Glenn Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University, a position befitting someone who has had an enormous impact on both the field of economics and American discussions of race. Over a long career, stretching from the 1970s until today, Loury has attempted, among other things, to diagnose the problems leading to unequal status and outcomes for black people in the United States. He sees those problems as often self-induced.

Loury was the first black person to be tenured in Harvard’s economics department, and race is a reference point in much of his economic work. His most famous academic article, “A Dynamic Theory of Racial Income Differences,” argues that economic success is related to “the impact of an individual’s family and community background on his or her acquisition of labor market skills.” Affirmative action only puts less qualified individuals into positions where they are doomed to fail. Instead, Loury argues, we must help people in families and communities with less-than-adequate social capital to gain that capital in other ways. 

From 1980 until the late 1990s Loury was a Reaganite. He was a darling of the right, once sitting next to President Reagan at a national summit on race. Because of this, he was treated with skepticism by other black academics. 

That changed starting around 1999, as Loury began to give talks decrying colorblindness and was welcomed into the academic left by figures such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Cornel West. He started to express sympathy with the notion that incarceration rates showed a systemic bias against African American men in the United States justice system. In 2008 he published a book based on this work: