| Username |
Post |
| ashu |
Posted
on 02-Jul-01 12:35 AM
I am delighted that Larry Summers, a former economics professor,
is now formally Harvard University's new president. Unlike any of his predecessor, Larry brings a thoroughly global mindset to his new job that will only help Harvard attract first-rate students/acholars from around the world.
It would be an understatement to say that I have long considered
Summers, together his former boss at Treaury Robert Rubin, to be one of my MANY role models I encountered in America.
Here's wishing all the best as Larry presides over the Big H.
What follows is an 'assessment' written by a former classmate, who is now the Washington bureau of Slate Online magazine.
Enjoy!!
oohi
ashu
****************************
Larry Summers
How the Great Brain learned to grin and bear it.
By David Plotz
Lawrence Summers takes office as president of Harvard University Sunday, an installation that marks a small but significant shift in American culture. The paramount hero of the Internet boom was the Power Nerd: unsocialized, aggressive, fiendishly smart. If Bill Gates was the epitome of the power-nerd businessman, Larry Summers embodied the power-nerd public servant.
But Summers' ascent to treasury secretary and now Harvard's helm is confirmation that the power nerd has been domesticated. Gates softened his image with a $20 billion charity, soft-collar shirts, and media training; and megalomaniac nerds like Michael Saylor have skulked into hiding. (Even Larry Ellison seems humbler.) And Summers has been rewarded lavishly for his dogged pursuit of amiability. (It is an irony of Summers' career that this superb economist's most important insights may turn out to be drawn from All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Be nice. Share credit.)
Summers long seemed destined for importance but not leadership. He was brilliant but too abrasive. Summers was a prodigy born into a prodigiously intelligent family. His father was an economics professor, his mother taught at Wharton. Each had a brother who won the economics Nobel Memorial Prize (Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow). Summers grew up smart and cocky. He started MIT at age 16. In 1983, at only 28, he became the youngest tenured professor in Harvard history. A decade later he won the John Bates Clark Medal for the most brilliant economist under 40.
Summers flitted from subject to subject within economics. He would drop in for a brief visit, coolly demolish the work of various experts, make a phenomenally original insight, thump his chest with pride, and move on. (Summers contributed bold ideas to the studies of unemployment, capital formation, and market irrationality, among other topics.)
The first mystery of Summers' career—how a famed academic economist became a political player—is easily solved. Professor Summers was analytically rigorous but not arcane. Unlike many more theoretical colleagues, he devoted himself to real-world problems. From early in his career, he engaged in practical politics. He staffed the Council of Economic Advisers in the Reagan administration (though his politics were always Democratic and his economics Keynesian), acted as chief economics adviser to Michael Dukakis' 1988 presidential campaign, and served as the World Bank's top economist in the early '90s. By the time he arrived at the Clinton Treasury Department in 1993 as undersecretary for international affairs, he had more hands-on political experience than almost any university economist.
President Clinton assembled an extremely talented team of economics advisers—notably Robert Rubin and Gene Sperling—but even within that group, Summers stood out for his clarity of mind and aggressiveness. He pushed unpopular ideas that were economically sound. Summers designed the bailout when the Mexican economy collapsed and was the architect of the Asia rescue in 1998. He and Rubin proved complementary: Rubin soothed the markets and greased Congress, while deputy Summers did much of the dirty work of bullying and coercion.
|
| ashu |
Posted
on 02-Jul-01 12:49 AM
Summers rose despite himself. He had energy and brains (and humor) but also a nasty arrogance. He was impatient with those less intelligent than himself (that is, everyone), lecturing members of Congress who asked stupid questions, berating foreign finance ministers for their foolishness, sneering at colleagues, undermining rivals, and generally abusing his staff. Summers had a poisonous reputation on Capitol Hill and an unsteady status in the White House—protected by his brilliance and by Rubin, but distrusted.
Summers—too smart and ambitious not to recognize his problem—approached it with the same exacting logic he brings to everything. He realized that he was in danger of being permanently tattooed as a jerk and perhaps blackballed from higher office. So, as Clinton's second term began, he set about domesticating himself. Says one longtime Summers staffer: "He had a huge incentive, because he could see that he couldn't get far in Washington rubbing people the wrong way. He realized this was a chunk of stuff he needed to learn. So he did it. It was like learning French for him."
Summers tried to imitate some of Rubin's gentility. He began repeating self-deprecating Rubinisms: "It's just one man's opinion, but …," and "I may be wrong but …" He taught himself to endure congressional idiocy and journalistic doltism with a smile. He remained as intense and hard-working as ever but eased up on berating his staff. (Ex-administration staffers seem quite fond of him for his sense of humor and pedagogical enthusiasm.) He ate crow in public when the administration adopted policies that he had criticized. (Notably, when Clinton released oil from the strategic petroleum reserve just days after Summers had condemned that idea, Summers swallowed and reversed himself.) It has not been a perfect transformation: Summers visibly strains to grin and speak slowly during interviews. And he certainly has not lost his massive self-confidence. But it has been enough. His reputation softened, Republican Hill staffers began gushing about his comity and good sense, and his press coverage became sunnier.
Because Summers had assuaged critics, it was easy for Clinton to replace Rubin with Summers as treasury secretary. The makeover also probably guaranteed the Harvard job. During the selection process, Rubin called search committee members to insist that Summers had changed, a reassurance that was important to closing the deal, according to the Boston Globe.
It was a wise choice. Summers represents the last best hope for the university president. If he can't rescue that degraded profession, no one can. Earlier Harvard presidents were grand American leaders: Charles Eliot helped reform American education in the late 19th century, and James Bryant Conant was the godhead for American science in the mid-20th century. But university presidents today are eunuchs, shuffling paper by day, grubbing for money by night, and never, never speaking a word about issues of the day for fear of offending donors or alumni or faculty or students.
Summers has a chance to restore the university president to relevance. The Harvard job should exempt Summers from the worst aspects of presidency. Neil Rudenstine, Summers' beige predecessor, supervised a mammoth $2.6 billion fund drive. That and some wise investing boosted the Harvard endowment to $19.2 billion, twice as much as any other university. So, Summers won't need to do much calling for cash. And Summers ought to be able to shunt much day-to-day administration onto his provost.
This should give Summers the freedom to do what he wants to do. He claims that a priority is improving Harvard's notoriously impersonal undergraduate education. (Then again, Rudenstine claimed that fixing undergraduate education was a goal, and he never did anything.)
More important, early signs suggest that Summers will be a much more extroverted and public-minded leader than any other university president. When he appeared on Charlie Rose this week, Summers spent 40 minutes discussing global economic and political issues, and a scant quarter-hour on Harvard. He has dared to take political stands: Summers rapped President Bush for considering barriers to steel imports. It was gentle criticism compared to Summers the politician, but flame-throwing by college president standards.
Where Summers may shine is in combining his goal of globalizing Harvard with his policy passions. He is zealous about global inequality. As a political economist, he lobbied incessantly for small steps that could have outsize benefits: educating girls, developing vaccines against diseases of poor countries, and forgiving Third World debt. Summers could easily become a public champion of global inequality issues at Harvard.
If he can avoid bogging down in university infighting—and his niceness treatment should help him do that—he has the energy, ambition, and arrogance to become an international goad. That would be great news for Harvard and great fun for Summers.
|
| mangal |
Posted
on 02-Jul-01 04:02 AM
++ Some more stuff on Larry Summers!++
Larry Summers' War Against the Earth
By Jim Vallette
Back on December 12, 1991, then the chief economist for the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, wrote an internal memo that was leaked to the environmental community, and we, in turn, publicized it. This memo remains relevant.
Mr. Summers, currently the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Dept., is President Clinton's nominee to replace Mr. Wall Street, Robert Rubin, as U.S. Treasury Secretary. As the country's chief economist, Mr. Summers will be the driving force behind its global economic policy. We can thus look forward, with trepidation, to further exertion of the U.S.' free trade - at any cost to people and the environment - policies.
In 1994, by the way, virtually every other country in the world broke with Mr. Summers' Harvard-trained "economic logic" ruminations about dumping rich countries' poisons on their poorer neighbors, and agreed to ban the export of hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD countries under the Basel Convention. Five years later, the United States is one of the few countries that has yet to ratify the Basel Convention or the Basel Convention's Ban Amendment on the export of hazardous wastes from OECD to non-OECD countries.
THE MEMO
DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP
"'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable."
"The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization."
POSTSCRIPT
After the memo became public in February 1992, Brazil's then-Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenburger wrote back to Summers: "Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said... the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear."
Sadly, Mr. Lutzenburger was fired shortly after writing this letter. Mr. Summers remained in the World Bank before joining the Clinton administration and continuing his incredible rise toward the Cabinet. Meanwhile, world trade has burgeoned with imbalanced cargoes: banned pesticides, leaded gasoline, CFCs, asbestos, and other products restricted in the North are sold to the South; tropical timber, oil, coal, and other natural resources flow from South to North with little or no benefit to the host communities; and while regulations tighten around dirty coal and dangerous nuclear power plants in the North, they are proliferating in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America, where they are owned and operated by Northern corporations.
This trade has been facilitated through tens of billions of dollars of financing by the World Bank, the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the U.S. Export-Import Bank, government institutions in which Mr. Summers has wielded his economic logic. His 1991 memo can be considered a working thesis behind this decade's dominant global economic policies.
|
| ashu |
Posted
on 02-Jul-01 04:22 AM
Mangal,
How's the Prose and Poetry (or is it Politics?)
bookstore doing in DC? Never mind if this question
makes no sense :-)
You know, I remain a die-hard believer of "The Truth
Eventually Comes Out" theory, and am only glad to apply
the theory in Larry's case too, though, alas, NOT in ways
you intend.
Let me explain.
Larry Summers was made US Treasury Secretary AND
now Harvard's president with absolutely NO REFERENCE
to that memo (which you have posted here, presumably to
discredit Larry) because it was EVENTUALLY found out three
years ago Larry himself NEVER wrote that memo in the first
place.
Surprised?
Go back and read the New Yorker magazine profile of Larry
that came out, I think, sometime in 1998.
Maybe you'll have a better appreciation for Larry as
a man -- arrogant, yes; but NEVER devious -- who
is fiercely protective of his friends and of
those who work for him.
Sounds like a guy worth respecting and admiring!!
Good luck digging up more dirt on Larry.
Glad that the Harvard Search Committee did not
hire you as a private investigator. :-)
That's a joke, by the way.
oohi
ashu
|
| ashu |
Posted
on 03-Jul-01 02:02 AM
What follows is a copy-paste from Harvard Magazine.
Little wonder that I remain one of the many, many
Harvard students very much influenced by Larry's
approach to ideas and working together with really
smarter people.
oohi
ashu
************************
In a New Yorker profile published in July 1998, John Cassidy captured the essential Summers in this role. "I would describe myself as a market-orientated progressive," Summers told him. "My belief is in a middle ground." Revealing a flash of his debating instincts, Summers memorably dismissed his laissez-faire critics for "the kind of thinking that made the Great Depression great."
Cassidy also plumbed the extraordinary relationship between secretary and deputy; [Robert] Rubin told him Summers "may be the most extraordinary intellect I have ever worked with, and I've been around a lot of places and met a lot of people."
His deputy, Rubin said, "conceptualizes extraordinarily well. He analyzes with enormous rigor. And at the same time he has a tremendous practical feel. It's very rare to find all these things together in any measurable degree in one person."
Brilliance aside, Rubin said, "Larry has grown a lot in this job. He has learned to present his views, and even to think about his views, with a recognition of other people's different views and the possible legitimacy of views different from his own."
For his part, Summers now says of his service with Rubin, "We tried to create a culture similar to the culture I had enjoyed in academia, one where the quality of ideas mattered, not the rank of the speaker, one where more ideas and more people were better than fewer ideas and fewer people. It was one where no remark was too provocative to be acceptable, and where challenging the conventional view was encouraged. Our goal was very much to do the right thing." On the global stage, that meant working in the Greenspan-Rubin-Summers triumvirate as the "Committee to Save the World."
|
