Free Larry Summers

You cheap shill.
A puff piece for this plutocratic hack?
"Free" this jerk?
He should be put out to pasture on the White House lawn.
Or why not cut open another vein of the Treasury and let him batten on it like the vampires from Goldman Sachs?

Despite his respect for Geithner's acumen, Summers will eventually have to support a more aggressive stance re: Citi at a minimum.

It's already baked into the recession. All the King's Horses and All the King's Men..

Please name one memorable thing financial speaking sommers has accomplished just one.

Brilliant.

How long does it take a well-educated person under age 60 to understand the "physics" of digital television? There's a nanosecond used up. What's he do with the rest of his day?

AIG has emerged as cause of the biggest bailout headache and has gotten the biggest chunk of the bailout money. In return AIG has slapped the nation in face with the biggest bonuses for its money managers. Don't they deserve placement in the same status of control as the "quasi-governmental" Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?

Noam --Thanks for the thorough examination of Summers' career and interpersonal style. It had the effect of liberating me from the arrogant bull-in-a-china-shop stereotype of Summers that I previously had.

Noam never really gets around to arguing why we should "free" Summers to run economic policy, which was supposed to be the point of the article. Instead you tricked me into reading a boilerplate bio-sketch.

gives us a lot more to help understand his role with obama and the advisor system. Thank you.

I think I get it. Summers should be freed to help pull Congress back from following the disaster scenario Summers mapped out back in 1991, where deficit-cutting and tax hikes during a hypothetical economic crisis ended up pushing the economy into the abyss.

"...In the scenario he'd cooked up for his article in 1991, Congress had insisted on cutting the deficit in the middle of the crisis, taking money out of the economy at the very moment it was needed most. Political leaders feared that "increases in budget deficits would have disastrous consequences for business confidence," Summers had written. "Spending was cut, and even some minor taxes were increased." The effect was to push the country into the abyss."

Wow. I take it you were a student of his who got a c- on something? How about adding to the discussion vs. personal attacks?

WIth all the shrill lies coming from Norm and Marty here, TNR should be named The New Republican...after Peretz's nasty attacks on the Freeman nomination, I for one will never be clicking on any of his posts again...and this piece of garbage by Scheiber is making me reconsider TNR's prominent place in my bookmark bar.

Dennis: Huh? The physics of digital television are trivial? I guess the MPEG committee sure wasted its time.

In my book Summers can't be all bad for pissing off a bunch feminist nazis at Harvard.If only he had been at Duke maybe that fiasco would not have got off the ground.

This article of overly dismissive of what Summers's experience at Harvard tells us about his leadership style and political acumen. I'm a woman and was a Harvard PhD student in the hard sciences during his tenure. I thank you for pointing out that the famous flap over women in science was not the real reason for his departure, but rather faculty displeasure.

But rather than blame the entire incident on overly entitled faculty members (they no doubt are), you might also consider Summers complete inability to understand that *leading* and institution, especially one like Harvard, requires more than analytical purity. The reason it's impolitic to suggest that inherent family instincts in women is the reason they don't succeed in science isn't just that it's PC (and his comments did belie an extremely naive reading the "data" he cited), it's also b/c as the President of Harvard you, more than anyone, have the ability to change the status quo. The question isn't whether women are less willing than men to go through the inhumane tenure process, it's whether such a process is necessary at all. For better or worse, Harvard often sets the tone for these kinds of reform, but he was unable to even imagine that he had the power to do anything about it. He seems much more comfortable playing devil's advocate and advising others' decision than he does truly innovating and implementing new ideas. Maybe serving as an adviser to the President is a good role for him, but given that our president's strength is not economic policy, shouldn't we look for someone whose boldness comes from the ability to make new things happen rather than the ability to bluntly criticize others' actions?

Summers is an intelligent guy who has had a problem being open-minded and communicating and has grown up a little, so what?? I still do not see where he's being imprisoned here. I see a lot of his ideas being proposed and implemented.

Nice puff piece, much like the one the WSJ did for "kenny boy" lay back during the Enron scandal.

Not a bad article if you're, say, twenty-two and you don't know much about Summers. Much better if you were to tell us the specifics of his work in his shop rather than to simply present him as the sage master functioning in the context of the economic crisis we have all read about elsewhere.

Don't know what Mar's illigetimate grandson has with the author but I thought it was just a real good piece. Everyone is human and now the Shrub is gone, hopefully trying to right all the wrongs. It is easier to honk the horn than it is to drive the bus.

Mr Summers and Mr Rubin were instrumental in pushing President Clinton to sign onto deregulation a decade ago that fomented our present financial crisis. If Mr Summers is so intellectually gifted, why was he not wise enough to understand the good sense of the depression era regulations that he usurped ?

RT misses the point. Larry Summers didn't take a position on the question of why there are few women than men at the high end of mathematics and physics. He merely suggested that science should trump political correctness in determining the answer.

Feminists and other leftists are just as irrational and anti-scientific as religious fundamentalists.

Scheiber's piece interestingly conveys some less known sides of Larry Summers. I was at Harvard when he was President. It was clear that he wanted to change the institution in many ways, for example, by placing undergraduate teaching at the core of the university mission. But he faced strong opposition from most of the faculty. Being a man of principles and a true academic, not a politician, he could not figure out how to implement his agenda. He was forced in the end to resign by using the excuse of the remarks about women (Scheiber is right about this). The Harvard job was intellectually beneath him, but politically above him.

"Provocative thought experiment" at the World Bank = suggesting that we should export dirty technology to the Third World because they were going to die early anyway. No wonder the eventually got tossed out on his ear as Harvard's president. The gy's just not that bright. Pity Obama apparently thinks he is - he's done nothing visible so far, for which we may be thnkful for his being reined in by a brighter guy, his ultimate boss.

I basically liked this article, although it was awfully general. But can we please take a moment for this sentence? "...Over the long term, he felt, a country's budget should balance ..."

Guess what? All budgets must balance in the long term. It is impossible for them not to. Well, that, or bankruptcy.

Larry Summers can be the smartest guy in the world - literally, the smartest fucking guy on face of the planet - and it makes not one iota of difference when his close friends & advisers doubt his ability to nurture proposals and ideas from other people within the government working to manage it.

How about "Free" Paul Volcker, eh??

You tricked me into reading this puff piece on a typical academic who flatters himself w/his degrees but not one miniscule of common sense.

What a waste of our taxpayers dollars.

To do what?!?!? Maybe if he's unrestrained he can propose more legislation to to destroy the other half of the world economy that's left????
You want to free the guy who rammed through the Financial Services Modernization Act (repealed Glass Steagall) and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act (made it illegal to regulate CDS) as the Treasury Secretary?!?!?!
Am I missing something? Are you being ironic (like you meant he really should be in jail)?? If not WTF?

Noam Scheiber says: "Several of the papers he wrote as a Harvard graduate student redefined whole swaths of the discipline, and they remain influential to this day." Sorry, but not true. Summers' papers are not that influential. I have a PhD in Econ from a respectable school [Univ of Illinois Urb-Champ] and I never read a Summers paper in Macro. He might have impressed the Harvard literati, but I am not sure the rest of the Econ profession [academia and outside it] is so impressed with Summers' contributions. There are other people, from the Harvard/MIT/Yale econ environment, who are academically much more impressive, and still read [Solow, even some Tobin papers, Samuelson].
But Summers? Vastly overrated; an ego big as the US Capitol, and contributions small as dwarf's dick.

He was right when he was the Harvard president. Maybe Obama should have made him Sec of Education. However, we will spend years and trillions recovering from the damage he did to our economy.

Seems (!) like a lot of the posts are be from people who did not actually read all the pages of the article... To their discredit... I mean after all, who can be bothered to read a whole 6+ "pages" in this day and age!?!?

OK, so as not to fall into simple ad hominem, what are the non-personal arguments???

I know the man a little and am close to others who know him even better. This article captures him better than anything I've read. Bottom line: he's not perfect; which of us are?; but he's brilliant, knows his stuff, and listens to people worth listening to (even to some who aren't). What matters most to him is getting it right intellectually. Moreover, to my personal knowledge, contrary to the public image, he's been a great mentor to talented women, respects them as much as men, and has advanced their careers. I have some problems with him, but on the whole we're very lucky to have them.

And those spewing vitriol at this fine man and others ought to consider how well our nation and our communities are served when those who sacrifice money and other forms of advancement in favor of public service have to suffer so much abuse on top of that. It's not even nice.

The remarks made by Summers that led to his resignation from Harvard were exceedingly mild but dramatically and (probably) intentionally misinterpreted, because he was already unpopular among some of the faculty. It's simply amazing to me that people still confuse the idea that there are fewer women with IQs 3-4 standard deviations above the mean with the obviously invalid assertion that men are smarter than women.

It is at least good to know that you can still have a second chance in this country, even today when political correctness rule every aspect of our life, after committing a fatal mistake of angering radical feminists. Really talented people like Summers will go on to have other opportunity where their talents can trully shine, while plotters of feminists coup-de-etat in Harvard, is still stuck in ivory tower where one's work is appreciated only by fellow gender ideologues.

To Alex: There is a nice program (Publish or Perish) that uses google scholar to look at total citation counts. Larry has roughly 26,000 which puts him up with nearly any economist you want to mention (Solow at 25,000, Mankiw at 21,000, Samuelson at 30,000, Tobin at 16,000). On another note, as my mother used to say, you don't put yourself up by putting others down. Why would be so unkind to someone you do not know?

It is at least good to know that you can still have a second chance in this country, even today when political correctness rule every aspect of our life, after committing a fatal mistake of angering radical feminists. Really talented people like Summers will go on to have other opportunity where their talents can trully shine, while plotters of feminists coup-de-etat in Harvard, is still stuck in ivory tower where one's work is appreciated only by fellow gender ideologues.

If Summers is as smart and capable as Schreiber says: Why has he joined the Obama crew which is working as hard as possible to make the US economy slow-growth, inflationary and uncompetitive ?

More New World Order propaganda! Larry Summers should be sent to Guantanamo, along with the traitors that just left the white house.

"Free Larry Summers" from what? I conclude from this article that he is perfectly placed to be very effective and that he faces none of the deadening elements that plague talented people who must operate in hidebound bureacracies. And he's not constantly in the limelight and thus not required to control every blink, grimace, or nod.

I think the consensus is that this is a pretty good article that was terribly misnamed...but noam should probably refrain from any more summers/geithner gossip its getting tiring for those of us who read the site regularly

Great premise! This "genius" is one of the people who created this mess. Keep up the good, hard-hitting journalism.

Typical adolescent gushing by Scheiber and TNR's crew of college journalists--hoping an adult will come to their rescue now that they have really screwed things up. Summers is a good economist and a decent, strong-minded man. But resident genius? What movies have you been watching that you believe in such a silly narrative???

Noam,

Oh, I think I know what pop culture narratives you're channeling for your "reporting" on Summers: the movie Karate Kid and the tv show Kung Fu, right--the ones where the brilliant but difficult great master saves the wise ass President, I mean the wise ass kid, who has gotten everything screwed up and doesn't know what to do.

Let me introduce to you Frank Rich's version of Larry Summer:

Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.

Yet even as Summers spoke, A.I.G. was belatedly confirming what he would not. It has, in essence, been laundering its $170 billion in taxpayers’ money by paying off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street to Société Générale and Deutsche Bank abroad.

Summers was even more highhanded in addressing the “retention bonuses” handed to the very employees who brokered all those bad bets. After reciting the requisite outrage talking point, he delivered a patronizing lecture to viewers of ABC’s “This Week” on how our “tradition of upholding law” made it impossible to abrogate the bonus agreements. It never occurred to Summers that Americans might know that contracts are renegotiated all the time — most conspicuously of late by the United Automobile Workers, which consented to givebacks as its contribution to the Detroit bailout plan. Nor did he note, for all his supposed reverence for the law, that the A.I.G. unit being rewarded with these bonuses is now under legal investigation by British and American authorities.

Summers brought deregulation as Treasury Secretary, together with is crook mentor Robert Rubin. He also lobbied for Enron in California.

I liked that he took attitude against anti-Semites at Harvard, but his genius economic policy is a failure. He just shouldn't be there.

Noam Scheiber is a corporate shill. All his post defend the corporate crooks who brought the catastrophe.

Has no one here noticed the date on the by-line?

Summery

Summers is a genius but gets everything wrong.

Summers is obese but fueled by diet Coke.

Am I missing something?

Summery

Summers is a genius but gets everything wrong.

Summers is obese but fueled by diet Coke.

Am I missing something?

Note to all: See Frank Rich's smackdown of Summers and Company in NYT editorial. Here is an equation: Many Harvard MBAs + many Yale MBAs + many Wharton School of Business MBAS + One former Harvard President divided by the number of failed banks, brokerage houses, lost jobs, and foreclosures = arrogance beyond belief and without relief.

Your loyalty is admirable, but with respect, the essential issue is Mr Summer's role in the financial deregulation of the late 1990's. Evidence mounts that the opening of this gate at the end of the Clinton administration was a key factor in the present unfolding disaster. Curiously, this issue is addressed only obliquely in the article. If we are to accept Mr Summer's primacy in guiding current economic policy, his judgement (or lack there of) on this most important of policy shifts in the recent past should be front and center.

On Mr Summer's new found chasteness - I would posit that this humility stems as much from a desire for redemption as from anything else. As he grown older and hopefully wiser, Mr Summer's has probably come to recognize his monumental error in pushing through banking and securities de-regulation as Clinton's Treasury Secretary. History may not look kindly on the errant shepherd that opened this particular gate.

A great article. Mr. Summers has made mistakes as all of us have. However, you never make a mistake unless you try to enact something. I'm confident that Summers has learned some valuable lessons and will apply them to the current economy. I knew we were in in deep trouble when the last Treasury Secretary hired a 35-year-old to manage the ongoing economic disaster. Obviously Ivy League managers between the ages of 40 to 65 were not capable.