Glenn Cartman Loury was born on September 3,1948 in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, growing up in a redlined neighborhood. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, writing his dissertation, “Essays in the Theory of the Distribution of Income”, under the supervision of Robert M. Solow.
Loury became an assistant professor of economics at Northwestern University after receiving his Ph.D. He moved to teach at the University of Michigan, and was promoted as the full professor of economics in 1980. At the age of 33, he became the first African American professor of economics at Harvard University to gain tenure.Loury’s areas of study include applied microeconomic theory: welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of income distribution.
Loury hosts “The Glenn Show” on Bloggingheads TV with John McWhorter, often regarding questions of race and education.
Loury was elected as a member of the Econometric Society in 1994, Vice President of the American Economics Society in 1997, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2011. He was elected as the president of the Eastern Economics Association in 2013. Loury is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a main academic contributor to the 1776 Unites project. He received the Bradley Prize in 2022