I am blessed in my career to have the opportunity to cross paths with many people who quietly enrich my life in some way. Linda Datcher Loury was one such person. She died Thursday after a long struggle with cancer.
I knew Linda casually through her husband Glenn Loury, a friend and colleague to several of us here. She was an accomplished economist for many years at Tufts University, where she made valuable contributions in several areas. She was a very kind, athletic, and funny person.
We at RBC extend our sympathies to Glenn, and to her sons Glenn Jr., and Nehemiah. She is deeply missed.
Linda and I were colleagues at Tufts for several years. To get a sense of her reseach, click
here at http://ideas.repec.org/e/plo121.html . Her paper on job information and social networks (joint with Yannis Ioannides) greatly influenced my thinking. Here is that paper;
http://ase.tufts.edu/econ/papers/200217.pdf.
My favorite Linda Loury paper is “All in the Extended Family,” which shows that grandparents, for example, have independent impacts on the academic achievement of their grandchildren. Alas, that suggests that greater racial equality is likely to be a multi-generational project: the children of first-generation college graduates do not start out on a level playing field with those whose families have longer histories of educational attainment.
I had Professor Loury as a student at Tufts about 8 years ago now. I took her class which was basically differential equations for mathy econ majors. She was far and away a better calculus teacher than any I had in the math department, simply taking us through the steps of the Lagrange multiplier and showing us why it matters in the context of economics. A very small memory I suppose, but she somewhat less quietly enriched my life as well.