Kind: captions
Language: en
i hate
affirmative action i don't just disagree
with it i don't just think it's
against the 14th amendment i hate it
the hatred comes from an understanding
that it is a band-aid that it is a
substitute for the actual development
over the capacities of our people to
compete they want to tell african
americans uh pat us on the head
uh we're gonna have a separate program
for you we're gonna give you a side door
that you can come into that doesn't make
us any smarter
it doesn't make us any more creative
and it doesn't make us any more fit
for the actual competition that's
unfolding before us
the following is a conversation with
glenn lowery professor of economics and
social sciences at brown university he
is one of the great minds and
communicators of our time writing and
speaking about race and inequality
i highly encourage you to listen to his
show on youtube and stack simply called
the glen show
this is the lex friedman podcast to
support it please check out our sponsors
in the description and now dear friends
here's glenn
lowry
martin luther king juniors i have a
dream speech i think is the greatest
speech in american history if i may i'd
like to read a few words of it sure and
uh ask you a question about this dream
i have a dream
that one day this nation will rise up
and live out the true meaning of its
creed
we hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal
i have a dream
that one day on the red hills of georgia
the sons of former slaves and the sons
of former slave owners will be able to
sit down together at the table of
brotherhood
i have a dream that one day even the
state of mississippi
a state sweltering with the heat of
injustice sweltering with the heat of
oppression
will be transformed into an oasis of
freedom and justice
i have a dream
that my four little children will one
day live in a nation where they will not
be judged by the color of their skin
but by the content of their character
i have a dream today
first of all damn
i mentioned to you offline i immigrated
to
to america and this is why i love this
country this is one of the great species
that represents what this country is
about yeah so
what is this ideal of equality
uh that we should strive for as a nation
this that all men are created equal what
does that mean to you this equality
well
if we put this in historical context
king is speaking in
1963 when he gives that speech it's
exactly 100 years after
abraham lincoln signs the
emancipation proclamation declaring
the enslaved people
to be free
they're not yet citizens in 1863
but the end of slavery is has become the
position of the federal government when
lincoln issues that emancipation
proclamation
so
putting it in context
enslaved people four million or so
african descended enslaved people
how do they become
citizens how do they become
in this uh
status of
subjugation and domination and stigma
and exclusion
how do they become citizens it seems to
me that that's the
that's this the heart of it
the the equality that king
is talking about is an equality of
status as members of the nation
as free and equal citizens within the
republic
now
i think it's really important to
understand that
slavery
was not merely a legal
order but it was also
a social
system that had the symbolism
attached to it
they had a big journey to make from
their subjugated status as serfs as
landless people as uneducated unfit for
citizenship really in the minds of many
so i think that's what in
100 years later that king is appealing
to this idea that
when thomas jefferson in the declaration
of independence writes these words all
men are created equal and endowed by
their creator with
certain inalienable rights
he didn't thomas jefferson a slave owner
didn't have in mind when he wrote those
words
the people who were slaves
but by the time you get to 1963
king is
invoking
this idea all
men and of course he means all persons
he doesn't only mean men
he means men and women are created equal
he wants this idea to be embraced by the
country in reference to the descendants
of the african slaves
that's his dream that's his idea
the legacy of slavery would be erased
uh that that the
uh position of african-americans would
be equalized within the
political community which is the united
states of america
that's my sense of it in any case so on
a very basic level
the worth of a human being is equal it's
just literally the worth
of a human being so i mentioned to you
offline that
i came from the soviet union
my grandfather
fought in world war ii
and
for hitler
the worth of a slavic person
as they were captured
there's different numbers but it's in
the hundreds to one german
in terms of
the value of the person
to the great germany so he wanted
germany to expand and conquer a large
part of the world and within that future
world that third reich
the worth of a russian or slavic person
is
one hundredth or one thousands of a
german person of a pure german person so
that has to do with
not some kind of public policy or
politics or all that kind of stuff it
has to do with the basic worth of a
human being and that's what dr king is
speaking to
that
all people
on some kind of deep level are
worth the same
if you're somehow weighing uh the value
of a person
we're equal and that's basic fundamental
worth
yeah i think that's correct i think
that's very well said
i don't know that he had in mind the
position of slavic people in central
europe
in the middle of the 20th century in the
first part of the 20th century king i
don't know that he had that in mind he
might well have done
but
certainly that's the idea so you don't
think he was really thinking about
this particular civil rights struggle
and the particular
struggle of
against the backdrop of the history of
slavery in america and thinking about
african americans he wasn't thinking
about the basic
he wasn't speaking to the basic worth of
all human beings no i don't mean to say
that
the speech
in washington
the dream
in in 1963 at that march
was
within the context of the united states
and he was it was within the context of
the civil rights movement there was a
movement that was going on
he was
a actor in a political drama that was
american
that had to do with the fight
over
equal rights
for voting
for housing
for employment
for uh citizenship
of blacks in america but king
was informed i think by a much broader
christian
ethic
of uh the equality of all persons i mean
he he gets killed in 1968.
the five years after that
speech in washington he spends
uh developing his
world view
and
the things that he had to say for
example about the war in southeast asia
that was going on at that time
made appeals to universal
principles of equality he was a pacifist
to some degree he was against war
he was
a socialist to some degree he might not
have worn that label
publicly but he believed in a decent
society where the poor would not go
untended where health care would be
available to people who needed it and
this kind of thing
a humanitarian who saw that the value of
a life was not dependent upon the color
of the skin
upon the native
mother tongue that might be spoken
upon whether male or female
all persons are created equal this this
is very much
the ethic
of martin luther king on my
understanding broadly speaking
what do you learn about human nature by
looking at
the history of slavery in america
oh my so what does that tell you about
people
well
i think of two things right off the top
of my head
one is about the capacity
of people
for
looking the other way in the face of
uh unethical and
you know morally
profoundly problematic
practice
so i mean slavery was controversial it
was controversial
going all the way back to the founding
of the united states of america the
country was founded on a compromise
where
half of the country
uh thought that slavery was uh was
abhorrent and would not have had it uh
countenanced
in the constitution the other half of
the country were
steeped in the dependence on the labor
of these african captives
and their descendants the economy
depended upon it they owned them as
property that was their wealth their
wealth was invested to some degree in
the value of these
human beings
and in order for the united states to
come together as a confederation of the
several colonies
there had to be a compromise made and it
was made
where slavery was allowed to persist
and
the people who were against it or who
thought it
morally problematic
were able to countenance
the practice in the southern
states where slavery flourished and that
went on for 75 years after the founding
of the country until the crisis of
the late 1850s that led to the civil war
and ultimately to the emancipation so
one thing
i think about human nature
from the fact of slavery is that
the ability of
people to live with
terrible
morally
questionable practices and have that as
a part of their institutions
it took a a movement of
a massive movement of abolitionists
uh struggling against slavery
for the better part of a century
before
um before that that practice could be
eradicated
but the other thing about human nature
uh that i see
is the ability of people to sustain
their humanity under the most
awful oppressive conditions
um
the enslaved persons the slaves
um and their children i mean they were
chatted they were bought and sold like
horses or or cattle
and yet
they were not their humanity was not
destroyed by that and
they were able to
sustain their dignity
to some degree in such a manner that
once emancipation finally did arrive the
freedmen and women the the persons who
had been
enslaved and who were set free were able
to
over the
following
decades
uh build a foundation
for the
development of african americans within
the context of american society
that eventually culminated in the civil
rights movement of the middle of the
20th century
and
has led us into the present day
so
you know
human nature can countenance awful evil
but human nature can also survive in the
face of terrible evil
that's what i take from
slavery that's
that flame can burn even when uh
this the world around it tries to put it
out this there's still a little flame of
human consciousness of spirit of culture
of whatever the hell that is that makes
humans flourish and makes humans
beautiful that lives on
that's what everyone said yeah i think
you you put it very well there's got to
be some
poetic way of expressing that
leave it to the poets yeah
what about the people that look the
other way how many people do you think
just regular people
knew that something is this is wrong
or did do people
through generations convince themselves
most people most regular people convince
themselves that there's nothing wrong
all right
yeah
i asked this question because i wonder
what we're looking the other way on
today
also
because
you mean you have to kind of if we're
you have to ask yourself these difficult
questions of
assuming we're the same people we were
yeah back then
then we're we can be flawed in that same
kind of way we can look the other the
other way just as others have
in history
yeah
you spoke of the european uh context and
of the nazis and
certainly
a lot of people had to be looking the
other way
when the massive crimes that were
committed by that regime were being
undertaken i mean the railroad cars full
of human
beings being taken off to be slaughtered
or to be worked to death in
labor camps or to be gassed uh etc a lot
of people had to know about what was
going on and
look the other way
or enthusiastically supported the
the persecution of the jews and the
gypsies and
so on
and i don't know i wasn't you know i
wasn't around in 1840
my sense of the matter is that like of
many practices that are unjust most
people thought
uh that's just the way it is i mean
that's the world that they inherited
they they they were not moralists they
were not revolutionaries
they they just wanted to go along
uh some people might have been troubled
by it but thought there's nothing that
can be done some people might have
thought well
they're
these black africans they're not really
like us and you know they are lucky to
be here if they were in africa they'd be
worse off still
some people might have thought that
some people might have been disturbed
but not been able to see what it is that
they could do about it
they they might have thought oh this is
you know this is disgusting this is
uh you know not something i wouldn't
want to have anything to do with but
uh not knowing whether there's any
practical way of opposing it that that's
why
you need a movement you need
for the people who are
troubled by the practice to know that
there are others like themselves equally
troubled and
as they gather together
collectively they can exert their
their influence i mean debates about the
the wrongness of slavery as i say go all
the way back to the founding of the
country
uh there were abolitionists and there
were people who were who opposed the
compromise that led to the uh framing
documents and uh institutions that
created the united states of america
opposed the countenancing of
slavery in that in that situation
um but it took a while before that could
come to uh 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
channel uh is something that one sees in
on on a global basis one sees it going
all the way back to uh antiquity
so
we might ask how is it that people
finally came
to turn their backs and eradicate the
practice that that might be the thing
worth
really trying to understand because the
practice itself is
you know there's a wonderful book
by the sociologist orlando patterson
called slavery and social death
that was published in 1982
which is a comprehensive history and
social analysis of the institution of
slavery
over
2500 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
so i mean i'd like to make this point
sometimes when we 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 uh
impressive was the accomplishment of the
eradication of slavery now that was
something there were 600 000 dead
in the war between the states 1861 to
1865 in a country of 30 million people
that's a that's a lot of dead people
uh
who
gave their lives not to eradicate
slavery and in every instance probably
most of them were just
fighting for uh you know
they enlisted or were
conscripted into the forces and they
fought and they died
but the net effect of their having
fought and died uh 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
you know backward in their
of course what else could they have been
they they were kept in captivity they
were uh prevented from developing their
human potential and yet
uh after the end of slavery that
population that four 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 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
uh to full citizens of the republic
anywhere in human history it's certainly
um worth celebrating the achievement of
the eradication of slavery i would say
and it probably started with a few
people
that
inside their mind dared to rebel
you know it's interesting to think about
how it all started
how
in the state of injustice
the
the revolution percolates
like where it starts you said people
that see something is wrong find each
other
it's you know
it's in the ideas of charismatic
individuals that not only know that
something is wrong but they're able to
tell others about it
and be
convincing
and then together gather
and rise up it's interesting to make
this kind of incredible progress from
slavery to where we are today to live
out the ideal of this all men and creed
created equal
yeah the power of individual because i i
don't i don't know what you think about
it but i tend to think that
a few small individuals
probably originated this like it's the
power of the individual because
sometimes we think there's injustice in
the world what can i possibly do i tend
to think one person can
be the seed
of starting to fix the injustice
sure
one person here one person there
yeah
um one thinks of course of
frederick douglass the
massively
significant figure
who was born in slavery
who
stole his
freedom and uh because he was property
and he 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
uh
massively influential person in the
united states and in england
uh going around
presenting himself as uh an embodiment
of human dignity and
commitment to ideals of equality and
you know i mean he's just one person
but there were others
just one person all it takes is just one
person so here we are
on this topic of equality
in uh
the 21st century
so what does equality mean today
if you start to think
about this idea of equality of outcome
or the injustice of inequality
at which point does equality of outcome
is just at which point is it unjust
sort of looking at our world today and
looking at in inequality
how do we know
that some inequality is a sign of
injustice and some is the way of life
so what does equality mean when we look
at the world today different from dr
king's speech of the basic humanity 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 outcome
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
um
position within the society
representation in the various
professions uh the
various measures of social achievement
doesn't follow from
judging by the content of character and
not 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
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
um various immigrant populations
people coming to the united states of
america from all corners of the world
uh 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
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
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
implies equality of outcomes it does not
is the process by which uh we're we're
speaking now
uh in the midst of the of the national
basketball association's playoffs
uh 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 uh brooklyn
uh nets
i mean we defeated kevin durant and
kyrie irving and company okay in a
playoff series
we whip them
and we're on our way to you know
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 to win in the
nba finals
okay so that's the nba that's the
national basketball association i'm a
sports fan i like basketball slightly
biased prediction but yes
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
you know there's some really good
basketball players coming out of uh
eastern europe you know
and more power to them
um and there are a lot of african
americans
uh we're overrepresented
uh they're 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 that they all
they're looking for is people who can
play i think something like that is true
in 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 and you
will be able to
rise to the top of that profession i 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 gonna
rise to uh rise to the top um
i'm not saying that there are no
barriers of discrimination of course 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 uh
who's who's actually starting businesses
um and so on to say that if that in a
fair world i would expect that if black
said ten percent of the population
they'd be ten percent 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 how do you know
if the difference in culture accounts
for the difference in outcomes
or it's the existence of barriers
especially barriers early on in life
of discrimination that are racially
based so if you think about affirmative
action
is
in which ways is affirmative action
empowering and which way is it limiting
for these early development of the of
the different groups but let's just
speak to african americans we should say
that
you went to some no name northwestern
university at first but then you ended
up with a great university of mit
uh so uh so that's that's your not early
but middle development
um so speaking of the development
the opportunities
the equality of opportunity
how do we know we got that equality
right
yeah i'm glad you put it like that we
were talking about results now we're
talking about opportunity i was taking a
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 the social conditions in which
people are are raised the social and
economic conditions so
the child of a poor
family that has no resources
it 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
difference in outcomes
is a reflection of unequal opportunity
or it's a reflection of differences in
culture and interest and 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 one one
wants to try to
measure
you know as a social scientist i would
say you what you want to do is you want
to estimate
the
uh
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 it 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
that might determine how much they end
up making in the labor market
but you also want to perhaps con
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
uh how successful they are in the labor
market and if you find that after you
have
controlled for the things that are
legitimately
determining
uh 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
of a
latino
background
also
affects their earnings then you might
conclude that to that extent
they're not getting equal opportunity
labor 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
workers racial or ethnic background
that's one
opportunity issue but that's how 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
um
the mother
carrying the infant in the womb
she has certain nutritional
uh
practices she might be smoking or
drinking alcohol or something like that
i'm not saying she is i'm not saying she
is and i'm just saying whether she is so
she is and it will affect the
development of the fetus uh the newborn
uh now there's a question of environment
uh there's a question of the development
of their
uh neurological uh potential do they
learn how to read do
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
communities in which they're embedded do
they encourage the young person to apply
themselves
uh 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 the
cultural background
of the individual and those things are
not
equal
uh those things vary across
uh groups in in a very uh 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 i see
representation in the professional
schools in 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 moral
judgment that we make when we see
inequality of outcome
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
uh they they want to
point a finger at society whenever they
see a disparity
uh but i think that that's a mistake i
think it misunderstands
the the
difficulty of the problem
you think that if you get the right law
uh if you have the right public policy
uh if the right politicians are elected
to office suddenly those disparities
will go away
and um i'm here to tell you that uh that
that's uh a false hope
um
and and moreover it is probably the
wrong goal
uh but i mean we could go into that
you were talking about affirmative
action which is is something else
altogether
uh 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 i'm just joking it's
one of the great universities of the
world yes and i'd 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 you love both
mathematics and human nature and so
which is why you ended up going into
economics
at one of the great economics programs
in the world at mit and getting your pg
there so one of the many hats you wear
is that of an economist which allows you
to think
systematically and rigorously about the
way the world and the way humans work at
scale
um
trying to remove the full mushy mess of
humans like a psychology perspective
economics allows you to do
well economics is one of the social
sciences i 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 you know the
dynamics of economic
development and
you know trade and um
you know so on
but uh yeah uh speaking personally as i
was coming along
i was fascinated by mathematics i was
good at it and i ended up at
northwestern and
took a lot of courses there and you know
functional analysis and logic and
mathematics and uh
dynamical systems and you know 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
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
uh and precision of logical
uh you know deduction and and inference
uh on the one hand
satisfying my mathematical uh
interest
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 what do you use
beautiful about
mathematics about mathematical puzzles
about logic all those kinds of things
because you
it's still there the love for math is
still there for you so is there
something you could speak to what is the
the kernel the flame of that love
it's like magic
i mean you know
being able to prove something and uh i
mean you know i think of uh offhand you
know there's low there's no largest
prime number okay so
how do i 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
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 their
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 it doesn't take a whole
lot of depth to see
the question
there's no largest prime number i wonder
if prime numbers show up in economics i
mean that oh they don't show up in
economics but except if cryptography i
understand that's important yes yes for
code
you know in in encoding stuff and that
shows up in economics but in terms of
models
yeah um
probably not that's that's so prime
numbers
are little
um you know in uh uh um
abstract algebra it's like they show up
in all these places they're just like
beautiful mathematical puzzles that
don't immediately have an application
but somehow maybe challenge you
and as a result push mathematics forward
like for mars last theorem you know
as far as i know no obvious real world
application but it has challenged
mathematicians throughout the centuries
indeed
and
and somehow
indirectly progressed uh the field but
uh that the rational numbers are
countable
they can be put in one to one uh
relationship with the integers and you
know
but that the real numbers are not
countable and there's a lot more real
number more real numbers these are
orders of infinity this is
uh cantor gay or cantor and all that
kind of
that kind of stuff or girdles of uh
theorem i i studied this as an
undergraduate you know the
incompleteness theorem that there are
propositions within any logical system
that's rich enough to accommodate
uh
accommodate arithmetic they're going to
be
propositions that you can formulate that
are true but that you
cannot prove to be true
uh 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 and
uh
girdle showed that there was no hope
ever of being able to
demonstrate the closure of of logical
systems that were rich enough to
accommodate
the real numbers they gave an
existential crisis to all uh
mathematicians and scientists alike and
humans because maybe you can't prove
everything i remember
you know when i was uh
i was a junior college a community
college student before i transferred to
northwestern and i took a calculus
course
uh 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've got exponentials etc you
can solve it
and then i took a course that showed me
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 the solution to the differential
equation
dx dt
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
the slope of
the function f as a function of x that
it doesn't
uh
that you can sort of uniformly bound the
slope on that function and then you can
use a
iterative process to uh show that the
sequence of
you know partial solutions to the thing
converges to something that's a solution
to the real thing anyway again i'm not
not going to bore you or
pretend that i'm a mathematician i'm not
but what i'm saying is the difference
between
a 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 was like a huge step for
me uh in my study of mathematics and um
the techniques that you have to employ
to address these
larger questions and and so on so i
you know 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
you know learned about uh
uh
some some early functional analysis
ideas
and when i saw that those ideas were
being applied by advanced study and
economics i was delighted i found an
intellectual home
so that
one of the
fascinating challenges of mathematics is
to think
how can you cons
which echoes the challenge of economics
what are the properties of an equation
that allow you to
say something profound and say it simply
and so the question of economics is how
do you construct a model where you can
generalize nicely and say something
profound and say it simply
uh so one of the
questions one of the challenges of
economics
is macro versus microeconomics yeah is
um
you know the world is made up of
individuals so there's a connection to
this our discussion of
of race and discrimination and outcomes
and all those kinds of things
the world is made up of individuals
but in order to say something
general
we have to construct
groups
in order to analyze the data we have to
aggregate that data somehow we have to
make an average over some set of people
so what are the pros and cons of
looking at things like equality of
opportunity and equality of outcome
based on groups versus based on
individuals
and
uh
what are the groups
if there's any pros to looking at groups
that we should be looking at
okay well those those are big questions
i mean in economics
you're right i mean micro you have a an
account of how individuals make
decisions about spending their money
on this consumption side and about how
enterprises make decisions about
uh 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 know 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 market's interacting with
each other
you realize that the behavior one
individual affects the
supplies and
available resources and for other
individuals so they're knitted together
in some kind of
systematic way
and you 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 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 of firms 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 in 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
by the way
amazing worldwide summary of all of
economics but yes go ahead that was that
was great
markets
of competition of pareto efficiency
anyway but yes groups and prices and
prices
and by the way there are some very
beautiful
you know
uh
formalizations of everything that i'm
saying here you know you end up in
vector spaces you you end up with sets
of
bundles of consumption and production
you end up with convexity you end up
with
hyperplanes which are
you know in in this uh finite
dimensional vector space which are uh
you know
uh
all of the bundles that have the same
value at a certain price you end up with
inner products you know and and you know
it's just
it's very pretty yeah but you almost
forget that it's just a bunch of humans
transacting with each other
uh
that that markets are made up of
individuals
markets are made up of individuals and
in order to carry out this formalization
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 aren't your intuition where we sit
back and we don't really know
exactly what we're talking about because
we haven't pinned it down
um in in a precise way i'm in favor of
the formalization people
they think what is mathematics and the
social sciences after all we're dealing
with people people are not automata i
agree with that
but
the analysis of the interaction of
people i think to be rigorous
requires us to be specific
uh about what we're talking about about
markets about consumers about firms
about profits
uh about technology about preferences
and uh that's the language of economics
um but people's behavior depends upon
what they seek
in life what depends upon their goals
and their objectives
those things are at play
uh they can be pushed this way or that
so
i mean i you know nationalism
fighting and dying for your country
um religion
uh sacrificing on behalf of some
abstract ideal of the good or of you
know what is the human situation and
what is the meaning of life
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
uh belief in
my identity
but 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
well is there some general things that
are really powerful in terms of you said
nation
religion those are groups
yeah can you group people nicely
in helping you understand human nature
so
group them into nations based on their
citizenry
that's geography right
the geographic location of your birth
or your uh long-term residence or maybe
religious belief what you what religion
you believe over time
is there groups like that and then
race
is that
useful
what are the pros and cons of looking at
outcomes based on
these kinds of groups
race in particular
i think they're pros and i think they're
cons i mean i am myself glenn lowery
sits before you right now
a black american an african american i i
quote unquote i identify as you know
that's the way they talk about it
nowadays i identify as a black american
my skin is brown
my hair is coarse
my nose is broad
uh 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
uh here in the united states we have
various quote unquote races
uh 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
or the shape of the bones in your face
uh 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
to bait 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 a
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
uh we built real
structure on the basis of such
superficial difference a person could
say that
on 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
dissent
in which i affiliate with
a racially defined people do i really
need that i mean i think that's an
important question i i in fact
this is a confession
think of myself as black i could
think of myself as simply human i could
not identify specifically as black i
could i could say
my 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 um
i weigh 290 pounds i'm gonna 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
uh 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 uh st
louis person or that cleveland person
based upon the fact that we come from
different cities and you have even
abandoned in your heart the chicago
bulls there's some chicago that's still
in me i suppose but it's not it's not
very deep it it's not quote who i am
anymore and i'm wondering uh i hear i'm
trying to pose a question why is it that
being
a descendant of african slaves should be
who i am so there's some answers
one answer is
people will look at me and deal with me
differently based upon what they see
i 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
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 asked me for my
automobile registration and i reached
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 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
and he pulls his weapon and he
discharges it and i'm bleeding out there
and i'm dead now and i 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 uh i see you're
nicely dressed there lex uh i'm not but
that's okay
i i do have some good clothes at home i
just didn't wear them here today yeah uh
but you know what i mean and the clothes
the the salesman in the clothing store
either
treats me like uh you know 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
and what because