Glenn Loury on Affirmative Action

>> Speaker 1: Hi, Doctor Glenn, I'm from Mexico. I really like the Glenn show. I'm a regular at it. So I was wondering recently you interviewed, sorry recently you interviewed Doctor Amy Wax. And she mentioned to a certain extent that the aboriginal IQ within populations would be able to explain the disparities in economic outcomes and also in incarceration rates.

So I was wondering, to what extent would this idea explain these parties within populations?

>> Glenn Loury: Okay, thanks for the question. Yeah, Amy Wax, quite a character, quite an interesting woman on the hot seat there at the University of Pennsylvania law school now where a disciplinary action is being brought against her.

Because she has said such things as you just quoted her as having said. I'm gonna answer your question momentarily. I want you to know that next Monday, but today is Thursday, Monday for subscribers at the Glenn show. That's glennlowrey.substack.com. Amy Wax will appear and will answer for herself, as it were.

I'm not charging her, I'm merely reading off the charges. But we have an interesting session coming up. Okay, to your question, correlation, not necessarily causation. Certainly the average IQ scores, as ascertained by the paper and pencil tests that people take between racial groups differ, blacks on average, about a standard deviation.

That's about the move from the median to the 83rd or so percentile. That's a big gap difference on average in IQ scores. And certainly IQ does correlate with positively with earnings in the labor market and negatively in the sense of more likely to be in trouble with the law if you have a low IQ.

So I can see where a person might get this idea. And by the way, this is not an original idea to Amy Wax. I mean, one thinks of Charles Murray, of course, in this context of the Bell Curve with Richard Herrnstein, but also facing reality, two truths about race in America, something like that.

That's his most recent book where he talks both about criminal offending and about labor market outcomes and representation and the professions. And he argues that IQ is a big factor. Here's what I think, I think certainly IQ is a factor. Whether or not it accounts for the full disparity, I don't think so, frankly.

I think the correlation, if you just run a straightforward regression equation where you put earnings on the left hand side. And IQ on the right hand side or educational achievement on the left hand side and IQ on the right hand side, there'll be a correlation there. But there will be a big error term in that equation as well.

And a lot of other stuff is going on. So I'm not one who takes this one factor explanation, but I do allow that it is a factor. And the question for us becomes how important and what are the interventions, if any, that might be adopted that would help to remedy the situation.

I should, in the interest of full disclosure, tell you that in my book, the Anatomy of Racial Inequality, recently reissued in a second edition by Harvard University Press, I adopt three axioms as I set out to explain racial inequality. And one of them is the axiom of anti essentialism, I call it, in which I posit that for explaining racial inequality, I will eschew any reliance on natural and intrinsic differences between the populations in order to give an account.

Because I believe an account can be given without having to rely on natural and intrinsic differences. But in saying that, I would also affirm that anybody who wants to do research, such as Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein did in that classic book of 1994, the Bell curve, and explore this question should be entitled to do so.

And the idea that you can preempt discussion of this hypothesis by calling someone a racist or pointing a finger at them, as has been done in the case of Amy Wax, is, I think, an offense to our liberal political order. People follow the evidence where it leads them.

For me, the evidence does not lead to the place that Charles Murray thinks it leads to, but that's what makes the world go around.

>> Speaker 3: Hi, Doctor Loury, thanks so much for your talk, my question had to do with affirmative action. So affirmative action has been criticized as sort of unfairly or advancing racial quotas and things like that.

So I wanted to get your thoughts on what should our institutes of higher education be doing to best or to most productively advance the state of black people and racial equality in the United States and across the world, thank you.

>> Glenn Loury: Thank you, thanks for the question. It's very important, given that this case with Harvard and the University of North Carolina in court with plaintiffs, the students for fair admissions, Asian students who are objecting to affirmative action as being discriminatory against them and unfair.

And that case is gonna be heard by the court in the coming term. And so hold on to your seats, because if you thought that the Dobbs decision on abortion was a shakeup, this will be another shakeup, I expect. But who am I to prognosticate about what the Supreme Court is gonna do?

I want to address your question. What should universities do? I'm against affirmative action, let me just put it that way. I've been around for a long time. My PhD dissertation that I made reference to was 1976. Okay, that's a long time. When I was coming along, affirmative action was just a thing that we wanted to do.

Because the previous regime, dating back into the early 20th century, had seen blacks virtually excluded from participation in these institutions of elite, selective higher education. The country made a turn in the 1960s and 70s toward a project of redressing the consequences of its history in terms of exclusion of blacks.

And affirmative action was a tool in that term. It was controversial from the very beginning. People said, not without reason, that the use of racial preferences to favor black people was in principle, no different than the use of racial discrimination to disfavor black people. It was treating people differently based upon their race.

And the court was approach to consider objections to affirmative action on that grounds, violating the 14th Amendment's equal protection provisions, for instance, by using racial identity as a factor in awarding benefits. The court has pronounced and pronounced and pronounced, I won't try to review all of the jurisprudence on this.

We don't have time for that. And it will pronounce yet again, and that's one line of attack. That's one set of concerns that could be raised. Should universities, or, if you will, public universities, since those are the ones who are state actors within the purview of the 14th amendment, be banned from using racial criteria when they make their selection decisions?

And that's one line of attack to say that they should do. I'm less sympathetic to that line of attack. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a legal scholar, I'm not unaware of the literatures in these areas, but I'm not an expert. But I pretty much was persuaded by a good book by Randall Kennedy, who is a liberal.

He clerked with Justice Thurgood Marshall when he was a young man. Randall Kennedy's a law professor at Harvard. He's a black man, and he's a man of the left. And he's written a book called for discrimination in which he says, you know, I realize that affirmative action is racial discrimination.

Okay, let's just credit that, because that's important. He realizes, a liberal and a supporter, that it's racial discrimination. But he says it's not racial discrimination that the framers of the 14th Amendment intended to preclude when they require the equal protection of the law. So this is Kennedy. He's a lawyer.

He's making this argument. And he says, then, therefore, the question becomes whether it's wise, whether it's a good idea for the institutions and, frankly, for the people who are benefited by the practice. And that is where I plant my flag. I plant my flag against affirmative action on the argument that a half century down the line from 1970, relying on racial preferences to secure a reasonable number presence of black people within elite academic venues is bad for the country and it's bad for black people.

It invites patronization. It's not equality. The underlying performance differences that are signaled by the test score differences are not remedied by imposing or employing racial preferences. Rather, we invite a world in which we are tempted to avoid or ignore those performance differences. Let me just fill this argument out a bit.

I'm sorry to take so long, cuz I know our time is limited, but this is really important. Study after study after study show that the admissions test, the SAT, and the ACT test for college students. The law school admissions test, or the medical college aptitude test for lawyers and physicians, the graduate record examination for people pursuing post baccalaureate degree programs.

Performance on these instruments correlates with performance after admission. The correlation is not perfect, but it is substantial. High test score students do better than low test score students after you admit them. Fact number one. Fact number two, if you use a lower threshold in your admissions process for black students than for others, you guarantee that the post admission population is going to consist of people by race who differ in their performance on those tests.

That's just a tautology. You use the lower threshold, you get lower test score admittees. Combine those two facts. Test scores correlate with performance. Racial preferences guarantees that blacks will, on average, have lower test scores. Now, you don't have to be a member of the econometric society, as I am, to see that if you have a large population that is being subjected to these kinds of admissions practices, you're gonna create situations, scores of them.

Hundreds of them, around the country, in institutions where on the ground, the actual performance after admissions of students noticeably differs by racial identity. That is the world that we now inhabit, and no one can say it. I can only get away with saying it because I'm black. If I were a white lecturer like Sandra Sellers at the Georgetown Law Center's law school teaching a negotiation class a couple of years ago.

Who was caught on a hot mic lamenting the fact that most of the kids at the bottom of her class were blacks and that was a terrible thing and she didn't know what to do about it. She got fired by Georgetown for uttering the truth about that situation, and the institution went into a naval gazing, self-critical posture about how racist and institutionally biased Georgetown is.

Because a professor pointed out the obvious logical implications of the racially preferential admissions practices of that institution. Lying to each other and to ourselves about the actual consequences of what we do. That is corruption. The incentives are all wrong. We're telling students who need every impetus to put their noses to the grindstone and to work their tails off because they may be overcoming disadvantages that they bring with them into the classroom.

We're telling them that don't worry, you don't need to have an a minus average, a B plus is good enough. Don't worry, you don't have to be at the 85th or 90th percentile of the LSAT distribution of test takers. If you're at the 60th percentile, it's good enough.

I urge you to look at the data that are public now as a consequence of discovery in the Harvard affirmative action case. Dig out Peter Arcidiakno's brief on behalf of the Asian students. Peter is an economist at Duke University who is the expert, lead expert witness for the plaintiffs in this lawsuit.

He's got data in there to tell you. When you array the applicants to the university by where they stand in the distribution of academic qualifications, middling black students in the 60th or 70th percentile of the population. Have a decent chance of getting in the heart of 15%, 20%, 25%, and excellent black scorers have an outsized chance of getting 50%.

60% of those kids are admitted to Harvard. If you're Asian and you're a middling student, you can forget about it. You're not going to get into Harvard unless you're in the 80th or 90th percentile of the test takers, and then your chances of getting in are 15% or 20%.

Whereas if you've been black, it would be 50 or 60 or 70%. So the message that we're sending is, it's okay to be just to black students by institutionalizing in perpetuity. I mean, there's no end to this. It's only going to become more. If the court were to uphold what the colleges at Harvard and UNC are doing now, it's only gonna become more and more entrenched.

Institutionalizing into perpetuity a set of practices which are guaranteed to produce ex post facto racial disparities of performance. And which send the wrong message about what's needed to succeed in their institutions to the students of color who are applying. I'm against that.

>> Glenn Loury: You asked me what to do.

Okay, I don't know for sure. I can tell you this. If you're an elite institution and you're in good company with the liberal agenda, you're gonna have ten or 12% black students in your student body, and your class is gonna be representative. It's gonna be a population parody kind of thing.

You could get by with 5 or 6%. The sky wouldn't fall. The marginal admittees are the ones who are least well prepared. And that's where you would start. I would encourage institutions to hew to a common, equal playing field in terms of judging their applicants so as to send the message upstream that what is needed is better preparation.

I mean, we could go into what to do about primary and secondary education, which affects all Americans and not only blacks, but from the point of view of elite institutions. My first order of business would be to get away from using this disparity of academic standards when judging applicants, and to be willing to live with a somewhat more modest representation goal than what it is that they currently seem to be fixated on.

>> Nick Kimball: Hello, sorry. Hi, my. Hi, my name is Nick Kimball, and I wanted to thank you for your time, and my question today is really specific in terms of the conversations of racial inequality. A lot of times, the United States, when we discuss it, it's between white and black, but my question is delving into how can we make this conversation more based in all races and cultures in the United States?

>> Glenn Loury: Well, as you heard from my remarks, that's exactly what I wanna do, I mean, we do have a history here, and going back to the 20th century, going back to the 19th century, America is a very dynamic country, as you know, as everybody who is listening to this talk knows.

We're not just black and white in this country, haven't been for some time there's the Hispanic, Latino, et cetera, population, and there's the immigrants from all over the world, including from South and East Asia, whose numbers continue to grow here in the United States. We're a country of immigrants, earlier in the history of the country, there were wave after wave of European immigration coming from Eastern Europe, from Southern Europe, and so on, from Scandinavia, Germany, and so on, going all the way back from Ireland.

So the country is not the same today as it was 50 years ago, that civil rights era legal revolution also included a revolution in our immigration policy, where immigration liberalization and the removal of racist constraints on who could enter the country was abrogated. And tens of millions of people have come from non European ports of origin into the United States and are a part of our great country, so the 21st century, I mentioned interracial marriage and so on, which complicates the scene.

This Asian propagate promoted legal challenge to affirmative action at these elite universities is another sign of our times, and as I say, we have to bend and stretch the boundaries of racial identity, or if we don't have to, we're inclined to. The first black president of the United States has as an ancestor, neither on his mother or father's side, anyone who was ever enslaved in the United States.

And that's also true about the first black vice president, not to put too fine a point on it, just to say that the 21st century is a whole new ballgame, and going forward another 20, 30, 50 years, we're gonna look very, very different than we do right now.

So I am, in my70's, mindful of the fact that I don't wanna get caught in a historical time warp and miss the dynamism of American society, no, we're not just black and white, and the racial discussion needs to be supple and sophisticated enough to recognize that. My answer I told you what my answer was, my answer is we are all Americans here, we're human beings, we need to get out of the business of parsing, chopping, cutting, and comparing and measuring and balancing by these racial identity groups which are themselves in flux.

Who knows what is going to be the case 50 or 100 years from now, given the rates of intermarriage between the various different ethnic populations? We need to get out of this binary business and out of this my people, your people business and recognize that we're all here pretty much in the same boat, and our civic objective should be to create a society that's fair and decent and humane for everybody.

>> Speaker 5: Thank you very much, Doctor Lowry, for coming to speak with us today, absolutely fantastic presentation, I'm glad you brought up the example.

>> Glenn Loury: I can't hear you.

>> Speaker 5: You can't hear me? What about now?

>> Glenn Loury: No, that's a little better.

>> Speaker 5: That's a little better, okay, sounds good, I'll make sure to bring it closer, I'm glad you brought up the example of Georgetown, the Georgetown law scandal, I am a recent graduate of Georgetown University undergraduate, as opposed to graduate.

I'm sorry, I can't hear the question, why don't you state the question and then someone else can repeat it, okay, go ahead. Yes, of course, so my question is, how do we engage with, how do we possibly engage with more liberal segments of our society that are. It's much more difficult to have this sort of conversation simply because it's very easy to have what you're saying be construed as saying that you are racist, frankly, if I were to go to Georgetown University right now and say a lot of the things you're saying, I'd have disciplinary action takes taken against me?

I would assume so, how is it possible to have those conversations about racial inequality in our society?

>> Josh: Glenn, this is Josh, I'm gonna repeat it, so the question was, how is it possible to engage with, as the questioner put it, more liberal segments of society who are likely to accuse one of racism if one even goes in this direction?

>> Glenn Loury: Okay, yeah, thanks, Josh, for the repeat, I got the question, It's not a new question, you have to have the courage of your convictions, you're not a racist. You have to be willing to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune because political correctness and cancel culture are real things, you have to insist that the interlocutor, whomever you're talking with, avoid a hominin.

In other words, I just made an argument, whatever the argument was, it could be about affirmative action, it could be about responsibility, social structure, whatever, crime. And the guy, the liberal, the person who's calling you a racist, doesn't agree with your argument, well, then where's his argument or hers?

You made an argument with an argument, not with an epithet, so calling me a racist, if I were white and I made the argument that I made here now, or for that matter, if I'm black, I mean, calling me an Uncle Tom, that would be the flip side of it.

That's the kind of thing that Justice Clarence Thomas has to deal with, is precisely not a refutation of my position, so I'm sorry that my answer isn't more comforting because I don't have a way of avoiding the harm, the social opprobrium, the ostracism, the condemnation. But Ibram X Kendi and company, well, I don't think they've got any answers whatsoever to the underlying issues, which are kids without fathers, which are high crime rates and people who are locked in their homes and afraid to come out because they don't wanna get bludgeoned or carjacked or I shot by somebody in a drive by.

Which are schools that don't work and are not educating enough people of color and otherwise, so that they can be effective, competitive participants in our economic enterprise and so on, they've got exactly zero answers. It shouldn't be hard when making an argument if you know what you're talking about, to remind them of the fact that they've got no answers and to insist that they meet your statements not with a name calling, but with a reasoned and factually based rebuttal.

That's the position that I would take and that's what I'd urge upon you.

>> Josh: Thank you very much, Glenn, we're at time for our session, very much appreciate your joining us here today.

>> Glenn Loury: My pleasure, bye all.