CASBS fellow Glenn Loury has been elected a Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association (AEA). The AEA announced the honor in an April 29 press release.
He is the 51st AEA fellow to have been awarded a CASBS fellowship as well.
Established in 1885, the AEA is a nonprofit, non-partisan, scholarly association dedicated to the discussion and publication of economics research and teaching. It is composed of more than 20,000 members from academia, government, business, and other diverse disciplines.
The Distinguished Fellow Award was instituted in 1965, with no more than four scholars awarded per year. With this honor, Loury securely places himself among some of the most esteemed and celebrated economists of the past half-century. The list of past AEA Distinguished Fellows includes scholarly titans such as George Stigler, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith, Kenneth Arrow, Herbert Simon, Ronald Coase, Simon Kuznets, Robert Solow, Charles Kindleberger, Albert Hirschman, Thomas Schelling, Gary Becker, Amartya Sen, Gordon Tullock, Rudiger Dornbusch, Jagdish Bhagwati, Martin Feldstein, Oliver Williamson, George Akerlof, Douglass North, Alan Blinder, Janet Yellen, Stanley Fischer, Robert Barro, and many others. Several AEA Distinguished Fellows also have won the Nobel Prize.
In its citation of merit, the AEA asserts that Loury
has made groundbreaking contributions to the fields of welfare economics, income distribution, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics and labor economics. His papers on racial inequality and social policy have been influential in both academe and the public sphere. He has been a leading and provocative public intellectual for forty years, publishing not only in academic journals but also in the popular press. His books, public commentary and congressional testimony have for decades positioned him as a leading public intellectual on matters of race and inequality.
The citation also mentions “the enormous breadth and significance” of Loury’s research interests, and specifically noted his “particularly influential” work on affirmative action. It further recognizes his applied theory work in development economics as “a backbone on which further papers, both empirical and theoretical, have built.” Read the AEA’s full statement of merit here.
In reacting to his election, Loury was elated, reverential, and grateful for the AEA’s acknowledgment of both his technical-theoretical and policy-based work.
I am humbled by this recognition of the value of my intellectual labors over the past four decades. The list of Distinguished Fellows of the AEA reads like the roster of an economics hall of fame, and I am grateful to be included in their number. It is especiallygratifying to me that the awards committee recognized and appreciated my work as a public intellectual as well as my technical contributions. My hope is that younger scholars will be encouraged by this award to understand that in the conduct of economic research there is no necessary incompatibility between scientific rigor and policy relevance.
There will be a formal award ceremony for Loury and other Distinguished Fellow recipients at the AEA’s annual meeting in Chicago in January 2017.
Loury’s cohort of 2015-16 CASBS fellows gathered on May 4 to celebrate his selection as a AEA Distinguished Fellow.
Glenn Loury is the Merton P. Stolz Professor of the Social Sciences and professor of economics at Brown University. During his fellowship year at CASBS, he is writing a memoir reflecting on his intellectual and political journey over five decades.
He might opt to reserve a page or two for this high honor in describing that in-progress journey.
