uncle mooney didn't have any time for these christian ministers he thought that was a white man's religion he you know and back in that day you go into a black church and you'd see a portrait of jesus and he'd be a blonde hair blue-eyed yeah he didn't even look like uh like a mediterranean he didn't i mean he didn't look like somebody who came from uh palestine i mean he looked like somebody who came uh from northern europe or something like that the picture of jesus and my uncle mooney rejected that whole thing he would be damned if he was going to bend his knee to some white jesus but he was not a muslim either but he respected the muslims he brought home their newspaper it was called muhammad speaks this is the nation of islam which is the black muslim movement founded in american cities in detroit and in chicago going back to the early middle 20th century and growing into a very significant movement that had a lot of influence louis farrakhan and a controversial figure descends from this movement it has fractured now and has the major part of the legacy of the black muslims has assimilated itself into islam proper malcolm x made a famous pilgrimage to mecca and medina and came back with a very different vision about what it meant to be a muslim and understood himself to be a part of the large tradition and religious culture of islam that has a global reach and he had a different vision when he came back from that some people say that's why he was killed and so on um i don't know i certainly find that to be plausible that he became the constitute a threat to the sect uh which was the uh the black muslims and i had to be had to be dealt with uh i don't know if we'll ever know the full story on that but anyway what i'm trying to say is the black muslims were there malcolm x was there and in my experience they constituted a counterpoint to the position of king which depended on a kind of respect for the best of the tradition of american democracy appealing to the better nature of our oppressors live up to the full meaning of our creed i mean these are words that he would use a magnificent promissory note is what he would think of as the declaration of independence and the legacy of abraham lincoln unfulfilled ideal and the black muslims were like fuck that we're going to take care of our own we we're going to build our own schools we're going to build our own businesses uh we're we're not waiting for the white man to do anything get your knee off my neck and get out of my way and let me take care of my own and my uncle respected that he respected the straight back the the stand up straight with your shoulders back that's a jordan peterson but i mean that was this is way before jordan peterson but that was his philosophy stand up straight but just raise your children don't be depending upon welfare you're taking welfare from the white man you need to get busy you need to educate yourself you need to clean up your act put down the fried chicken because it's going to kill you my uncle mooney loved this book that elijah muhammad they they called him the honorable elijah muhammad was the founder and the leader of the nation of islam he had a book and all the books said was be smart eat green vegetables don't eat fried food uh don't eat pork they're muslims don't eat pork uh and take responsibility for your diet and be healthy and uh you know don't be putting a whole lot of pills into your body you don't need to do that if you just get control of your diet and you you know you eat probably now my uncle loves this idea of responsibility for self and a determination to build uh you know he he respected that in the muslims even if he didn't by the religious part of it and so and and by the way when my uncle died uh in 1983 he left me a bequest it wasn't money unfortunately it was his complete collection of the recorded speeches of malcolm x and i have i have these albums these are 33 and a third lps there's six of them uh and i have a complete collection as best as my uncle could assemble the recorded speeches of malcolm x now why did he do that he did that because he did not want me to forget don't be dependent upon the white man build your own stand up straight with your shoulders back proud black man take care of your business take care of your children pick up the trash in front of your house uh get busy this was this philosophy uh so violence now that's another story i mean malcolm x would say you know we're going to defend ourselves you're going to mess with us you know you racist ku klux klan or whatever we're going to arm ourselves and we're going to fight you back you racist police who are oppressing and persecuting and abusing our people well you better be ready because we're going to fight you back and that too was the spirit that my uncle that was a kind of attitude a kind of posture uncle was not a radical he was he was a businessman but he respected this idea you uh take your life in your own hands when you mess with us because we're prepared to defend ourselves so that blood runs in you too that threat is when you write about black patriotism that threat is there too it's like you embody both the ideal that we're all american but also that there is this oppressive history there there is the powerful that are manipulating you that are oppressing you and you can't just wait around for things to fix themselves you have to take action you have to take things into your own hands and sometimes that means being angry sometimes that means being violent that's there too yeah it's there but um here in in the butt is i don't me today glenn lowry in 2022 think that that is the answer i i don't think that violent rebellion gets us anywhere at the end of the day i think we're past that uh there there aren't knight rider ku klux klan uh people breaking down your door and dragging you away they are not uh nooses throw thrown over a tree uh limb uh where you hang somebody from the tree because they whistled at a white woman or they got too much property in your community and you became you know they were uppity negroes and whatnot like that that is a thing of the past in america that the uh uh situation is no longer the one that requires that kind of violent reaction and that there there is if we look at the net effect of the so-called rebellions um in the american cities they're negative uh the the george floyd protests which became violent and arsonists in the aftermath of civil disturbance and what not in the summer of 2020 i think set back the program for african americans i don't think it advanced it i i think there are things to be concerned about schools that are not working uh police that are not not respecting citizens and so forth but i think that those are things that affect white americans as well and that the way to ultimately correct those things is to uh make uh alliance and associate oneself with americans who are concerned to change these things and i don't think it's properly framed as a racial um as a racial problem and i certainly don't think that uh you know violent rebellion uh gets us anywhere i i'm you know i i get the historical salience of that posture and it made a lot of sense in the early in the mid 20th century i don't think it makes very much sense at all in the early 21st century well thank you for allowing me for a brief moment to try to channel your uncle mooney and maybe malcolm x in this conversation as we as we look forward to the 21st century you mentioned that um in part you're troubled by the term african-american so words are funny things until they're not so let me ask you about what i think is one of the most powerful and controversial words in the english language the n-word so this is a word that i can't say that only certain people have the right to say i have a friend joe rogan yeah who has um what would you say there was mass pushback or highlighting of of the fact that he didn't just say n-word but said the full word many times throughout his conversations when referring to um in a meta way about the power of words especially when related to certain comedians using those words um yeah what do you think about this word is it empowering is it destructive what is it what does it mean for race in america um what does it mean that people like joe rogan were essentially there's an attack to cancel him for using the word just as a scholar of human nature what do you think about this whole thing it this is a phenomenon that interests me okay the n-word nigger i could say it because i'm black but i mean i can also say it because i like hip-hop and when i listen to hip-hop i hear the word all the time these niggas did you know watch out for these you know etc i heard the word constantly as i was growing up as a boy and a young man in chicago niggas ain't shit that was said that was you know the the and that could be a reflection of some kind of pathology within the african-american community of self-hatred and so forth it could be or it could just be a colloquial linguistic way i mean i assume other groups also have uh their various i don't know how the irish talk about their irish brothers and you know whatever and um i i don't know how the jews talk about the jewish brothers and whatever but black people when talking about other black people use the n word all the time my nigga yeah nigga yeah you know my nigga uh that is a term of endearment my friend randall kennedy uh the law professor at harvard university has a book called nigger and he uses the word in the title of the book the history of a strange history of a of a provocative word it's something that there's a subtitle but the title of the book is n-i-g-g-e-r colon and then he has a subtitle um i think of course the use of the word as a slur and an insult which is a part of the history of black people in the united states the use of the word by the southern racist segregationist we don't want no niggas up in here y'all you know niggas niggas have no place in my restaurant in my store etc that's meant to be an insult it's an insult to people it's a fighting word it's a way that you say that to somebody it's a it's a invitation for conflict that said what is it that about this particular word and also the asymmetry of it that do you think it's empowering to the black community to own a word my honest answer to you is i don't know i don't fully understand it it has become symbolic in a way and the policing of the use of the word i can say it but white people can't say it i can say it i'm not a racist i'm not a self-hating black you know i'm just speaking the language of colloquial english that has emerged amongst african americans in which that word plays a big role but the prohibition on its use by others and of course in the joe rogan case it wasn't as if he was calling anybody an n-word he was simply pointing out that people had said stuff in which the n-word was a part of what they said now he did make this statement about uh uh how did he put in the planet of the apes that one of the offensive things that he said had you know he walked into a room there's a bunch of black guys standing around he says like planet of the apes he said it's like africa planet of the apes yeah he should have it and he should have been a little bit more careful that was that was an insult that was that was you know something that uh you know if you say that and people are offended they have a right to be offended and if you didn't mean to offend them you can apologize and he did apologize i accept his apology joe's okay with me as far as that goes um in fact uh mcwhorter and i john mcwhorter and i at the podcast that i do the glenn show i had a conversation part of which touched on the joe rogan phenomenon and we concluded he didn't really do anything wrong i mean i mean you can like remember you can hate him or whatever but the idea that he's a racist is kind of ridiculous so frankly i mean you know uh if that's your test of what constitutes a racist the utterance of the word uh then you know it's kind of a it's it's kind of silly as far as i'm concerned what do you think about the rigorous testing of people to the degree they're racist or not the accusation of racism being a way um to attack to uh to bully to divide so what are the pros and cons of that once again because it does reveal the assholes and the racists but it can now hurt people who are not well i think we have a history here in the united states of blatant racism that goes back a long way and that has present day echoes so there are races i mean there are people who look and see all those are black people they're they're patronizing this business i don't want to patronize this business anymore who if their daughter or their son is dating somebody that is black they will say i really wish you wouldn't do that i mean why are you hanging out with those people don't you know who they are uh there are people there are racists okay there are black races that is black people who see somebody who's white and who then invoke a whole lot of stereotypes or whatever or have a uh you know visceral dislike based upon nothing other than the color of the person's skin such people exist racism is a real thing etc on the other hand i think this uh throwing around you know uh the accusation of racism a college professor is teaching a course he says in the context of teaching the course that the underrepresentation of blacks in physics uh program at this university is because they score lower on the test than other groups and they're not qualified so say the professor gives a lecture and he says we don't have more blacks in the physics department at this university because there are not enough qualified blacks somebody in the classroom who hears that a black student objects he's a racist okay that's a power move it's a move to try to control the conversation it's not an argument it's an epithet you've said that a person who has a particular idea that you don't like maybe that idea is i'm against affirmative action i think it's unfair i was just with dorian abbott dorian abbott is a scientist at the university of chicago who published a piece in newsweek magazine in which he said that he thought affirmative action and racial balancing was unethical uh he was invited to give a lecture at mit a very distinguished lecture in his field based on planetary science i don't know exactly what it is um i'm not a scientist uh but in any case because he had said that he didn't like affirmative action and he thought affirmative action was racist that's basically what he said why are we looking at people based upon their race and decide we should just do it on the merit that was his position now people protesting at the university where he was invited mit saying that he's a racist because he had that opinion he gets disinvited charles murray um is a popular social science writer who is famous for his book about iq the bell curve one chapter of which chronicles the racial differences between black and white in performance on mental ability tests and speculates about the extent to which such differences may be connected with the genetic inheritance of these racially distinct populations now he could be wrong about everything that he's saying the southern poverty law center calls him a white supremacist because he observes that there are racial differences in measured intellectual ability amongst americans of different racial dissent the i the you know he could be wrong let me stipulate that he is wrong i mean i don't want to argue about whether he's right or about whether he's wrong he's addressing himself to a factual issue and now the issue becomes instead of grappling with the factual questions at hand and demonstrating his rightness or wrongness about those questions the issue becomes his character he's a racist um that's in my mind a lot like calling him a witch the use of that word now i think has parallels to accusing people of witchcraft because they have views about substantive questions that bear on racial inequality or racial difference that a person finds unacceptable or that a person disagrees with and you think you can shut somebody up crime in the cities of chicago st louis baltimore philadelphia washington dc is out of control some person might say murder rate is high who's committing those crimes they're mostly black young men who are doing the carjackings and who are doing the shootings they're killing each other they're making our city unlivable now that's a hypothetical statement that i offer it might be correct it might be incorrect it might be appropriate it might be inappropriate it may be true but something that we would be better off if people didn't focus on i don't know responding to someone making that statement have you seen what has happened to my city it used to be that you could go to north michigan avenue and you could find one after another after another high-end shop this is in chicago my hometown and uh tourists would come and they'd go to the theater and there were restaurants and they'd go out they don't do it anymore you know what half of those stores are boarded up now you know why because when george floyd was killed black people mobbed in the city and they burnt and they rioted and they looted and it hasn't been the same ever since and i'm moving to the suburbs i'll be damned if i'm going to send my children to those schools a person could say that they might be right they might be wrong to say it calling them a racist is exactly not a rebuttal of what they said it's a move it's a move to try to take control of the conversation by accusing someone of having bad character because they said something that made you uncomfortable which you can't deal with so you think you can shut them up by calling them a racist you might as well be calling them a witch you might as well be calling for their head on a platter because they believe that satan is lord because that's the kind of quote argument close quote which is precisely not an argument that people who invoke that term are using and here's what i have to say about that it's a fool's errand to try to refute somebody by calling them a witch likewise it's a fool's errand to try to rebut the contrary forces in american politics that are a reaction often to real things that are going on on the ground in black communities in the cities across this country by calling people a racist you may shut them up but you won't change their minds and you know what at the end of the day they're going to go to the ballot box and they're going to vote they're going to pick up their store and they're going to move it to the other side of town or to another town altogether they're going to keep their children away from places where they think the influences are harmful to those children they may not even talk about it in public you can believe that in private that they're talking about it with each other you had better find a more effective way of dealing with the conflicts in this country that fall along racial fault lines than calling people witches which is what this um you know anti-racist you're a racist because you think that uh the out of wedlock birth rate amongst black americans is seven babies out of ten are born to a woman without a husband their families are falling apart now no one says that in public because they'd be called a racist if they said it in public but as a matter of fact the families are falling apart you didn't change that in the lease by telling people to shut up about it daniel patrick moynihan is called a racist in the 1960s the late senator the new york senator who was a federal employee and an intellectual writing reports and he writes a report about the negro family he called it in those years if i use the word negro now they're going to call me a racist if i'm a white person i can't even use the word negro which is a historically legitimate reference to the descendants of the slaves enslaved people which we were as black americans proud to use until yesterday so all of this linguistic policing is a sign of weakness it's false black power people will seat you the ground okay you don't want me to use that word i won't use that word anymore okay you don't want me to talk about that in public all right i won't talk about it in public anymore i don't want to be called a racist okay so i won't express my opinion you haven't changed anybody's mind you know so and you've also mentioned that for that you haven't changed anybody's mind but also for things like in universities and institutions there's diversity inclusion and equity kind of meetings and education and so on and i believe i've read somewhere i've been i'm like i mentioned to you offline big fan of your glenn show people should listen to it uh it's amazing um there's also just interviews of you that i've listened to i believe you mentioned somewhere that even those kinds of meetings people might sit through and nod along but that doesn't necessarily mean that's making progress that they may not they may actually be bottling up a frustration that's the fear is that that's going to result in a a pendulum pendulum sort of push back towards this idea of forced uh appreciation like forced anti-racism kind of thing uh i talk about this often in my pockets that's the glen show you know and you can find the glen show on my youtube channel and also at sub stack uh yeah you have a great sub stack you you and your friend do you q and a's and all that kind of stuff on patreon yeah so yeah so people should definitely follow you it's brilliant but yeah i mean one concern is that uh the um uh policing of the superficial policing this is a part of political correctness you know the insistence that you only use certain words that you only talk in a certain way it's a phony kind of power because it doesn't actually persuade people about the issues that are at hand instead it forces them underground in their uh talk about these issues and and that's uh that's problematic much better that we have overt and explicit and honest disagreement to the extent that there are disagreement about things that are going on than uh that we have a superficial kind of um uh new you know uh conversation that is uh purged of any real biting um uh you know discomforting confrontation with with the realities of the situation at hand and for black americans i think one big part of the reality of the situation at hand is violent crime violent crime you know a police officer is afraid when he stops a car because it's an 18 year old driver in the vehicle he's got dreadlocks he's a black person the car doesn't have the right license plate he's afraid to uh deal with that person and one of the reasons he's afraid to deal with them is because a few who look like him are behaving violently their violence is usually perpetrated against others who look like themselves but not always and uh that reality doesn't get changed by uh you know uh telling a newspaper writer who writes about it that they are a racist or enforcing within a newsroom you can't cover that story in that way because to do so would be racist that that i i think it's a monumental mistake to enforce a closure on public discussion based upon a calculation that if we allow people if twitter allows this kind of post if the washington post runs this kind of story etc you end up with a superficial politeness but a subterranean seething resentment that only makes matters worse if i can get your comment maybe you have ideas because it does seem that this kind of attack um works of being called a racist being called um maybe not sexist but somebody you know like we're going through a johnny depp trial now right uh it's a defamation trial and the reason it's a defamation trial is because all it took is a single accusation of johnny depp being somebody who sexually and physically abused uh ever heard and all it took is just a single article no proof was given um except the accusation itself and the world believed it so it's effective so how do you fight back if it's so damn effective that you can just call anybody racist and it works it's hard to wash off it's it's a uh you're you know you're not proven in the court of law or anything like that but we we get those articles we get that label and then the world moves on and just assumes that person is racist so how how do you do you have any ideas how to fight back no i don't frankly um just highlighted roseanne barr who made this statement about valerie jarrett she made some kind of ape like reference to whatever her show got cancelled and and and she's a racist so first of all pointing it out i suppose is one of the most powerful things that this the uh the hypocrisy of it the you say it works i i guess you're right it used to be that calling someone a communist yeah worked i mean going back to the late 40s early 50s red scare mccarthyism and whatnot and the person might have belonged to a club that was pro-soviet union in the 1930s when they were in college they might have voted for the socialist candidate henry wallace in the presidential election of they might belong to the communist party they they might think karl marx was uh right about a whole lot of stuff about capitalism and whatnot and they got called a communist or a marxist and it could have ruined their career could have ruined their lives um you know and a lot of people shut up about it and it took and it went on for a long time uh and in a way in a way it kind of still is going on i mean you call somebody your marxist if you can make that stick they're certainly not going to get elected president of the united states but i don't know about this um i think you know i once read this book by a german political scientist called elizabeth neula neumann that was a the writer's name elizabeth noel neumann the book was called the spiral of silence and the argument was there can be some views some issues in society that get uh defined in such a way that it's inappropriate to hold those views and as a result people who don't want to be shamed who don't want to be ostracized don't express those views and when they don't express them anybody holding the view because they don't hear it said by others think that they're the only one or one of the few who hold the view and so they don't want to be the only one out there saying something so they keep it to themselves so now this view this attitude in society could be held by a large number of people but because of the fear that if they were to express it they'd be ostracized no one says it and since no one is saying it the others who hold the view don't know that they're not alone that they are not the only ones who hold the view and hence they keep silent that could be an equilibrium it could be a relatively stable situation in which the emperor has no clothes everybody can see that this dude is naked okay but everybody thinks that you know i don't want to be the only one to say it and so we all kind of collaborate in this charade of keeping the view to ourselves then along comes uh an event that uh somebody decides to defy the consensus and to speak out it could be a little kid who in the story about the emperor has no clothes doesn't realize that he's not supposed to say that the emperor is naked the thing about the kid in the story who says that the emperor is naked it's not that he's saying it it's not even that other people hear him saying it it's that everybody knows that everybody else heard him say it okay the kid who speaks out and says the emperor has no clothes creates a circumstance in which it's common knowledge that the emperor has no clothes now common knowledge does not just mean knowledge it does not even mean widespread knowledge it means comprehensive knowledge of other person's knowledge of the thing okay so the spiral of silence is a equilibrium that is susceptible to being undermined by a process of of a kind of cumulative process a snowballing process of revelation that you're not the only one who thinks this way okay it's fascinating to think that there's an ocean of common knowledge that we're waiting for the little kid to wake us up to different little parts of it that's correct and the little kid by the way could be somebody like donald trump only more effective than donald trump somebody who is smarter than donald trump somebody who is shrewder than donald trump somebody who figures out that when colin kaepernick takes a knee at a football game and says i'm not gonna stand for this president allegiance that a vast number of people are uh very unhappy about that somebody who understands that when a black lives matter activist stands up with his bald fist and says burn this bitch down about a city in the united states of america that a lot of people are upset about that a lot of them a person a shrewd politician a a shrewd manager of public image could build on and create a circumstance in which more and more people will feel safe to express that view and the more who express it the safer those who have yet to express it but who hold it will feel in expressing it and to the extent that the view is very widespread but is kept under wraps an explosion could happen and you can look up tomorrow and have a very different country than you had today because the conspiracy of silence the spiral of silence ends up getting um unraveled uh by somebody who steps out away from the consensus dares to take the slings and arrows of exposing themselves as a naysayer but taps into a sentiment that's uh that's very widespread and i fear that with respect to many racial issues this is uh the situation that we actually confront that it could unravel in a very ugly way but it can also unravel in in a beautiful way so it's the depending there is a spiral of silence you're saying and it could be because speaking of children uh charismatic children uh there's a guy named elon musk who might be a candidate for such an unraveling right you mentioned uh the person that speaks up could be a donald trump but in this current uh situation that we live in like as this week uh elon has purchased twitter that's what i hear and it's pushing for um in all kinds of ways the increase of free speech on twitter and speaking about some of the issues that we've been speaking about here with you but maybe in broader strokes about just the fact that you have to it's okay to point out that the emperor wears no clothes and to do so from all sides in a way that everybody's a little bit pissed off but not too much what do you think about this whole effort of free speech on in these public platforms um elon in particular twitter your uh avid twitter user um but just public platforms for discourse for us as a civilization to figure stuff out yeah well the people on the left are very upset about the possibility that elon musk uh and twitter will be open to more open to uh provocative uh public speech that has heretofore been banned or suppressed and um i think they might be right to be concerned that that could happen i don't know enough about the technology and about the market to really yeah i mean social media and whatnot it seems like it's a complicated uh system of interactions between people and who the users are and so forth and so on um i do know that that uh new york post uh story about hunter biden's laptop was real news and could have affected the outcome of the election and it was suppressed and that uh twitter had a role in suppressing it i do know that the question of where the covet 19 virus originated and the role that a lab leak account could have played in the public processing of that event was real news and that it was suppressed by people who were trying to control misinformation disinformation russian disinformation campaigns and whatnot uh so twitter has users i'm one of them and it has a lot of users it's not as big as facebook i gather it's not but um it's important the ability to construct counter platforms where people moving around and whatnot it's a kind of network dynamic that maybe i should understand it better than i do being a social scientist but i don't think anyone understands this yeah even people include inside twitter which is fascinating it's a monster because of just the bandwidth of messaging and you don't know who is a bot and who is a human that's a fascinating dynamic and the whole and the viral nature of negativity yeah that all of those dynamics of course you are probably the right person to understand it from a social scientist perspective from an economics perspective but nobody really understands and it's fascinating within that domain how do you allow for free speech not allow for free speech encourage free speech defend free speech and at the same time manage millions of ongoing conversations from just becoming in insanely uh chaotic sort of from from twitter perspective they want people to be happy to grow to actually have difficult critical conversations and they you know the problem with humans is they think they know what that is and they um think they can label things as misinformation as as counterproductive for healthy conversations in quotes and the problem is as we are learning humans are not able to do that effectively first of all power corrupts there's something delicious about having the power to label something as misinformation you do that once for something that might be obviously misinformation and then you start getting greedy you start getting excited it feels good it feels good to label something as misinformation or disinformation that you just don't like and over time especially if there's a culture inside of a company that leans a certain political direction or leads in all the groups that we talked about leans a certain way they'll start to label labels misinformation things they just don't like and there's that power is delicious and it corrupts you have to construct mechanisms like the founding fathers did for somehow preventing you from allowing that power to get too delicious at least that's my perspective on what's going on i'll just tell you personally i'm excited about the prospect i'm glad to see musk making the move that he's making and we'll see what happens at twitter and so forth you look you're looking forward for the uh what did he say let's make twitter more fun i'm looking forward to uh uh to the fun you've talked about you are at a prestigious university brown university brown university uh and you've mentioned that universities might be in trouble i think it's with jordan but everywhere else that barbarians are at the gate who are the barbarians at the gate of the university so first of all what is to you beautiful about the ideal of the university in america of academia and what is a threat well you know a university is dedicated to the pursuit of truth um and to uh the education and nurturing of young people as they enter into the pursuit of truth to doing research into teaching in a environment of free inquiry and civil discourse so free inquiry means you go wherever the evidence and your imagination may lead you and civil discourse means that you exchange arguments with people when you don't agree with them on behalf of trying to get to the bottom of things um i think the university is a magnificent institution it is a relatively modern uh institution i mean last 500 years or so i mean there are universities that are older than that but the great research universities of the world and not only here in the united states uh are places where human ingenuity is nurtured uh where new lot knowledge is created and where young people are equipped to uh answer questions that are open questions about uh our our existence in the world that we live in you can trace to the university much if not most of the advances in technology and resourcefulness and our understanding of the origins of the species of the nature of the universe cosmology et cetera science uh the pursuit of uh humanistic understanding the nurturing of uh traditions of inquisitive so that's the university barbarians at the gates the people who are trying to shut down open inquiry at the university on behalf of their particular view about things are a threat to what the university stands for and they should be resisted so if i'm inquiring about the nature of human intelligence and i want to study differences between human populations and their acquisition of or their expression of cognitive ability that's fair game it's an open question if if i want to know something about the nature of gender affiliation and identity and gender dysphoria and whatnot that's fair game to study in the university you can't shut that down you shouldn't be able to by saying i have a particular position here i'm a member of a particular identity group suppose i want to study the uh history of colonialism and there's a narrative on the progressive side which is colonialism is about europeans dominating and stealing or whatever whatever and i happen to think well there's another aspect to the story about colonialism too which is that it's a mechanism for the diffusion of the best in human civilization to populations that were significantly lagging behind with respect to that it brought literacy to the southern hemispheric populations that were dominated in the process of the colonizing thing it's complicated i'm not taking that position by the way i'm just saying somebody at a university should be able to take it up and pursue it and engage in argument with people about it i'm talking about race and ethnicity but this extends to a a wide range of things suppose we're talking about climate and one person says the earth is endangered because carbon in global warming et cetera et cetera and another person says no wait no wait look at where we stand in the 21st century we're vastly richer than our ancestors just 250 years ago we have much more knowledge about that and so forth and so on 250 years from now human ingenuity will have devised in ways that we cannot even begin to anticipate all manner of technological uh means for managing the problem there's no reason that we should shut down industrial civilization today because we fear the consequences of it when in fact we are vastly richer than our ancestors and those who come up two centuries after us will be vastly more effective at dealing with problems than we are now let's it's you know etc i'm not actually making that argument i'm just saying the tendency to try to say oh no that person is a climate denier they can't pursue that area of inquiry uh is against the spirit of the university uh i think the barbarians at the gates 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 my position is you don't know what the right side of history is and the purpose of a university is to equip you to be able to think about what is the right side of history what is the solution to the dilemmas that confront us uh as human beings living um on this planet with the billions that we are in the condition that we are so um the identitarians the ones who want to make the university kowtow to their particular understandings about their own identity um we now have at the at brown university and various other places we don't do columbus day anymore we do indigenous people's day when that day comes up in october we don't talk about columbus they're taking down statues of columbus all across the country and so forth and so on i'm not arguing anything here other than that the latter-day position by pox black indigenous and other people of color the latter day position that the university has to reflect a particular sensibility about these identity questions i think it's a threat to the integrity of the enterprise i don't think you're overstating it i i tend to be just for my limited knowledge of mit but perhaps it applies broadly i think the beauty of the university broadly speaking is the faculty and the students and the problem arises from the overreach of a overgrowing administration that gives again thinks that it knows enough to make rules and conclusions based on a set of beliefs and then based on that empowers a certain small selection of students to be the sort of voices of activism of a particular idea and not i think activism is beautiful but not just activism but anybody that disagrees is shut down and that that i think the the the blame lies with the administration so i think the solution is in lessening just like the solution with too big of a government too big of a bureaucracy is there needs to be a uh redistribution of power to what makes universities beautiful which is the old students and the young students old students being professors so the scholars the curious minds the people that are in this whole thing to explore the world to be curious about it on a salary that's probably way too low for the thing they're doing that's that's the that's the whole point and then the administration just gets in the way and um is the source of this kind of they i would say that in your beautiful phrasing i will say the administration is the barbarians at the gate so um the solution is smaller bureaucracies smaller administrations i have to on this point you had this conversation you put on yourself stack with jordan uh jordan peterson about cognitive inequality i think it's titled wrestling with cognitive inequality this particular topic of just iq differences between groups why is this why is it so dangerous to talk about why this particular topic well it's like you're calling black people inferior it's like you're saying they're genetically inferior that's what people are saying it's like you're rationalizing the disparity of outcomes by reference to the intrinsic inferiority of black people if you if you say cognitive ability matters for social outcomes if you say cognitive ability exists people really are different in terms of their intellectual functioning and if you say cognitive ability differences are are substantial between racially defined populations the sum of that there is cognitive ability it matters and the difference by race is the conclusion that outcome differences by race are in part due to natural differences between the populations people find that to be completely offensive and unacceptable so that's what i think is going on can you still man that case that we should be careful doing that kind of research so this has to do with research it's like uh the nazis used nietzsche in their propaganda right is you can use white supremacists could use conclusions um cherry-pick conclusions of studies to uh to push their uh to push their agenda can you steal man the case that we should be careful yeah i could do it at three levels one is what do we mean by cognitive ability so there's many different kinds of intelligence a person might say how good are iq tests at measuring other kinds of human capacities that are pertinent to success in life like temperament like emotional intelligence and so on so intelligence is not a one-dimensional thing measured by g the cognitive psychologists talk about g the general intelligence factor which is a statistical construction it's a factor analytic uh resolution of the correlation across individuals in their performance on a battery a different kind of test and they use that to to define a general factor of intelligence and a person could say that is a very narrow view of what human mental capacities actually are and that uh it's much better to think about multi-dimensional measures of human mental functioning rather than a single cognitive ability measure so-called iq which is a narrow construction that doesn't capture all of the subtle nuance of human difference in functioning functioning is not just the ability to recite backwards a sequence of numbers i say eight seven nine five three two you say two three five seven eight nine it's not just that intelligence is a complex uh management of many different dimensions of human performance including uh things like being able to stick with a task and and not give up things like being able to discipline and control your impulses so as to remain focused and so forth um that could be one dimension i could start by questioning the very foundation of the argument for racial differences in cognitive ability by saying that your measure of cognitive ability is flawed i could go to a higher level i could say what we're really interested in is social outcomes and the question of what factors influence social outcomes extends well beyond mental ability to many other things so here's an example visual acuity how well do you see you're not wearing glasses i am visual acuity varies between human beings some people see better than other people do visual acuity can be measured i can put you at the chart and you can can you identify and read that bottom line in small print or not so we can measure visual acuity and it varies between human beings visual acuity is partly genetic i think that's undoubtedly true we inherit genes that influence whether or not we are nearsighted or farsighted or astigmatic or whatever so visual acuity differs between people and can be measured and is under genetic control on the other hand corrective lenses allow for us to level the playing field between people who are differently endowed in terms of visual acuity likewise social outcomes are what we're really interested in employment earnings whether or not they're law abiding how do they conduct themselves and their families and so forth amongst individuals yes social outcomes are influenced by so-called cognitive ability but they're influenced by many other things as well if they can if there are interventions that can be undertaken in society that level the playing field between people who have different natural endowments cognitive ability the fact that people or groups differ in cognitive ability becomes less significant just like it's less significant that people differ with respect to how well they see when corrective lenses allow for the leveling of that playing field there are in fact interventions educational interventions early childhood interventions that have been shown to level the playing field to create better life outcomes for people even if they happen to be endowed with low intelligence so a second level of arguing against this whole program of research on human differences and intelligence is to observe that yes human beings and perhaps racially defined groups may differ on the average in intellectual endowment but there well may be social interventions that level the playing field whether it's in education or in other kinds of programmatic interventions especially for the poor a final level of argument is the one that you alluded to which is that if you talk like this you're going to encourage a kind of politics which is very ugly and it's best to frame the discussion in ways that don't put emphasis on uh racially defined natural differences between populations uh that's a argument that i am myself personally uh conflicted about on the one hand i think you know those people are just stupid it is uh racist okay on the other hand i think the calculation we shouldn't do this kind of research suppose i'm at the national science foundation a research team submits a proposal the proposal proposes to undertake a study the study would explore the extent to which people and racial groups differ with respect to their intellectual performance and how that's influenced by their genetic and environmental interaction and i decide not to fund the study based on a political calculation that the subject is too sensitive and if you explore that subject you might get the wrong answer and if you get the wrong answer the white supremacist will be encouraged well that is presuming before the research is done that i know the outcome of the research and that i can calculate what the political consequence of the research outcome is going to be that's that's assuming the thing before you even know what the thing actually is it's a kind of omniscience it presumes that you as the master of the universe can tell people what it is that people are being treated like children what it is that they're capable of knowing and what it is that they're not capable of knowing it would be like someone saying to einstein i don't know about that special relativity theory you know it could well lead to the development of technologies that would allow nuclear weapons and someone saying that oppenheimer who is a physicist overseeing the manhattan project where the u.s developed a nuclear weapons capacity don't carry out that project because the results of acquiring that knowledge may be more than we can deal with or someone saying to someone doing biomedical research who's interested in exploring uh the nature of the human genome don't carry out that experiment that cloning uh undertaking whatever because the consequences could be uh deleterious well the consequences could be deleterious the consequences could also be the cure of cancer the consequences could also be being able to generate electric power without producing carbon effluent uh so who are you to tell me who you being the person in the political position to control the research what the consequence of doing the research is i i think i don't want to cede that kind of power to politicians over the course of of human inquiry so yes i would want there to be regulations governing the use of biologically sensitive and potentially dangerous pathogens in a lab in wuhan or anyplace else i would i would not want to simply leave that to laissez faire on the other hand i think that the tendency to try to shut down inquiry on behalf of supposed adverse political consequences is the road to ignorance and uh impoverishment at the end of the day for humankind denying ourselves the potential benefits of that kind of inquiry i think we need to take our chances with inquiry rather than to try to control it and i feel that way about the exploration of human intelligence as much as anything else so you've asked me to steel man the case against research on iq of the sort that charles murray is famous for popularizing and i've said hey your measure of intelligence is single dimensional and it ought to be multi-dimensional i've said b the consequences of people's differing in intelligence depends not only on the natural endowments of the people but also on the environment and the potential for intervening in that environment environment through one or another kind of instrument as the metaphorical example of the use of corrective lenses to level the playing field between people with different visual acuity indicates but finally i've said yes research on racial differences in iq can foster political beliefs that we would regard to be um obnoxious on the other hand to presume that what we don't know yet and might find out from the research is going to be harmful is to assume a kind of presumption or of knowing what the outcome of unknown processes might be which we ought to be very slow to embrace because if we had done so in the past we wouldn't have nuclear power uh there's a lot of things that we wouldn't know i mean what were people saying about darwin and uh exploration of the evolution and origin of the species they were afraid that it was gonna in effect disprove the uh religious based accounts of you know what were they saying about copernicus and et cetera et cetera so you know that was a masterful layering of uh quote wrestling with the cognitive inequality he dragged in nuclear research uh uh copernicus darwin biomedical research with genetics even covet and and um uh the lab leak i mean this that was that's that was just fun to listen to okay okay let me ask you about your politics uh so you've recently said that you're a conservative leaning i mean maybe that's a day-to-day thing um maybe you can push back but uh so you have somebody like your friend john mcwhorter yeah uh who we could say is uh on your left yeah to the left of you and then you have somebody like um uh thomas sold who maybe is un to the right of you yeah probably uh and yet there's a lot of overlap between the three of you right so to what degree does politics affect your view on race in america and maybe to what degree does your uh view on race affect your politics okay and that for people who don't know has shifted over time you've been on quite a roller coaster as anybody who thinks about the world should be well let's begin with the fact that i was trained as an economist in a tradition of what many people would call neoliberalism i was trained at mit which was not a right-wing place by any means but it was a place where you learned about markets and about the benefits of capitalism as a way of organizing society the virtues of free enterprise the fact that the pursuit of profit was not necessarily a bad thing but it well might be the road to prosperity and to economic growth the idea that private property and individuals seeking to acquire and succeeding in acquiring wealth did create inequality but it also created opportunity and it also expanded our knowledge and our control over of the physical environment which were embedded in etc um so we were not marxist at mit although we did read marks i mean those of us who are intellectually curious you read marx marx was an important figure in the history of the west and i think mark should be read and capital three volumes etc uh alienation of labor uh and whatnot the implications of modernization of the advent of industrial capitalism et cetera that that kind of dynamic uh deserves to be studied and to come at it in a critical way uh informed by the intellectual inheritance of marx and marxism i think that's a part of a full education in social philosophy and and uh economic analysis that a open-minded person ought to acquaint themselves with but at the end of the day i think that the uh i think that the free marketeers have the better of it i think the story of the 20th century as far as economic development is concerned reflects that i think that the experiments where centralized control over economic decisions was the order of the day failed i think that the fact of the 21st century rise of china as a force has a lot to do with the spread of in effect capitalist oriented modes of entering economic exchange freeing up prices markets property uh and so forth although obviously it's a complicated political economic system i'm talking about china um but uh i think that the uh story of the 20th century and the hope for the 21st century is that prosperity is enhanced through the free exchange of goods and the pursuit and acquisition of property uh by people in a more or less capitalist oriented uh a system that that's you know that's the view that i hold i guess that makes me a conservative i don't know i want to say that's not to the exclusion of a social safety net i'm not saying that old people in an ideal social system would be left to their own devices regardless of whether or not they had saved for their retirement i'm not saying that uh the ideal of extending decent access to health care to all people regardless of whether or not they can afford it decent access to education to people regardless of whether or not they can afford it is standing in the way of prosperity i don't believe that i think the mixed economies that we see in northern europe and in north america uh are a balancing of the virtues of free enterprise property and the pursuit of wealth on the one hand against the the needs to have a decent society in which people who fall between the cracks nevertheless are bolstered through a sense of social solidarity that is accommodated by our common membership within a single nation state which is why i think nationalism is important and it's why i think borders are important because without a coherent polity who can uh see themselves as in a common situation and agree through their politics to support each other to some extent you can't sustain a safety net you cannot you cannot have a social safety net for a global population you can only have a social safety net for a bounded population who have a sense of common membership in an ongoing political enterprise which they pay their dues through their taxes in order to sustain it there's a balancing that has to go on so that's the first thing that i would say about my politics i'm a neo-liberal economist i believe in markets i believe in prices i believe in profit corporations are not an incarnation of evil corporations are a legal nexus through which production gets organized in which you solicit the cooperation of workers of people who provide capital of people who provide raw materials and input of customers uh and so on and that functionality allows for the production of goods and their distribution and the earning of income and its distribution which at the end of the day is the foundation of our prosperity corporations are people too mitt romney got in trouble for saying that in 2012 but corporations are nothing but illegal fiction the corporation is not a person as such but the nexus of contracts and relationships amongst the stakeholders who intersect in the context of the corporation is the way in which we organize the massively complex set of activities that are necessary in order to produce economic benefits in order to feed people in order to have everybody with a cell phone in their pocket in order to be able to travel from one side of a continent to another on a device that is with almost absolute certainty going to safely take off in land and in order to be able to build cities and it's etc but do the markets the ideal of the market collide with the ideal of all men are created equal the identity the struggle that we've been talking about of of what it means to sort of empower humans that make up this great country do they collide and where do they collide well markets are going to produce inequality and all men being equal is a statement about the intrinsic worth of people not about the situation that will come about when people interact with each other through markets because people are actually different uh and because there are factors that are beyond anybody's control called luck and chance that you know i you and i both invest uh it looked our priority like your investment and my investment were equally likely to succeed but as a matter of fact ex post facto your investment succeeds my investment doesn't succeed i don't have wealth and you have wealth that is an inevitable consequence of a environment in which both of us are free to make our investment choices and where the consequences of investment depend in part upon random circumstances of which no one has control but you asked me about my politics and i was just trying to lay down a foundation by saying i begin as an economist in the tradition of uh liberalism adam smith and so forth john maynard keynes for that matter and so forth uh that um milton friedman and so forth that uh paul samuelson bob solo uh james tobin uh and so forth uh thomas soul yes uh that appreciates property the virtues of free enterprise uh the set of institutions that allow for a security of contract a rule of law things of this kind so that's one thing to say about my politics another thing to say about my politics and you're right i've moved around is that you know i began south side of chicago black kid i was a liberal democrat um i encountered uh the economic curriculum at the mit and i i became trained in economics in the tradition that i've just described and i encountered uh also the reagan revolution this is the late 70s and early 80s these are big debates about economic policy and so on um and uh i found a lot to admire uh in the supply ciders uh the people were saying you know let's get the government out of the way the people who are worried about national debt which is a lot more now than it was then the people were worried that the welfare state could be too big that the incentives of transfer programs could be counterproductive that you had a war on poverty and we did have a war on poverty and poverty won and there's a lot of evidence that the war on poverty was lost by the people who were trying to quote unquote eradicate poverty in our time um that incentives really do matter and that the state which is driven by politics is often unresponsive to the dictates of incentives whereas markets eliminate people who are inefficient who are not cognizant of the consequences of incentives because they can't cover their bottom line and they won't persist for very long if they can't cover their bottom line they're forced to respond to the realities of differences in costs and benefits and so forth in a way that governments can cover because they have their hand in our pocket they can cover their losses and they can make accounts balance notwithstanding their mistakes because they can take my property by fiat by the power of the state the tax collector comes if i don't pay he seizes my holdings and they can carry on in that way they need the corrective influence of markets in order to be responsive to the realities of life i mean i may not like it that uh prices are telling me that something that i want to do is infeasible i may not like it but what the prices are telling me is that the costs of doing it exceed the benefits to be derived from doing it and if i persist in doing it notwithstanding that i'm going to run losses and those losses will accumulate and the net effect of that over an entire society is stagnation and ultimate attenuation of the economic benefits that might be available with people again i think if you look at the developing world in the post-colonial period the second half of the 20th century that's exactly what you see planning doesn't work centralized control over resource allocation doesn't work okay so i became more conservative in that respect but i also and this has to do with race lost the faith in the posture that uh beca what became of the civil rights movement i mean the civil rights movement you quote king 1963 the civil rights movement starts out as um we want equal membership in the polity um but it becomes uh a a a a systematized a cover i'm going to argue for deficiencies that are uh discernible within black american society which only we could correct that's a very controversial statement uh i i make it with trepidation i i don't take any pleasure in saying it but here's what i'm talking about so i'm talking about the family so the family is a matter internal to the community about how men and women relate to each other and engage in social reproduction child bearing uh the standing up of households the context within which children are developed are maturing and so forth and so on so the african-american family is in trouble i think i can demonstrate that by reference to high rates of marital dissolution uh by high rates of birth to uh out of wedlock and so forth um you can't even say that the african-american family is in trouble violence homicide is the order of magnitude more prevalent amongst african americans than it is in the society as a whole this is behavior it's behavior of our people i speak of black people of course we're not the only people in society for whom violence is an issue it's an order of magnitude more prevalent uh in our communities i'm talking about schooling and school failure so we have affirmative action as a cover it's a band-aid on differences in the development of intellectual performance which is only partly a consequence of the natural intelligence of people and largely a consequence of how people spend their time what they value how they discipline themselves what they do with their opportunities how parents raise their children what peer groups value and things of this kind the asian students who are scoring off the charts on these exams are doing it not because they're intrinsically more intelligent to other people but because they work harder because their parents are more insistent on focusing on their intellectual performance because they're disciplined uh because of the way that they devote their time and their resources to uh equipping their children to function in the 21st century this is what i believe i think it's demonstrably the case and it is a factor in racial disparity the way that the civil rights movement has evolved under the wing of the democratic party into an organized appalachia uh of for the failures of african americans to seize the opportunities that exist for us now in the 21st century but did not exist in the first half of the 20th century the way in which the civil rights movement has become an avoidance mechanism for us not taking we african-americans responsibly this is glenn lowry not everybody's going to agree with it uh is part of what makes me a conservative i am tired of the bellyaching i'm tired of the excuse me white supremacy uh it is in my mind a joke uh i lament the fact that that kind of rhetoric is so seductively attractive to african americans and so widely adopted by others and as i am fond of saying at the end of the day nobody is coming to save us i mean higher education mit caltech stanford the where the future is happening that is about mastery over the achievements of human civilization such as they manifest themselves in the 21st century there's no substitute for actually acquiring mastery over the material there's no substitute for that to be uh patronized to have the standards lower they want to get rid of the test they want to tell african americans uh pat us on the head uh we're gonna have a separate program for you we're gonna give you a side door that you can come into that doesn't make us any smarter it doesn't make us any more creative um and it doesn't make us any more fit for the actual competition that's unfolding before us now you want to be 10 of the population that's carried along for the next 100 years you want to be uh a ward of the state in the late 21st century you go ahead because the chinese are coming you're not going to hold them back the world is being remade every decade by new ways of seeing and new ways of doing if you don't get on board with the dynamic advancement of the civilization in which we are embedded you're going to end up being dependent on other people to look kindly upon you in this story that you've got this uh bellyache this excuse my ancestors were slaves it's only gonna work for so long so that's that makes me i suppose a kind of conservatives i hate affirmative action i don't just disagree with it i don't just think it's against the 14th amendment i hate it the hatred comes from an understanding that it is a band-aid that is a substitute for the actual development over the capacities of our people to compete i'd much rather be in the position of having them try to keep me out because i'm so damn good like they're doing with the asians then having them have to beg the supreme court to allow for a special dispensation on my behalf because they need diversity and inclusion and belonging it's not just diversity it's not just diversity and inclusion there's diversity and inclusion and belonging i'm whining because i feel like i don't belong that's a position of weakness it's pathetic uh and it's only political correctness that keeps people who can see this and believe me a lot of people can see it from saying so out loud so you want the black american community to represent strength correct and i want us to deal with what it is that we have to deal with in order to be able to project strength uh in in an increasingly competitive world let me ask you i know you said you're angry um or dislike affirmative action let me ask you about something that even to my ear cut wrong um now i'm relatively apolitical so president biden when he was running for president gave a campaign promise that he will nominate a black woman to the u.s supreme court saying quote the person i will nominate will be someone with extraordinary qualifications character experience and integrity first sentence second sentence and that person will be the first black woman ever nominated to the united states supreme court do you wish he only said the first sentence and not the second yes i wish that he had only said the first sentence even if his intention was to do what he said he was going to do in the second sentence yes in other words i wish that he had simply said if i have the opportunity to nominate someone to the supreme court it's going to be a superbly qualified person to carry out that position and he might have kept to himself his intention to name an african-american woman to that position and then gone ahead and named an african-american woman to that position and i'm sure that katanji brown jackson i don't doubt that she's exceptionally qualified she has a distinguished career she served as a judge on the d.c circuit court of appeals she's a graduate at harvard law school she has a background you do not have to be a world-class constitutional legal scholar to get onto the united states supreme court a lot of members of the united states supreme court have had different kinds of legal careers before they were elevated to that position earl warren of the famed warren court of the 1950s and 60s was a politician as well as a leading jurors and whatnot i mean many kind of people in the u.s supreme court i have no doubt that judge katanji brown jackson is a qualified member to be on the supreme court i wish that biden had not done what he did he could have just appointed a black woman by saying that he was limiting his considerations to black women and what are black women as a percentage of all potential appointees to the supreme court three percent four percent i don't know we could look the number up uh the by saying that he puts an asterisk on the appointment but it's worse than that because she will live down the asterisk if a person is inclined to to do that she will have the opportunity to show through her performance uh exactly what kind of juror she is just as justice clarence thomas has shown through his performance that he was qualified and more than qualified to be on the united states supreme court what i disliked was the pandering he was seeking votes from black people by pandering to us and he's treating us like children why should i care what color the person is who's on the united states supreme court what i should care about is what kind of opinions they're going to write when they're on the united do i suppose that being a black woman means that you're going to write different kind of opinions on others well perhaps perhaps that kind of identity politics at the highest level of american legal uh establishment is something that rubs me very much the wrong way uh what i should care about is uh the nature and the future of the law i mean i'm actually struck by this because uh the court is conservative it has six conservative members on it and it has three liberal members on it um and uh if i were and i'm not a liberal democrat the highest concern that i would have about an appointment to the supreme court is is this a person who is going to be effective in advocating my liberal views within the highest council of american law now the fact that that person is a woman or as a black person is way down the list of the things that i would think are important to the kinds of opinions that they're going to write so i mean i think uh joe biden this is just a piece of a larger political strategy to cobble together a coalition that'll be successful at the polls in sustaining democrats uh jim crow 2.0 this whole characterization of the uh conflict in the states about election security and voting rights is another part of that strategy he is pandering to black voters he is trying to frighten us thinking that if the republicans win our rights will be taken away uh and uh i i think it is a infantilization of african-american politics i i think black people are not to be as concerned about the color of the skin of a person who is serving in government as they are about the content of their character and the focus of their of their political and ideological orientation which for me would be center or even center right but that's me and it should not have a significant impact nevertheless he said she can overcome the asterisks but to me it was deeply disrespectful that um anyone would give an extra asterisk stuff to overcome he didn't have to say it all he had to do was do it if he wanted to put a black woman on the court they could just go ahead and done it the reason he said it is because he wanted black people to vote for him by saying it and i'm saying that treats us like we're children uh you know it's not a political statement i just thought as a leader that was not um those that was kind of disgusting um let me ask you about thomas solo you mentioned him he's a colleague and somebody who's an influence what uh in the space of ideas so what broadly what impact has he had on your ideas and um how do you think he shaped the landscape of ideas in our culture in general i think thomas soule is in his 90s now he's been around for a long time he's still got it he's still going at it he's still going at the books continue to come out i think he's a great man um i think thomas soule regardless of his race he's black is one of the 100 most significant economists of the 20th century he has chosen as his subject a substantial part of his subject subject to investigate the deep causes and consequences of racial disparity of one kind or another he's written fundamental books about that many of them he's a social philosopher he is a economic historian he is a combatant in the conflict of ideas around how to think about society and this beyond racial differences although race has been a big part of what he's written about he's been critical of affirmative action and he didn't just stand back and wag his finger he got busy looking at the consequences of affirmative action in societies all around the world and he's written books about that he's been critical of the narrative about civil rights and racial inequality he believes in small government he doesn't think that efforts to redistribute income have proved to be the solution to the problem of racial disparity tom has not been honored by the committee that hands out nobel recognition in economic science and probably won't be because he's controversial and i reckon that that committee would be low to encourage the blowback that they would be sure to receive if they were to take a controversial and politically uh uh focused and expressive black conservative and honor in that way so i think another reason is that tom as a methodological methodological matter is not especially quantitative he pays attention to data but he doesn't do statistical analysis and he doesn't do modeling so from a methodological point of view he's not a cutting edge kind of mathematically sophisticated kind of quantitatively statistically oriented but he does descriptive stuff he writes in a style that is much more like a social historian than it is like a like a mathematically trained analytical economist on the other hand he is an economist in the chicago school with milton friedman and george stickler prominent amongst his teachers who takes price theory which is the analysis of the interplay of market forces uh mindful of incentives and so on uh to you know uh implement the basic insights from uh economic science you know there is no free lunch i mean there's always going to be a cost anything that you do and so on people respond to incentives demand curve slope downward um you know competition tends to work best when people are free to enter and not and so on i mean uh that kind of thing but tom is also a social historian and uh philosopher in the tradition of a friedrich phone hayek uh one of tom's books i deeply admire knowledge and decisions is an extension of the haiki and arguments uh about uh the limits of central planning and whatnot so i think tom seoul thomas soule african-american born as i understand it in louisiana raised in new york city uh graduate of harvard college a military veteran um a phd in economics from the university of chicago um a black conservative social scientist of a very high stature i think he's a great man and one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century and you're saying implicitly uh deserves a nobel prize yeah i i do think so i mean uh hayek was awarded by the committee uh gunnar maridol uh the swedish uh economist wrote about economic development wrote a famous two-volume work an american dilemma about the status of blackstone i mean i think tom could be uh you know put in that company very easily without any difficulty i agree daniel kahneman them so it doesn't have to be new psychologists he's not an economist yeah um uh eleanor ostrom uh the political scientist who was honored in a joint prize given to her and oliver williamson uh 15 years ago or so uh he he could be put in that company really quite easily let me ask you you mentioned obama in this in the very beginning that we were talking about how did it feel uh that seems like forever ago that in 2008 barack obama became president now at that time perhaps you identify as conservative already uh but how did so politics aside just in general um how did it feel that in 150 years where this country has come along well yeah i i didn't identify in 2008 as a conservative to the same extent that i do today uh i was i was kind of in transition yet again i was excited by the obama candidacy at first i was skeptical because after all he's not black the man's father is a kenyan and the man's mother is a white uh american and uh he identifies as black i find it interesting that the first black president of the united states and i could have put inverted commas around black and the first black vice president of the united states neither of them descend from american slaves kamala harris's father is of african ancestry in part he's a jamaican immigrant and her mother is an indian immigrant she was kamala harris raised up largely in canada though born in the united states um barack obama is as i've said of mixed ancestry and neither of his parents are the descendants of uh of uh american descendants of african slaves but blackness is flexible it's it's it's uh something that you can put on or you can take off to a certain degree for some people and so be it i was excited our time has come hope and change we are the ones we've been waiting for these are slogans from 2008. i can't believe i bought that crap oh interesting let me push back here you talked about it's i mean to me a jew is a jew skin color is skin color yeah i mean he barack obama is black okay when it matters when you're talking to a white supremacist yeah when you're talking to when you if you're a slave owner he's black just like you said when hitler comes around a jew is a jew it doesn't matter how you identify it doesn't matter what so in that sense don't you think that barack obama is black in the most powerful of ways which is designating how far the mlk the dr king vision oh sure and look i i said it a little bit tongue-in-cheek yes yes of course but i think obama has been very careful about manufacturing a kind of public persona that is intended to um position him in the most effective way you mean like every politician yeah like every politician sure and that the racial identity piece is an aspect of that i mean anything i say here would only be speculation because i have no facts about the personal history of barack obama and i accept barack hussein obama as hillary clinton once said i take him at his word uh about uh whatever she was talking about uh well was he a christian i think is what the the question was and uh you know there was some right-wing attack on obama for you know having been raised in for some years in the philippines and um all of that or indonesia i beg your pardon in indonesia and his stepfather and all of that but uh she took him at his word and i take him at his word about his racial identity no but you were captivated by the power of his words and you regret to the degree you were captivated well i mean i think in retrospect that whole campaign looks like a pie in the sky kind of uh fairy tale we are the ones we've been waiting for i can't quote exactly that speech that he gave in grant park in chicago when he was announced as the winner of the election but today is the day that the rise of the ocean stopper words to this effect i mean uh those who doubted that uh we could do it that tonight is your answer this was going to be a new day it was going to be a new regime well it wasn't a new day and it wasn't a new regime it was american politics more or less as usual barack obama turns out not to be the messiah maybe there should be no surprise in that race relations got set back during obama's tenure my beef with obama is that you okay you're black you say you're black you're black you got elected now we have a black president a black president you can do stuff that nobody else could do you're a black president you could tell the people burning down the city to get their butts back in their houses and to stop it you know you could tell the race hustlers the al sharptons of the world not only has our time come for those who supported my my campaign your time is over for those who want to uh carry on uh a advocacy rooted in racial grievance the election of myself to this highest office proves that the institution of the state are legitimate and open to all comers i think barack obama when the s-h-i-t hit the fan if i had a son he looked like trayvon i deeply regret that he said that he's president of the united states the color of his skin and the color of trayvon's skin the correlation between those two things if i had a son he looked like trayvon now he says when he said it he only meant to sympathize with the parents but in fact when he said it from the highest office in the land and then sent his attorney general eric holder out to enforce this narrative he doubled down on a racial narrative that i think is actually false i think the story that systemic racism in america as reflected in policing that terrorizes black people because of the color of the skin is demonstrably false i think that the central threat to black lives is violent crime perpetrated largely by black people against other black people i think there is such a thing as police brutality and i think there are reasons to have regulations of police but i think it is a second order issue in terms of the quality of life of african americans i think obama could have told the people who after freddie gray died in police custody in a van in baltimore and who undertook to burn that city down to get their asses off the street and go back to their apartments to stop it i think he could have said in the aftermath of michael brown being shot dead by darren wilson in ferguson missouri and there was a grand jury deliberation that elected not to indict officer wilson and people took the streets in that city and stood on top of vehicles and so forth and so on he could have told them we don't mob around courthouses in this country we respect the rule of law get your butts off the streets and back into your apartments he didn't do that uh so to push back a little bit yeah good push back i think you're asking barack obama the first black president of the united states to do the thing that i think should be done by the second black president of the united states i think his very example given the color of his skin uh was the most powerful thing and um actually doing some of these hard thomas soul type of glen lowry type of strong words about race it may be too much to ask given the nature of modern day politics he is a politician he is a politician he needs to get elected he needed to get re-elected yeah um it was in his second term where most of what i'm talking about happened so he wasn't facing further election but obama was what 46 or 47 when he was inaugurated he served for eight years so he's in his mid 50s he's got another half century or 40 years of life god willing his post-presidency i think was what was primarily on his mind not getting elected to anything but being enshrined in a certain way and the the persona that he is now embodying uh which depends upon um a racial narrative that i and thomas soul and others object to i think was very much in the forefront of his mind when he made decisions as the chief executive officer of the country uh that we've all now uh have to live with yeah but the fact is he opened the door in a way that hasn't been done in the history of of of this the united states that i don't see there being a uh even a significant discussion when an uh an african-american a black man or a black woman runs for president maybe a black man let's say because there still hasn't been a woman president i just see that that broke open the possibility of that that's not even a discussion and that that example by itself i mean to me the role of the president isn't just policy it's to inspire it's to do the um yeah it's to do the dr king thing which is i have a dream and barack obama is an example of somebody that could give one hell of a speech it got you to believe obama is a smooth operator without any question he's a master of his craft he you know he did the impossible i mean he beat hillary clinton in that primary fight um and uh he beat john mccain in that general election and hats off to him and moreover he remains a a iconic figure in american culture i don't think there's any doubt about that uh let me just mention clarence thomas is also black clarence thomas has a story that is vivid and inspiring just like obama's story he overcome obstacles just like obama did i mean extreme poverty and so forth and so on clarence thomas has served longer than any other member of the united states supreme court he is one of nine justices and it's three equal branches of government so clarence thomas by my arithmetic personifies 127th of the american state uh he is an iconic figure his example should be an inspiration to americans of all races but especially of black american youngsters he happens to be conservative he's very conservative so fucking what he he too deserves to be in that pantheon he is not by the custodians of american education clarence thomas's name is not on that many schools barack obama's name will be on many of them i'm not equating them they're different people the offices are very different but the same logic that you just used to extol the significance of barack obama's ascendancy could and should be applied to clarence thomas in my opinion yes but you know it's the office but also uh there is a resume and there's accomplishments but then there is oratory and charisma and the number of twitter followers uh so there's ability to captivate a large number of people and that's a skill that's a skill that correlates but is not directly connected to with how impressive your resume is i agree and moreover the judicial function the judge doesn't go out and give speeches of that sort because it's exactly antithetical to what he's doing he's a custodian of the law and that's not a popular uh feature figure in american policy he doesn't stand for election and it's a good thing too so i i take that point here i want to say something else though that's provocative the next black president you say the first black president shouldn't have been the one to do that the second one should is more likely than not going to be a republican i'm not i don't have a particular person in mind i'm just saying i agree i agree i agree and that's why it's going to be super fun uh let me ask you to put put on your wise sage hat and give advice to young people so if you're talking to somebody who's in high school in college what advice would you give them about their career about life in general how to live a life they can be proud of well i'd say the world is your oyster i mean first order business you're not a victim i don't care what color you are i don't care you're male female you're gay straight whatever the world is your oyster you are so privileged you sit here in the united states of america a free country a rich country everything is possible for you believe me you can do anything okay uh secondly i would say uh mastery over the medium in which we're embedded is the key to the future so get educated focus work hard uh you know invest in your future by acquiring the skills that you need to be able to navigate the 21st century i would say the chinese are coming and i don't mean anything against china i just mean to say the world's a small place and it's getting smaller uh and uh you know you better get moving and you better get moving quickly i'd say your identity your coloration your your orientation your your your category uh is not the most important thing about you that uh you know so uh the the temptation to limit yourself i mean i give this speech to my my kids i say um i i quote james joyce uh he has a a passage in um portrait of an artist as a young man in which he says uh do you know what ireland is ireland is an old sow that eats her pharaoh this is joyce he says uh stephen daedalus is the character that he has in mind in this uh chronicle he says uh your ethnic inheritance he's talking about irish nationalism are like nets holding you back that your challenge is to learn how to turn those nets into wings and thereby to fly okay flying into the open skies of modern society don't be your grandfather don't be your father don't wear your thing so heavily that it keeps you from being open to everything that's new in the world wear it lightly yes everybody comes from somewhere but it doesn't have to be where you end up uh so you're you're not your father you're not your grandfather you you are this uh wonderfully blessed uh human being in the middle of going into the middle of the 21st century um and uh don't miss it don't don't don't live blinkeredly don't live small live big uh live big and uh wear your history lightly yeah everybody's got a mother tongue everybody's got a story everybody has a people but the world is a small place i love that you're quoting an irishman one of the greatest writers of the 20th century a profound one um but an irishman nevertheless the the the levels of humor within that is not lost on me let me just mention the great ralph ellison the african-american writer invisible man is his uh masterpiece uh embodied this spirit okay we black americans we do come from somewhere that come from somewhere from slavery in america that's our ancestral heritage but that's not what we are skin and bone these are superficial things the spirit and if i were a more religious person i could give a whole disposition about that but it's the spirit it's that light that's inside that's that's who we are and our challenge is to live in the fullness of it uh as opposed to this blinkered thing where we don't look left we don't look right we're just fitting within this template that we inherit uh that is a travesty really glenn you've lived an incredible life a productive one but just representing um some powerful ideas some powerful ideals but life comes to an end yeah do you think about your death are you afraid of it well it is a really interesting coincidence that you'd posed me that question because i'm coming from a funeral uh today is sunday on the proceeding tuesday five days ago i was at the funeral of eugene wesley smith who was my brother-in-law he was my sister's husband my sister leonette passed away in august of 2021 her husband has died at the age of 68 in april of 2022 and i was at his funeral he died suddenly of a heart attack that came completely out of the blue he seemed to be in perfect health he was a magnificent human being i could go into the details but you know take my word for it he was a businessman a steel trader metals trader he would buy and sell he worked mostly from his home office he had clients counterparties people he did business with all over the world um he had three sons one of whom is uh in his early 30s two of whom are in their late 30s these are my sisters children she's deceased now he's deceased the older two sons are severely developmentally disabled and although they're in their late 30s they're not independently viable they don't function effective they have to be cared for that responsibility has now fallen to the family but mainly to the surviving son who lives and with his wife and his two young children and has assumed the responsibility they've carried at home my sister and her husband wesley eugene wesley smith cared for their disabled sons at home they didn't want to see them institutionalized they had some help from programs at the state and social worker and so on but they mainly took on the burden of caring for them at home anyway i go on at length here and you know i don't know how much of this you will choose to make use of it it doesn't matter really i'm just trying to respond to your question i was asked to offer some remarks at the funeral and i offered them and i you know i i spoke well of this great man he was a great man he had a straight back he was a stand-up guy he could be counted on his word was his bond he had broad shoulders he carried a lot of people with him business associates family members and so forth and so on he had a huge heart he was a giving and kind person he had a great mind he was an intellectual even though as a businessman much of his day was taken up with the you know minutia of contracts and you know the details of the order being delivered and not being delivered of the quality of the product of the financing and so forth there was still a powerful mind there yeah it was a powerful mind and he uh studied he read books he was interested in music and art he was uh he's a spiritual seeker uh had been ordained as a child minister in his youth and while he remained uh a master of the christian canon he also explored uh eastern religion and other spiritual paths and kind of stood above any particular tradition as a man who believed in god but thought that god manifests himself in many ways to human beings and that there was much to learn from other religious traditions as well this is wesley we called him wesley by his middle name eugene wesley smith may rest in peace 68 that's five years younger than i am right now he dropped dead without any warning i could too so how does that make you feel what were the thoughts in your mind leading up to it having to give that speech in the days that followed first of all i wondered what would i say what would i say and you know there was no way to prepare and i decided you know i i rehearsed in my mind this you know he has straight back he had broad shoulders he had a big heart he had a great mind you know he had a capacious spirit and whatnot and i used that as a template for making my remarks but my main thought was my god life is precious and life is fleeting and death is a part of life my death is a part of my life and i thought you know well i want to take better care of myself than i do you know etc etc but i also thought a lot of this is not in my hands at all i thought one should have his affairs in order my brother did not have all of his affairs in order in the sense that there is a lot of you know things are going to probate there was no will there's you know this it's kind of unsettled i i don't want that to happen to my uh surviving family members i i want to have my affairs such that should heaven forbid i fall over one day and don't get up again um people don't have to scramble about how to how to take care of things from from that point forward but as a human are you afraid i'm afraid now i i read this wonderful book called the swerve uh it's it's about lucretius it's about uh the nature of things which is this great classical work from the roman period uh by this uh guy lucretius and i'm trying to think of the name of the author but you could look it up the swerve it's the book and one like a national book award or a pulitzer prize is and it's the history of the recovery of this book uh by uh one of these italian renaissance italian uh people who would go into the monasteries in central europe uh and uh look through the scrolls and they discovered these classical works from antiquity which had been lost through the dark ages and they re re-uh uh publish and and read these works and lucretius's great work on the nature of things was one of these books poggio uh bacclini i come i don't remember the italian guy's name but this all could be looked up uh yeah pogio broccolini yeah 15th century uh 15th century and the name of the author is a stephen greenblatt yeah stephen greenblack a magnificent book and a terrific story anyway one of lucretius's points he was an atheist i mean he was a roman i mean he was he he didn't believe in mysticism and he and and he argued it's irrational to be afraid of death why should i fear death death is coming to all of us the point of being afraid i mean i'm wasting my time fearing something that i have no ultimate control over it's irrational to be afraid of death uh yeah because it uh you can't predict when it happens you only know that it happens so why be afraid how's that and therefore live every day fully live every day purposefully um you know and so on but these are all just words you know i i don't want to die uh i want to live forever i'm not going to live forever i don't want to i don't want to suffer i i see people suffering i saw my late wife linda dacha lowry dr linda thatcher lowry professor of economics at tufts university whom i met in graduate school at mit black woman from baltimore we married we raised two sons together she died at the age of 59 from metastatic breast cancer and i watched her suffer and i watched her die and it took a while and we care for her at home right up until the very end she died in our bed with our sons on either side of her and the dog curled up by the by the door the porch door in the bedroom and she expired and i watched her suffer and i watched her die and i don't want to suffer who does i don't want to die i am likely to suffer before i die uh i am likely to see my death coming and to lament it um there is a book by richard john newhouse the theologian called as i light as i lay dying as i lay dying richard john newhouse uh he had stomach cancer and he thought he was dying and he wrote this book as he lay dying and then he recovered he had uh he went when it went into remission and he had another couple of years he thought he was dying and he had another couple years and i can remember meeting him at a bookstore in suburban boston when he was on a tour he was this was a friend of mine a theologian and a public intellectual he founded the institute on religion and public life in new york city which still exists uh richard john newhouse and he's contemplating his own death from the point of view of a christian minister he was a first a lutheran pastor and then he converted to catholicism or as he would have put it on return to the church because he you know thought the renaissance was over i mean i'm sorry the reformation richard thought was over he says there's only one church you know it's etc get into theology stuff here um but i'm saying all that to say i read that book aloud to my wife linda as she lay dying in that bed i read that book and it was filled with hope i mean it first acknowledged the dread yes i lie dying i don't want to die i'm a christian minister christ was raised from the dead i'm supposed to believe in everlasting life but the fact of the matter is this is me and i'm lying here and i'm dying this is the end of me how are you going to do anything other than dread the end of me so let's acknowledge that i don't want to die okay i'm just going to tell you that up front but that is not the end of my death is not the end of life i have lived well and fully i will go and do my best right up until the end uh i will accept what is inevitable uh and i will hold out this belief and he's a christian minister so he holds out this belief and he knows he knows that the belief is not rational it's not a reasoned deductive scientific conclusion it's spiritual in the most fundamental way it is something that people hold on to and they have hope and he had hope uh i don't know if i have that hope i used to be but i'm no longer um a christian and i'm no longer a theist really i i i'm with lucretius there i mean there's no nothing there's no magic that's going on here there's no you know unseen hand behind the scene that's arranging things what i believe is that when i look at the natural world i see i see the evolution of the species i see the organic development of the of the planets i mean the earth is going to not exist in a finite number of years i think with a very high probability the sun is going to die it's going to you know implode it's going to go supernova whatever is going to happen and there's not going to be any there there what's the meaning of life glenn larry that's the meaning of life yeah let's go let's go what's the why or is that something economists and social scientists and mathematicians are not equipped to answer surely you know i think we live we try to live well and meaningfully within our time uh we bond we reproduce we try to pass on and we accept our limitations and our mortality we try to contribute um and that's through our children and through our work and we're in this together we're not in this alone uh we we are connected to other people um i get a lot of gratitude out of teaching i'm a teacher my students are gonna outlive me they're going to have students i'm a writer my writing is going to outlive me i don't want to be you know self-important or pretentious here i doubt that i'm going to be the james joyce of the 21st century they may not be reading my stuff in a hundred years as people will certainly be reading uh ulysses in a hundred years but i try to have a impact on my on on the world that i'm a part of and and try to leave a legacy that's dignified uh you know i mean i could give some flowery words to truth-seeking and whatnot what about love love what what what what what role does love play in this uh in this life around i mean without love i mean what have we got i mean we don't have uh we we don't have family and and uh you know we we certainly have missed out if love is not a central part of our of our existence but stop asking me questions like that thank you for doing everything you do for thinking the way you do for being fearless and bold um in in the glenn show in your writing and in your work and just being who you are thank you for being you and thank you for giving me the huge honor of spending your extremely valuable time with me today this is awesome it's been my pleasure lex i mean really and it has been like four hours man i mean you wearing me out for me i love it thanks for listening to this conversation with glenn lowery to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from dr martin luther king jr if you can't fly then run if you can't run then walk if you can't walk then crawl but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you