YouSaid · the spoken record

Glenn Loury

lines on the record: 213
first: 2022-05-14
most recent: 2022-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A black person, and therefore I dress up before I go out to buy clothes to get, you know, because I want to present myself as not someone who's just walked in off the street, but as one of those black people who is really prepared to spend some money in the store so that I can be treated with respect. And I have to carry the burden. Such as it is, of knowing that I need to earn Being taken seriously by overcoming the suppositions that people may have about me based upon the color of my skin. Something like that. Or I ask myself, what am I going to teach my children about who they are and where they come from? What stories am I going to tell them about their ancestors? Who are their ancestors? Every African-American has European ancestors. Every black person in the United States of America”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you know what I mean? And the salesman in the clothing store either treats me like an old friend and is warm and welcoming and what can I do for you, sir? And let me show you this and that. And what are you looking for? Because he thinks I'm going to spend $1,000 there that day and he's going to get a five percent commission or whatever it is. He either does that or he ignores me and looks at me with suspicion and thinks I might be trying to shoplift something or thinks I'm only going to spend $50 and not $500 and therefore I'm not worth his time. And I'm aware of the fact that when I go into the clothing store, especially the high-end places where I can buy a good suit or, you know, buy some really good dress shirts or slacks that fit me well and so on, I'm aware of the fact that I may not be taken seriously by the salesman based upon the fact that he's looking at me and he sees.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he pulls his weapon and he discharges it. I'm bleeding out there, and I'm dead now. And all of that is a possibility that's very real and it's based upon the color of my skin. And therefore, when he stops me, I keep my hands on the steering wheel and I don't go to the glove compartment and I'm fearful of the fact that he might mistake me for a criminal, etc. Or I walk into a high-end store, clothing store. I see you're nicely dressed there, Lex. I'm not, but that's okay. I do have some good clothes at home. I just didn't wear them here today.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The world will perceive me in a particular way and will perceive me differently based upon the color of my skin. So a police officer who stops me at two o'clock in the morning because my tail light is out and ask me for my automobile registration and I reach quickly to the glove compartment to get my registration and the police officer says show me your hands and I don't quite hear what he says or I ignore what he says as I'm getting my document out of my glove compartment, but the police officer thinks because I have not responded to his demand to show my hands that I might be reaching for a weapon. And the police officer sees that I'm black and fears that the likelihood that I might have a weapon is higher because in that town at that time a lot of the people who get stopped with weapons in their car happen to be black and male and so on.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some Chicago that's still in me, I suppose, but it's not very deep. I'm trying to pose the question why is it that being a descendant of African slaves should be who I am? So there's some answers Answer is people will look at me and deal with me differently based upon what they see. Don't have control over that. I'm going to be perceived as a member of a group, whether or not I elect to affiliate myself with that group or not. Therefore, I need to be mindful of the fact that regardless of what my internal orientation is,”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not identify specifically as black. I could say my eyes are brown too, so what? I'm a brown eye? I mean, you know, I'm going to invent a group based on my eye color. I weigh 290 pounds. I'm going to have a body-size group. I'm a plus 200, and that's quote who I am close quote. I don't do that. I came from Chicago. Yes, I do have a certain sense of affinity with my hometown. I'm a Chicago-born person, but frankly, I haven't lived in Chicago since 1979. That's a long time. I wear my Chicago origins very, very lightly. I would not go to war with someone from Cleveland or St. Louis and fight to the death with that St. Louis person or that Cleveland person based upon the fact that we come from different cities.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other hand, I am a black American. I mean, that's part of my identity. That's part of my heritage. It's part of the... Stories that I tell myself about who my people are. Why do I need a people? Why do I need a narrative of descent in which I affiliate with a Racially defined people. Do I really need that? I mean, I think that's an important question. In fact, this is a confession. Think of myself as black. I could think of myself as simply human. I could.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The shape of the bones in your face or the color, the tone of your skin, the amount of melon and how it is that you react to ultraviolet radiation in terms of your skin. What is that? The basis of anything. I mean, that's arbitrary. That's not meaningful. Could there really be meaning in these superficial differences among human beings? Isn't that archaic or barbaric way of thinking about ourselves to look at each other's skin color or hair texture and then to decide, oh, that's a black or that's a white or that's a Latin or that's an Asian or that's a whatever that's something that we should outgrow a person might say that's a relic of a kind of tribal society of a kind of pre-modern society where we built real structure on the basis of such superficial difference a person could say that”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they're pros and I think they're cons. I mean, I am myself Glenn Lowry sits before you right now. Black American, an African American. I quote unquote, I identify as, you know, that's. Way they talk about it nowadays. I identify as a black American. My skin is brown, my hair is coarse, my nose is broad relative to the way other people's noses look. My lips are thicker. That's a consequence of my ancestral descent from the human population resident in the African continent in millennia past my race. Here in the United States, we have various quote unquote races defined crudely in the way that I just tried to define myself. You could say, and I think there is a very powerful argument, that these are superficial differences. I mean, really? Why should it matter that your eye color or your hair color?”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economists have to assume that these things are some particular thing before they can turn the crank on their machine to analyze the outcomes of human interaction. And yet these things, belief in my identity, the things that I'm willing to sacrifice and die for, purposes of life that I affirm and pass on to my children are important preconditions for actually carrying out any economic analysis. And they are subject to manipulation and to change over time. And that's not something that economics has a whole lot to say about.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I agree with that. But the analysis of the interaction of people, I think, to be rigorous requires us to be specific about what we're talking about, about markets, about consumers, about firms, about profits, about technology, about preferences. And that's the language of economics. But people's behavior depends upon what they seek in life. It depends upon their goals and their objectives. Those things are at play. They can be pushed this way or that. So, I mean, you know, nationalism, fighting and dying for your country. Religion, sacrificing on behalf of some abstract ideal of the good or of what is the human situation and what is the meaning of life.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Markets are made up of individuals. And in order to carry out this formulation, you have to make assumptions about the individuals. And the end result is true in a formal sense, but may not be true as a representation of the reality because it depends upon assumptions that themselves may not hold. But at least you know what it is that has to be true in order for your formal framework to be relevant, which is already a step in the right direction, I think. I mean, the formalization is better than the intuition, the armchair intuition, where we sit back and we don't really know exactly what we're talking about because we haven't pinned it down in a precise way. I'm in favor of the formalization. People, they think, what is mathematics in the social sciences after all, we're dealing with people. People are not automata.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prices. And by the way, there are some very beautiful formalizations of everything that I'm saying here. You end up in vector spaces. You end up with sets of bundles of consumption and production. You end up with convexity. You end up with hyperplanes, which are in this finite dimensional vector space, which are all of the bundles that have the same value at a certain price value. You end up with inner products. And, you know, it's just, it's very pretty.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well being of consumers, they try to do the best for themselves that they can. But they do so in reference to a set of prices that they believe they cannot control. That's the criterion of competitive market circumstance. So does a competitive equilibrium exist? Do there exist a set of prices which if everybody recognizes them as given and responds to those prices on behalf of their own interest the outcome will be supply equaling demand in all the markets where people are interacting with one another? And that requires the use of some concepts and topology, fixed point theorems and whatnot that are familiar to mathematics, not very deep mathematical results, but important to economics. That's all about general equilibrium and whatnot. But you ask about groups.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Systematic way and you want to try to demonstrate the fact that notwithstanding all these interdependencies, there exists a solution to the system of equations that equates demand and supply across all the different markets. This is the existence of general equilibrium. Then you want to try to say something about the properties of an equilibrium if it exists. Is it efficient? Well, what do you mean by efficiency? Well, the idea of so-called Pareto efficient outcomes, these are outcomes that cannot be uniformly improved upon. Everybody can't be made better off by an alternative outcome. You want to demonstrate the efficiency of competitive equilibrium. What do you mean by competition? You mean that people take their actions to do the best for themselves that they can. Profits affirm.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, those are big questions. I mean, in economics, you're right. I mean, micro, you have an account of how individuals make decisions about spending their money on this consumption side and about how enterprises make decisions about what to produce, how much of it, what inputs to use, what techniques of production, and so on. Individual firms, individual consumers. And then you want to aggregate. So there's a theory of so-called theory of general equilibrium where you think supply and demand in a bunch of markets, you think prices that move to equilibrate, but you recognize that the price in one market affects people's behavior in another, the markets interacting with each other. You realize that the behavior of one individual affects the supplies and available resources and for other individuals so they're knitted together in some kind of”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specific algebraic formula that you can manipulate and solve on the one hand. And the abstract question of whether there exists a solution in the general case is like a huge step for me in my study of mathematics. And the techniques that you have to employ to address these larger questions and so on. When I was an undergraduate, I took the first year PhD sequence in math analysis at Northwestern from a brilliant mathematician named Avner Friedman and learned about measure theory and learned about some early functional analysis ideas. And when I saw that those ideas were being applied by advanced study in economics, I was delighted. I found an intellectual home.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equation, DXDT equals f of x and t. And it's basically, they called it a Lipschitz condition. It's a condition about the bounding of the slope of the function f as a function of x that it doesn't, that you can sort of uniformly bound the slope on that function. And then you can use a iterative process to show that the sequence of partial solutions to the thing converges to something that's a solution to the real thing. Anyway, again, I'm not going to bore you or pretend that I'm a mathematician. I'm not. But what I'm saying is the difference between”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember when I was a junior college, a community college. And I took a calculus course. And it was a lot of fun. And it was differentiating algebraic expressions and integrating and using trigonometric substitutions. And it was a lot of simple problem solving. I get to Northwestern. I take a course in differential equations. And again, it was a lot of formulaic, you know, applying if you get a differential equation of this structure, like if it's linear, you got exponentials, et cetera, you can solve it. And then I took a course that showed, you know, where the question was not how to solve any particular functional expression, but it was proving the existence of a solution to a differential equation where it was like x dot equals f of x and t and f is just some arbitrary function. What do I have to assume about the function f in order to know that there exists a solution to the different”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Girdle showed that there was no hope ever of being able to. Demonstrate the closure of logical systems that were rich enough to accommodate the real numbers.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rational numbers are accountable. They can be put in one to one relationship with the integers But that the real numbers are not countable, and there's a lot more real, quote unquote, more real numbers. These are orders of infinity. This is Georg Cantor and all that kind of stuff, or girdles theorem. I studied this as an undergraduate, you know, the incompleteness theorem, they're a propositions within any logical system that's rich enough to accommodate arithmetic. They're going to be propositions that you can formulate that are true, but that you cannot prove to be true. So the idea that you could systematically develop a logical framework for mathematical inquiry that could demonstrate the truth or falsity of any proposition is not a feasible goal. This was Hilbert's project, as I understand it.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other than one. There are no divisors of the number that makes it a prime number, like 13 or 19 or 37, whatever. Okay. So they're prime numbers There's no largest prime number. There are an infinite number of prime numbers. There's no largest prime number. Okay, that's an idea you can get your mind around it in an instant. It doesn't take a whole depth to see the question. There's no largest prime num”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like magic I mean, you know, being able to prove something and, I mean, you know, I think of offhand, you know, there's no largest prime number. How would somebody know that? Okay, what's a prime number? So a prime number is a number that has a whole number that has no divisor.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Addressing issues of social significance and economics, I discovered to my delight was a field of study that allowed me both to develop rigorous analytical frameworks, you know, modeling and precision of logical deduction and inference on the one hand satisfying my mathematical interests, but on the other hand could address questions of social significance like why does racial inequality persist? Why are some countries prospering and growing and others less so? Why do the prices of raw materials fluctuate in the way that they do over time and so on and so forth? And I ended up falling in love with the application. Of mathematical analysis to the study of social issues.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, economics is one of the social sciences. I think there's value in psychology and in sociology. There's a lot to know that doesn't come up within the study of economics. We study markets and the dynamics of economic development and trade and so on. But yeah, speaking personally, as I was coming along, I was fascinated by mathematics. I was good at it and ended up at Northwestern and took a lot of courses there. And functional analysis and logic and mathematics and dynamical systems. And stuff that I ended up employing in my graduate studies in economics. But you're right. I was not satisfied simply to be proving theorems. I wanted to be.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I study mathematics at Northwestern University, which is how I ended up at MIT in the first place. And I got a very good technical training. In mathematics, when I was at Northwestern, so.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, we could go into that. You were talking about affirmative action, which is something else altogether. And you were talking about me and my education, which is also something that's a little bit different. And I'm happy to talk about those things. Northwestern University, by the way, was a great university.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complicated inequality of outcome is a systemic factor to some degree, but it is also a cultural factor to some degree, I want to say. And that's controversial I know. A lot of people, they think of themselves as being progressive. They want to point a finger at society whenever they see a disparity. But I think that that's a mistake. I think it misunderstands the difficulty of the problem. You think that if you get the right law, if you have the right public policy, if the right politicians are elected to office, suddenly those disparities will go away. And I'm here to tell you that that's a false hope. And moreover, it is probably the wrong goal.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I see representation in the professional schools and law school and medical school that's different between groups. One question is, are the institutions treating people fairly? But another question is, do the background in social and cultural influences equip people in the same way? And we know that the answer to that, not in every instance do they equip people in the same way. And so it makes the judgment the more”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do they encourage the young person to apply themselves in a systematic way to their studies and to their focus on their acquisition of language command and of their educational potential? So development is not only something that is controlled by the society's practices, it's also something that is influenced by the cultural background of the individual. And those things are not equal. Those things vary across groups in a very significant way. And that too will be a factor determining disparities of outcome. So when I see outcomes that are different, I see wealth holding that's different. I see educational achievement that's different.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She has certain nutritional practices that she might be smoking or drinking alcohol or something like that. I'm not saying she is. I'm not saying she isn't. I'm just saying whether she doesn't affect the development of the fetus. The newborn, now there's a question of environment. There's a question of the development of their neurological potential. Do they learn how to read? Are they stimulated verbally? How many words have they heard spoken? Are they being nurtured in a home environment so as to maximize the possibility of them achieving their human potential? What about the peer group influences? What about the values and norms of the surrounding human communities in which they're embedded?”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A Latino background also affects their earnings, then you might conclude that to that extent they're not getting equal opportunity in the labor market. That kind of idea. But I want to focus a little bit more here on what we mean by opportunity because it's not just whether employers treat the worker on a fair and even basis irregardless of the worker's racial or ethnic background. That's one opportunity issue, but that's at the end of the development. Process they are now presenting themselves to the market, trying to find work and being employed at this or that wage. That's the end of the line. What about the developmental opportunity, the opportunity to acquire skills in the first place? That goes all the way back. That goes all the way back to birth. It even goes back to before birth. The mother carrying the infant in the womb.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That might determine how much they end up making in the labor market. But you also want to perhaps controlling for those things, see whether or not the fact that they are black or they are Latino or whatever, fact that they are male or that they are female, the fact that they do or do not speak English as their native language, this kind of thing, whether those factors also are implicated in determining how successful they are in the labor market. And if you find that after you have controlled for the things that are legitimately determining success and failure in the labor market, like skills and education and experience, having controlled for those things, the fact that a person is black or is a woman or is an immigrant or is of”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Difference in outcomes is a reflection of unequal opportunity or it's a reflection of differences in culture and interest and practice. And I don't know that there's a single answer to that question, but I think one wants to look at the data as a social scientist, I would say. What you want to do is you want to estimate the significance of various factors for determining the outcome if the outcome is how much money does a person make when they work in the labor market so you look at their wages and you think well that depends upon a number of things that depends upon how educated they are what kind of skills they have what kind of work experience they have and so on and those things are all legitimate factors”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm glad you put it like that. We were talking about results. Now we're talking about opportunity. I was taking the position that. When King says, I have a dream and he envisions a world where his children will not be barred from the good things in life because of the color of their skin. We're talking about Opportunity, not about results, but opportunity is not just something that depends upon what the law is and what public policies are. Opportunity also depends upon the social conditions in which people are raised, the social and economic conditions. The child of a poor family that has no resources doesn't have the same opportunity as a child of a wealthy family to realize their full human potential. You ask me, how can we tell whether or not a”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who's actually starting businesses and so on to say that in a fair world, I would expect that if blacks are 10% of the population, they'd be 10% of every one of those things is to ignore the reality that the differences in the culture and practices and norms of the various population groups will lead to differences in their representation amongst people who are outstanding performers in one or another activity.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many different venues. I expect if you're a really good technical engineer, companies are going to employ you. And if you can make money, they're going to advance you and you will be able to rise to the top of that profession. I expect that the people who are engaged in financial transactions who are actually making bets on the market by and large are the people who are good at that activity. And if you're good at that activity in this world, in this modern world, you're going to rise to the top. I'm not saying that there are no barriers of discrimination. Of course, there are of many different sorts. But I'm saying that to expect that there would be, okay, I mean, let's look at who's actually writing code. Let's look at who's actually trading bonds. Let's look at...”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is somewhat biased. All I'm saying is if you take a look at who the star players are in the National Basketball Association, you're going to find that there's some Eastern Europeans. Know there's some really good basketball players coming out of Eastern Europe and more power to them. And there are a lot of African Americans. We're overrepresented. There are not that many Jews, as far as I know. No offense intended there, Lex, but I mean... The NBA is not Equally representative of all of the different populations in the United States. Now we could go into the reasons why, but I'm just saying the process by which you get to be playing in the NBA is fair. If you can play, you can get on the court. All they're looking for is people who can play. I think something like that is true.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Implies equality of outcomes, it does not. Is the process by which we're speaking now in the midst of the National Basketball Association's playoffs? I confess to being a Boston Celtics fan. I mean, I'm just, it's a very good team and I'm excited about my Celtics. We defeated. The Brooklyn Nets, I mean, we defeated Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and company in a playoff series. We whipped them and we're on our way to the Eastern Conference Finals and we're on our way to the NBA finals. And I'm, you know, if I were a betting man, I'd put down a few bucks that the Boston Celtics underrated as we are have a very good chance of winning the NBA finals. Okay, so that's the NBA. That's the National Basketball Association. I'm a sports fan. I like basketball.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equally represented in every undertaking. They're not equally represented, and that fact, I'm arguing, is in and of itself insufficient to justify the conclusion that they're not somehow being fairly treated. Fair treatment doesn't imply equal outcomes in a world in which the populations in question are themselves different with respect to their culture, their practices, their norms, their traditions, their beliefs, their ideals, and so on. The fact of those different norms, traditions, beliefs, cultural orientations, and ideals will have consequences in terms of their different social outcomes. So I just think it's a mistake that people are making when they think. Fairness of treatment.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The total population into the various groups. These groups are themselves different from one another. They have different norms within their own cultural practice. How would we expect if, in fact, we recognize that the groups are different from one another, that in a world that is fair, they would all come out and”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, I think there's a contradiction in the idea that groups will be equal in all the various social outcomes that they will be equally successful in business, that they will be proportionately represented in the various professions, that they will have the same educational achievement that the occupational profiles will look the same. If they are, in fact, distinct groups with their own cultural traditions and practices. With their own ideals and norms various immigrant populations people coming to the United States of America from all corners of the world, the descendants of the African slaves, the black Americans here today who are ourselves various with different origins and so on, the different religious practices and commitments that Jewish or Mormon or Christian or whatever, however we parcel up.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think King's speech. I have a dream that one day my four little children will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Requires equality of outcomes. He says his children will be judged by the content of their character. That's a conditional statement. That is the judgment will depend upon the content of their character. Not the color of their skin, but it doesn't follow from that that the outcomes, whatever outcomes we consider wealth and economic power, position within the society, representation in the various professions, the various measures of social achievement doesn't follow from judging by the content of character and that color of skin, that when we look at the end of the day at the social outcomes, that they will be equal across the different groups.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person here, one person there. Yeah. One thinks, of course, of Frederick Douglass, the massively significant figure who was born in slavery, who stole his freedom. And because he was property and he decided he was not going to be property anymore and he took it unto himself to emancipate himself personally and who became an educated, powerfully articulate, massively influential person in the United States and in England going around presenting himself as an embodiment of human dignity and Commitment to ideals of equality. And I mean, he's just one person, but there were others like this.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the United States. Now, he did not descend from slaves. I think we must not lose track of that, but he identified as an African American and was a part of the population that consisted largely of people who descended from slaves. And we are, we African Americans are, for all practical purposes, fully equal citizens of this great republic. That has happened within a century and a half, and I don't know that you can find any parallel to that kind of transformation in the status of people from human chattel to full citizens of the Republic, anywhere in human history. It's certainly worth celebrating the achievement of the eradication of slavery, I would say.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they fought and they died. But the net effect of their having fought and died was to push along a process that led to the eradication of slavery. That's an amazing achievement. The slaves themselves were largely uneducated and backward in their, of course, what else could they have been? They were kept in captivity. They were prevented from developing their human potential. And yet after the end of slavery, that population, that 4 million plus African descended people, became the foundation for what a century later leads to Martin Luther King standing in the Washington Mall and giving that great speech. And now here we are 150 years down the road. And Barack Obama is president.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, I'd like to make this point sometimes when people are talking about how wrong slavery was. And I agree without any question that the practice was profoundly morally problematic, but I like to make the point that given how wrong it was, think about how impressive was the accomplishment of the eradication of slavery. That was something, I mean, there were 600,000 dead in the war between the states, 1861 to 1865 in a country of 30 million people. That's a lot of dead people who gave their lives not to eradicate slavery in every instance. Probably most of them were just fighting for they enlisted or were conscripted into the forces.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a comprehensive history and social analysis of the institution of slavery over 2,500 years, going back to the classical Greek and Roman civilizations, finding slavery in Africa amongst Africans, finding slavery in the Middle East, finding slavery in the Far East, finding slavery in South Asia, the enslavement of people, the practice of taking someone as a captive in war and then instead of killing them which you could do, making them into your property was a very, very widespread in human culture.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That one sees on a global basis, one sees it going all the way back to antiquity. So we might ask, how is it that people finally came to turn their backs and eradicate the practice? That might be the thing worth Really trying to understand because the practice itself is a wonderful book. The sociologist Orlando Patterson. Called slavery and social death that was published in nineteen eighty two.”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Their influence. I mean, debates about the wrongness of slavery, as I say, go all the way back to the founding of the country. There were abolitionists and there were people who opposed the compromise that led to the framing documents and institutions that created the United States of America opposed the countenancing of slavery in that situation. But it took a while before that could come to a head and produce the crisis, which ultimately led to the eradication of slavery. I would note that slavery is not unique to the United States. It's not unique to the Western Hemisphere, that enslavement of people, the trafficking in human chattel is something”
2022-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #285 – Glenn Loury: Race, Racism, Identity Politics, and Cancel Culture · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source