In Late Admissions, Brown University economist Glenn Loury offers an insightful and heartbreakingly human account of his life. He is unflinching in describing his younger self’s pathological narcissism and demented belief that rules did not apply to him because he was “Glenn F—ing Loury.” Borrowing from Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Loury writes that he thought of himself as one of the Masters of the Universe during the Me Decade of the 1980s. He tells of his sexual and narcotic recklessness, explaining that he considered them no more and no less than extensions of his greatness. The results were predictable and tragic, and he concludes, “I am the enemy within.”

His brilliance as an economist and his struggles as a person—and his brutal honesty about both—make Late Admissions difficult to put down. It will appeal to many kinds of readers, from economists impressed by Loury’s achievements, to armchair psychiatrists astonished by his hubris, to ordinary people interested in a human tale of success, failure, and overcoming.

Brilliant economist / Loury took a crooked road to the top of the economics profession. He grew up among less-than-stellar role models in a working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. He dropped out of the Illinois Institute of Technology because he was not a serious student, but then, after gaining a bit of maturity, he became a star student at Northwestern University. His prodigious talents convinced him he could have it all: He could be a star at his full-time job, a virtuoso in the classroom, and a “player” on the streets. It fed an arrogance that led to his downfall.

He decided he wanted to go into academic economics and got his graduate training at MIT, where the department took a highly technical/​theoretical approach to economics under the guidance of Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson. Economist Arnold Kling has described the central tenet of “Cambridge Economics”—referring to both Cambridge, MA, and the UK’s University of Cambridge—as “Markets fail, use government.” This approach searches for market failures—information asymmetries, externalities, and so on—and explains how to fix them with elegance and mathematical precision. Loury’s prowess at this earned him a job at Northwestern, where Roger Myerson, Bengt Holmström, and Paul Milgrom (hired after Loury) were doing work that would win them Nobel Prizes.

Loury’s work explained how “social capital” mattered for long-term development for individuals and groups and how it was conspicuously missing from many Black communities. He argued that market forces alone might not close racial and income gaps even in the long run: children of poor parents cannot borrow in toddlerhood to finance the kinds of early-childhood interventions that Nobel laureate James Heckman has shown to be so important. Redistribution that overcomes these capital market imperfections could, therefore, promote growth. Loury did brilliant work in this area, publishing articles in leading journals like Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, and Review of Economic Studies.

Yet, even as he triumphed professionally, he was making increasingly dangerous choices personally. As he explains, his ability to live with a calculator in one hand and a crack pipe in the other, dominating two worlds that did not overlap, fed his narcissism.

Black conservative / On the political spectrum, Loury has bounced from right to left and back to right again over four decades and is now among the most prominent of a small but notable coterie of Black conservatives. His influence has grown thanks to a weekly podcast, The Glenn Show, currently sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, that I look forward to every Friday (particularly his biweekly conversations with linguist John McWhorter). Late Admissions chronicles his fascinating journey navigating the world as both an intellectual (who happens to be Black) and an official Black Intellectual.

His views about Black communities put him at odds with what he calls the “Negro Cognoscenti,” who accuse him of disloyalty because he does not share their political commitments. In their eyes, Loury might be phenotypically Black, but since he is not politically Black, so to speak, he is inauthentic and unwelcome in their circles. Throughout the book and in many episodes of his podcast, he chafes at the idea that he is not allowed to define for himself what it means to be authentically Black, particularly given that so many among the Cognoscenti grew up among professionals and the haute bourgeoisie rather than the working class This reminds me of Thomas Sowell’s controversial 1981 Washington Post essays “Blacker than Thou” and “Blacker Than Thou II,” which are worth reading as a complement to Loury’s book.

The book offers a revealing insider’s perspective for outsiders like me who share the Cognoscenti’s desire to improve the lives of Black Americans but reject the Cognoscenti’s politics. Loury discusses emotional and strategic elements of public policy that are easy to lose sight of. Support for Affirmative Action is perhaps more accurately described as a religious commitment than an intellectually embraced policy: To question it, as Loury does, is to assault one of the tenets of the progressive faith. To borrow language Sowell uses in several places, Loury treats as hypotheses to be tested many propositions that are, for activists, axioms to be defended. In one section, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People refuses to support a proposal to eliminate gas price controls even though it is structured to provide tax credits to people who might be made worse off by higher gas prices because people would see it as a concession to the Reagan administration. In another passage, he recounts the time he gave a hard-headed presentation that left Coretta Scott King in tears. His experiences illustrate the problems so many economists have translating ideas and abstractions forged in the seminar room into proposals that play well from the pulpit or the street corner.

This is not to say that Loury only directs his critical gaze leftward. He recounts his frustration with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 book The Bell Curve, his disaffection with conservative periodicals that would not publish his critical review of the book, and his disgust with Dinesh D’Souza’s 1995 book The End of Racism, which culminated in Loury’s disaffiliation with the American Enterprise Institute. He discusses how his review of America in Black and White in The Atlantic cost him his friendship with prominent conservative academics Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom. Loury is his own man with a great mind, and Late Admissions takes us along as he struggles to find a comfortable political and intellectual home.

Drawing on his academic work on self-censorship and social capital, Loury is a regular participant in the ongoing discussion about the nature of the university. Heterodox Academy founder Jonathan Haidt has argued that universities must decide between competing purposes: open inquiry and social justice. Loury is squarely on the side of open inquiry. The university, he argues, is not a finishing school for aspiring social justice warriors. He registers his dismay with Brown University students who shouted down New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and the faculty members and administrators who applauded them for it. According to Loury, this has no place at a university. Instead, people are supposed to lay out arguments and then evaluate them theoretically and empirically. The university is not a place for sacred cows, and Loury is at the forefront of the argument.

Lapsed Christian / I was especially interested in Loury’s journey to and from evangelical Christianity for several reasons. First, I’m an evangelical Christian myself, and we are not especially well-represented in the academy. Second, his self-characterization as a Master of the Universe is straight out of every biblical sin narrative. He devours fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil with defiant gusto while shaking his fist in the face of God and saying: “I’m Glenn F—ing Loury! Who are you to judge me?” Lest we judge, let’s remember that Alexandr Solzhenitsyn was exactly right when he said that the line dividing good from evil runs through the heart of every man, and a few brief moments of introspection will show us examples of when we’ve done the same thing.

Loury’s journey to the faith will be familiar to many believers: Struggles with drugs and reckless behavior led him to the foot of the Cross. His journey away from the faith will be just as familiar: He saw up close just how corrupt and hypocritical Christians can be during his formative years, and he asks a fair question, which I paraphrase: What does it say about God if these con artists and hypocrites are his emissaries? A funeral also soured him on the devout. People prayed earnestly and fervently for healing, fully expecting the extremely unlikely. The healing never came (on this side of Eternity, anyway), and he was shocked that the subsequent funeral was much more celebration than mourning. I’m all for celebrating people’s lives here and in the Great Beyond, but grief is perfectly natural when bad things happen. “Jesus wept” at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11:35) even though he knew full well that he was about to raise the man from the dead. I think about Loury’s experience at the funeral often. As he explains, this might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back—or, at least, it was a useful pretext for leaving.

Master of the Universe / For better or worse, Loury’s sexual exploits, family drama, and substance abuse will sell the book—and possibly the movie rights (casting recommendation: Idris Elba as Loury, John Legend as McWhorter). My review copy has loads of explanation points in the margins because so much of the book is so shocking. Loury is clear from the beginning: he’s telling us every salacious detail of his life, including things no one would want known about themselves, in a sincere effort to signal to his readers that he is absolutely serious.

One of his frequent tropes is especially effective in his discussions of his pretensions to Mastery of the Universe: His pathological narcissism is on full display in example after example of how he thought the rules did not apply to “Glenn F—ing Loury.” Growing pot on his porch in full view of students and faculty? Having an affair with his best friend’s wife? Renting a secret love nest for his mistress? Going to public events with his mistress rather than his wife? The controversy that followed when the affair ended loudly and visibly, with the police getting involved? He ends up crying in the bathtub about the mess he made, and the reader asks, “Has he finally seen the light?”

No; it’s not 10 pages later that he’s smoking crack with a prostitute. As he descends into addiction, he reasons that it would be cheaper and easier to control quality if he found a reliable supplier of quality cocaine and made his own crack. He becomes so obsessed with his next high that we find him smoking crack in his Harvard office during off hours, when he thinks no one is around, only to end up sweating over the possibility of being discovered because his colleague Thomas Schelling shows up in the office next door. Once again, controversy erupts when he gets arrested.

Late Admissions is not a salacious tell-all, but it helps us see a lot of moral rot in the ivory tower, just like in church, government, and business. We are familiar with scandals involving plagiarism and fake data. The #MeToo movement has yielded many reckonings (and false positives). Loury describes how Schelling’s drinking led to a drunk-driving mini-scandal Harvard had to cover up. He also describes Schelling’s long-term, long-distance affair that broke up his marriage after his children left home. In their biography of F.A. Hayek, Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger detail the deplorable lengths to which Hayek went to secure a divorce so he could marry his mistress. (See “Complicated and Human,” Summer 2024.) From the end of Loury’s book and what I’ve learned on his podcast, his efforts to patch things up with his family have been mostly successful—and he recognizes how fortunate he is in that respect.

Had it been shorter and had I had fewer responsibilities, I could have read Late Admissions in a single sitting. Economists will like it because it is a deeply personal reminiscence from one of our greatest contemporary economists and because we know the cast of characters well. People interested in African American history as well as the present cultural moment will like it—or should—because it is a statement by an independent mind who did important research on the economics of racial and social inequality that was somehow absent from the American Economic Association’s official list of recommended readings on racial and social inequality. (It says something distressing about the dismal science that Ibram X. Kendi made the list while Loury didn’t.) People interested in the psychology and experience of addiction will appreciate the book because they will see bits of themselves in Loury’s narcissistic and self-destructive enemy within.

Late Admissions is unique. It speaks to different audiences on different levels, and it gives people a front-row seat to the trials and tribulations of someone who could be, at the same time, a great economist, a trenchant social critic, and a scoundrel. Loury lays himself bare for all to see. He softens nothing, makes no excuses, and doesn’t spin things to put himself in a positive light. He deserves commendation for doing something people hate to do: be unflinchingly honest with—and about—himself.