Second Thoughts on Larry Summers
I’m a huge Summers fan, but, after talking to a few people who share my admiration for him, I’ve changed my mind about whether he should be Treasury secretary. Summers has a great deal to contribute, yet he lacks the kind of … communication skills he’d need in the job. Yes, he served as Treasury secretary before, but the stakes are high, the economic environment is decidedly ominous, and Summers treats everyone as he’d like to be treated — that is, he is blunt and aggressive with everyone, including with people who need to be treated with kid gloves. The Harvard faculty was full of fragile egos, and so is the political universe. Let Summers be Summers, and keep him far away from a role that requires deft diplomacy. I’d much rather have him running the National Economic Council or play some other crucial behind-the-scenes role.
Go for Geithner.
You know a lot more about Summers than I do. What bothers me very much about the way his tenure at Harvard was characterized is that so many of the people cheerleading him (independent of the women and math imbroglio) simply feel that anytime professors are disrespected, it must be a good thing. People who hate academics and professors love Larry Summers because they think that his seemingly indiscriminate insults to professor is all to the good, because, you know, professors are scum.
— Freddie · Nov 10, 12:03 AM · #
Summers’ role in the Rape of Russia in the 1990s needs looking into as well.
— Steve Sailer · Nov 10, 01:33 AM · #
Reihan: Amen. (Dare I say “I told you so”?)
Also, Steve, the Rape of Russia? If that’s a movie, I definitely want to check it out.
— PEG · Nov 10, 05:14 AM · #
“Summers treats everyone as he’d like to be treated”?
There’s no evidence that Summers would like to be treated the way Summers treats others.
— otto · Nov 10, 05:28 AM · #
Gotta use this opportunity to recycle my favorite Larry anecdote:
Summers was doing a meeting with a friend of mine at a hedge fund where they both worked, and he was drinking a diet Coke as he talked. I mean that literally: as he talked. Coke was pouring out of his mouth and onto his shirt, and Summers showed no outward recognition that this was happening. Needless to say, to my friend this was fascinating to the point of seriously distracting from the substance of the meeting.
After the meeting, my friend emailed a colleague to say: I just finished a meeting with Larry, and he left with his shirt covered in diet Coke. The colleague emailed back: the last time I had a meeting with Larry, he left with cheese in his nose.
This guy is absolutely brilliant. But it’s not obvious to me we want someone with Aspergers running Treasury.
— Noah Millman · Nov 10, 08:52 AM · #
From what I understand, that’s always been the thing with Summers— genius economic mind, no social graces whatsoever. That’s about the opposite of what you want in a University president. There’s no compelling reason for a University president to be a brilliant guy. There’s every reason for him to be a diplomat and glad-hander. What bothers me so much about it is that so many people assume that if it’s academics who were getting tweaked, it must be for the good, fair or not.
— Freddie · Nov 10, 10:54 AM · #
I never quite got the disdain economists hold the rest of the social sciences in – but for a university president, that attitude is a disaster.
Sailer, make sure to check out the Russian adventures of the brilliant Summers’ protege Andrei Shleifer, a person Summers treated far more generously than Cornel West.
— rortybomb · Nov 10, 04:50 PM · #
@Noah: I laughed and laughed and laughed.
— PEG · Nov 10, 05:51 PM · #
Right, Summers spend tens of millions of dollars defending his best friend Andrei Shleiffer from federal corruption charges for Shleiffer’s crookedness while working for Harvard as a Yeltsin consultant in the 1990s. Harvard ended up having to pay a $26 million fine to the feds. That’s what led mechanical engineering professor Robert Abernathy to speak up against Summers. David Warsh has all the details.
— Steve Sailer · Nov 10, 06:24 PM · #
Right on the money. Summers is a master at coming up with out of the box solutions that defy popularity or political correctness. These solutions are painful in the short term, but vital to our long-term success. The public face of these initiatives must be someone who can temper opposition and reactions to such decisions, not someone who will add fuel to the fire. Summers should be the mad scientist concocting brilliant policy in his laboratory while his representative stands next to Barack on the podium and distributes it to the public.
— Matthew Bilinsky · Nov 11, 01:38 AM · #
“Summers is a master at coming up with out of the box solutions that defy popularity or political correctness.”
??? Name a few “out of the box solutions” which Summers has suggested.
— otto · Nov 11, 05:21 AM · #
The Temnestrian Iconography, from Anathem.
“It depicts us as clowns”, Fraa Ostabon said, “but clowns with a sinister aspect. It is a two phase iconography: in the beginning we are shown,say, prancing around with butterfly nets or looking at shapes in clouds…talking to spiders….putting our urine up in testtubes…reading books upsidedown…..But in the second phase a dark side is shown—an impressionable youngster is seduced, a responsible mother lured into insanity, a political leader led into decisions of pure folly.”
Summers FTW!
Equal rights for Auspies.
— matoko_chan · Nov 11, 09:15 AM · #
“??? Name a few “out of the box solutions” which Summers has suggested.”
His “suggestion” that credit default swaps NOT be allowed to trade on the Chicago Exchange or, for that matter, be traded anywhere in public?
I guess that’s not really an example of out of the box thinking, but it does defy popularity (not to mention common sense) and it is painful in the short term (as well as, no doubt, the near long-term). All thanks to a mad scientist who fueled a derivative fire with his oh so “out-of-the-box” ideas about deregulation/self-regulation.
— keatssycamore · Nov 11, 01:15 PM · #
Summers is one of the people most responsible for the Crash of 2008. His push to deregulate the financial sector in the 90s showed that Summers was too intellectually lazy to take into account the fact that the Crash of 1929 was mainly caused by a lack of market regulation. Summers racist and sexist comments show, once again, Summers lack of intellectual competence and sound judgement.
— libhomo · Nov 12, 09:08 AM · #
I know this has nothing to do with this post but I wanted to tell you that you sounded great on NPR last week!
— Joules · Nov 13, 12:59 AM · #
I had a poli sci professor say that the problem with Summers was his lack of feeling for the political dimensions of his job, namely that sound philosophy does not always make for happy female professors. Got to be prudent.
— Bernard · Nov 13, 04:59 PM · #