Matt Yglesias Has a Pretty Good Piece on Larry Summers
Matt covers six Larry Summers controversies: globalization, African development and pollution, the long-overdue but still stalled reform effort at Harvard, the “greater male variability hypothesis”, and the Obama stimulus, in addition to Larry’s being an infatuated fool; he grades Larry as more right than wrong on four of the six, is agnostic on the greater male variability hypothesis, and, as he says, there is “no real defense” to be made for being an infatuated fool and acting on it…
I largely agree with everything he says with three caveats:
(a) I see Larry Summers’s caution about the Obama stimulus being not about not wanting to get outside the Overton Window with Congress, but rather vis-à-vis Barack Obama, Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod, David Plouffe, Valerie Jarrett, and company.
(b) I reject the “greater male variability hypothesis”—it is not a bell curve with a higher variance, but much more complicated, perhaps (and here I guess) a combination of size, ‘roid rage, and the genetic weakness caused by having only one single x-chromosome rather than two.
(c) Plus there are the differences in perspective that arise from Matt’s not being Larry’s friend of 45 years, while I am. And, as Sancho Panza says in Don Quixote:
Miguel de Cervantes (1605): The Resourceful Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/996/pg996-images.html>: ‘Sancho answered…. “Each of us is as God made him, aye, and often worse…”
Friends have obligations to friends: to help them become and remain their better selves.
The public part of it is:
Matt Yglesias: I’ve been covering Larry Summers controversies for most of my life <https://www.slowboring.com/p/ive-been-covering-larry-summers-controversies>: ‘I’m sick of it, and also I think he’s been right about some stuff: One of the biggest journalistic f***ups of my career came way back when I was a college student and news editor of a campus alt-weekly called the Harvard Independent. We reported, based on pretty good but not-actually-accurate sourcing, that Lee Bollinger had been selected to replace Neil Rudenstine as president of the university. The real choice, of course, was former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
Which is just to say that “news about Larry Summers” has been a pain in my ass for literally most of my life, and on a purely personal level, my sincere hope is that the latest Epstein business will be the last time I ever need to cover a Larry Summers Controversy.
Because there have been a lot of them!
I first met Summers at a meet-and-greet before he took office as president. While there, he got into a remarkably contentious fight with an undergraduate who was pressing him about the harm done by American trade policies that pressured African countries to respect pharmaceutical company patent rights for HIV medication, making antiretroviral treatment far too expensive for residents of poor countries.
I hadn’t really thought about drug pricing before, but I learned from Summers the correct basic economic take on this, which is that if you price prescription drugs at the marginal cost of manufacturing them, you’re not ever going to get any drug innovation. He also said that super-cheap medication flooding Africa would invariably undercut the prices in richer countries and wreck innovation.
Summers’ position proved to be wrong on the politics — Bill Clinton through his charitable foundation and then George W. Bush through PEPFAR managed to finesse the reimportation issue just fine and got super-cheap medicine for people in Africa while residents of Western countries continued paying higher prices.
And that’s the difference between economics and politics.
To Summers’ credit, he was doing what an economic policy advisor is supposed to do and explaining the economic contours of the substantive problem with the activist proposal. But he was much too pessimistic about politicians’ ability to find an actual solution to the problem.
To psychoanalyze a little, I think that’s because he had a generally grouchy attitude about activists on behalf of the global poor, because they had a perverse tendency to hold Summers personally responsible for economic problems in poor countries.
This is a legacy of a widely criticized memo that he wrote back when he was chief economist of the World Bank (it was actually Lant Pritchett, but Summers signed it) arguing that “underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted” and it would be economically and socially optimal to shift more pollution to the third world.
This is, in fact, a correct analysis of the situation. As China went from desperately poor to middle income, it became a lot more polluted but was still better-off on net, and then over time they started focusing on cleaner air.
But I suppose it was an impolitic thing to say.
Which is just to say that not only have there been a lot of Larry Summers Controversies, to truly understand any given LSC, you really need to understand the context of previous LSCs. And because I was there in college, I have what I feel like is far more context than I actually want.
The lost reform opportunity at Harvard…
That is the end of the public part. The rest of it is behind the Slow Boring <https://www.slowboring.com/p/ive-been-covering-larry-summers-controversies> paywall. But I am going to provide a few more points as teasers. Matt:
What he said… [was not] something like “women are stupid”…. In the interests of accuracy and fairness… he believes…the “greater male variability hypothesis”…. Men are more likely to end up in prison, more likely to be murdered or commit suicide, more likely to die of a drug overdose or of alcohol poisoning. Men are more likely to crash a car… [and] men’s greater odds of becoming a CEO are in some sense the mirror image of their greater odds of becoming a total f***up…
Summers… took office [as Harvard President]… want[ing] to make the university less left-wing… undergraduate teaching more rigorous… asic cultural competency… more STEM-forward terms… an agenda that was bound to antagonize a lot of people…. His basic diagnosis was controversial, but correct…
What [his reform agenda] called for… was a deft operator…. What we got instead was kind of a hot takes artist tossing out provocations…
[In] this [Obama administration] memo… [the] highest-end option… was an $890 billion stimulus… [still leaving] a seriously elevated unemployment rate by 2011…. This… went down in progressive memory as… Summers’ economic analysis tanking the stimulus. That does not particularly seem to have been what happened…
It might be good to bring back the kind of prudish social norms that would have the disclosure of such an affair be reputation-destroying. But what… puts it over the top is… do[ing] the scheming with your buddy the sex criminal…. Lots of progressive minded people who’ve happily forgiven Warren for presenting herself as Native American to take advantage of affirmative action schemes that are supposed to benefit members of vulnerable minority groups would obviously not look kindly on the exact same conduct if it were Summers who did it…. And in this case, there’s no real defense to be made of the specific conduct at hand…
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