ut at some point Loury made the discovery that eventually confronts every honest intellectual who gets drawn into the political arena: The enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. The Glenn Loury who wrote that 1976 thesis was not a conservative. He criticized the simplistic anti-racism of the liberal establishment because he wanted society to tackle the real problems, not because he wanted it to stand aside. His seeming allies on the right, however, turned out to be interested only in the critique, not in the next step. (According to Loury, "When I told one gathering of conservatives that their seeming hostility to every social program smacks of indifference to the poor, I was told that a surgeon cannot properly be said to have no concern for a terminally ill patient simply because he had moved on to the next case.") Loury found out that the apparent regard for his ideas by conservative intellectuals was entirely conditional. Any questioning of conservative orthodoxy was viewed as an act of betrayal, giving aid and comfort to the liberal enemy. It was the loyalty test all over again.

The final straw was surely the grotesque affair of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. This book came close to claiming that, given your genes, it makes no difference to your economic success whether you grew up in Scarsdale or the South Bronx. The implied subtext was that this absolves society from any responsibility to do something for children growing up in the South Bronx. Since The Bell Curve was published, it has become clear that almost everything about it was inexcusably wrong: suspect data, mistakes in statistical procedures that would have flunked a sophomore (Murray--Herrnstein is deceased--clearly does not understand what a correlation coefficient means), deliberate suppression of contrary evidence, you name it. Yet conservative publications such as Commentary, which was always happy to publish Loury when he criticized liberal evasions, would not grant him space to critique The Bell Curve.

So Loury is now on his own (or rather, at the head of a small movement of like-minded people, centered on his new Institute on Race and Social Division): rejected by the black political elite, which still wants to blame everything on white racism, and equally rejected by a conservatism that wants to do precisely nothing about continuing racial inequality. And the dilemma Loury identified so clearly 22 years ago remains not only unresolved but also unconfronted.



Links







Paul Krugman is a professor of economics at MIT. His new book, The Accidental Theorist and Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science, was published this month. His home page contains links to many of his other articles and essays. Illustrations by Robert Neubecker.

