6:00-8:00 pm
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
Hope Club Ballroom
Biography
An academic economist, Professor Loury has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 2005 he received the John von Neumann Award, given annually by the Rajk László College of the Budapest University of Economic Science and Public Administration to "an outstanding economist whose research has exerted a major influence on students of the College over an extended period of time." He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Scholarship to support his work. He has given the prestigious Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford (2007), the James A. Moffett '29 Lectures in Ethics at Princeton (2003), and the DuBois Lectures in African American Studies at Harvard (2000).
A prominent social critic and public intellectual writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, he has published more than 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the US and abroad. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic. His book One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (The Free Press, 1995) won the American Book Award and the Christianity Today Book Award.
Overview
How does racial inequality manifest itself in today's America? What does this mean for the future of American democracy? There is a huge gap in the wealth, asset holdings, schooling, imprisonment, employment, and mortality of black and white Americans. This circumstance poses profound challenges for the future of American democracy.
In this discussion, Professor Loury focuses on incarceration in the United States – and the drivers that have yielded a US prison population that is staggeringly large and overwhelmingly nonwhite – to explore the nature of racial inequality in today’s America and the threat this poses to the character of American democracy. Rejecting false binaries – “it’s ‘their’ fault, because ‘they’ reap what ‘they’ sow;” versus “it’s ‘our’ fault for being indifferent to ongoing racism,” he argues that history matters – not only in terms of a material inheritance, but also by means of mental habits of thought that have been bequeathed to us.
Relying on historical study and contemporary political analysis, Loury will argue that – but for latent socio-political biases linked to the need to justify racial domination in the past – the stark racial disparities in incarceration rates as well as the high levels of confinement in the aggregate could never have enjoyed such popular support. This exploration – focusing on crime and punishment – will be used to illustrate a more general conceptual approach to understanding other kinds of racial disparities.