| Username |
Post |
| ashu |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 02:08 AM
Congratulations to a former professor who has just now been 'installed' as Harvard's new president: Larry Summers.
Harvard University will be all the better place with Larry at the top, and, I, for
one, am quite excited about that.
As I have written here on this site before, there is much I -- a student from
Nepal -- have learnt from Larry's academic and non-academic (i.e. Washington) life: his intellectual combativeness against muddled ideas, his willingness to stand up, even alone, for unpopular causes which he belived were to be right; the
way he cares deeply about the success of his students and colleagues, and
the way he relentlessly challenges his students to be better thinkers.
Sure, by his detractors, Larry has been called every name under the sun, but that's expected.
I also draw inspiration from this extract of Larry's inauguration speech at Harvard
recently.
Enjoy,
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
*****************
"The university is open to all ideas, but it is committed to the skepticism that is the hallmark of education. All ideas are worthy of consideration here -- but not all perspectives are equally valid.
Openness means a willingness to listen to ideas -- but also the obligation to sift and test them -- to expose them to the critical judgments of disinterested scholars and a discerning public.
We must be neither slaves to dogma nor uncritical followers of fashion. We must exalt neither novelty nor orthodoxy for their own sake.
Our special obligation is to seek what is true -- not what is popular or easy, not what is conventionally believed, but what is right and in the deepest and most rigorous sense advances our understanding of the world.
Universities are places of ideas but also places of idealism. We owe allegiance to the dispassionate pursuit of truth. But universities -- and certainly this one -- have been and should always be places of passionate moral commitment.
We cultivate what is special and intellectual here, but we must also nurture the value of generous public service to society beyond these walls.
This takes on a special importance at a moment like this, when we have an opportunity to awaken a new generation to the satisfactions of serving society.
For full text:
http://www.president.harvard.edu/news/inauguration/summers.html
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| threeinvestigators |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 10:24 AM
Ashu,
What does this have to do with GBNC? Wouldn't this letter be better off posted in Harvard's student or alumni newspaper? Or are you, knowingly or unknowingly, just pathetically gloating about your "supposed" connection to Harvard?
Jupiter.
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| VillageVoice |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 10:51 AM
I like his ideas. Great stuff. I am sure, Ashu, he must have been quite an influence on a lot of students at Harvard. Yes, we should not fall prey, or get intimidated by popular beliefs. Curiousity and skepticism are great qualities that advance our understanding of the world.
It may sound hackneyed but let me say it again. Many great ideas have been lost becuase the people who had them were worried that they would be laughed at. But I also strongly believe humility is central to understanding the world.
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| harvard haina |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 10:58 AM
For Nepal and the world, who cares who is Harvard president, or what speech gives? What is harvard for billions of people? I just think what Mr. summer did or said is irrelevant.
Do we also have his janamkundali posted as well?
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| oohi_ashu |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 01:36 PM
Hi Village Voice,
Thanks for your response.
I enjoyed reading it.
Others: If you have to wonder why that extract of Larry's speech is here,
please feel free to ignore it altogether, and that's all right.
This GBNC site, thankfully, is no longer ONLY for Nepalis in Boston -- but for
Nepalis and friends of Nepal from BOTH in and out of Boston.
Moreover, a variety of postings here only HEALTHILY reflects the DIVERSITY of our collective interests and ideas . . . and that can only be good.
And so, let this spirit of pluralism and inclusiveness prevail, for GOOD ideas have no nationalities, no skin color nor do they have geographic borders.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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| Krishna |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 05:09 PM
gotta love the memo (excerpted below) from summers where he bemoaned the difficulty of exporting point-source (such as automotive) pollution from the u.s. to developing countries, where lives are worth less, monetarily speaking; flawless economic logic, i believe he called it. maybe he'd like to send k-du some more ddt, once greenpeaz finishes cleaning up khumaltar. looks like larry found a good home in hahvahd--too bad he didn't bring moe, curly, shemp, and joe with him! heck...i can't seem to find the right words--let's hear what larr-bear's got to say:
April 10, 2000
Back in December of 1991, the chief economist for the World Bank wrote an internal memo that was leaked to the press. The economist, Lawrence Summers, tried to brush the infamous toxic memo off as a joke. While Summers has gone on to become the Secretary of the Treasury of the U.S. government, his infamous "toxic memo" still stands as a testament not only to his own warped thinking, but a distressing mindset inside the world Bank. --Editors
THE MEMO
Here is the text of the relevant section of Mr. Summers' infamous 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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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."
Mr. Lutzenburger was fired shortly after writing this letter. Mr. Summers remained in the World Bank before joining the Clinton administration and continuing his 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.
--Jim Vallette, International Trade Information Service
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| ashutosh |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 10:25 PM
Krishna-ji,
Where have you been all these months? The memo you
have posted is dated and old news. Please see a reproduction of my
earlier my posting o this site below when someone named Mangal posted
the SAME MEMO here.
*************************
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.
PS: Larry is a perfect example of: If you haven't done anything wrong, then
no matter how much blood your critics want on account of false charges,
you will do just fine.
oohi
ashu
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| ashutosh |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 10:31 PM
What follows is taken from:
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/archive/01mj/mj01_feat_summers_1.html
It's a profile of Larry Summers
***********
For his part, Summers now says of his service with Rubin [in Washington], "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."
***********
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| ashutosh |
Posted
on 22-Oct-01 10:34 PM
The Toxic memo
Taken from:
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/archive/01mj/mj01_feat_summers_2.html
For a decade, Lawrence H. Summers has been dogged by a memo, bearing his name, purporting to advocate exporting polluting industries to poor nations ("underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted") and dumping toxic wastes there ("the economic logic...is impeccable").
The memo, dated December 12, 1991, during his service as vice president and chief economist of the World Bank, found its way to the press, and has since circulated widely on the Internet. It was the subject of a question at his March 11 news conference at Loeb House, and of student protests then and the next day. Summers responded to the reporter, "I think the best that can be said is to quote La Guardia and say, "When I make a mistake, it's a whopper.'"
There is more to the story. In a 1998 New Yorker profile, writer John Cassidy reported that "the memo was composed by a young economist who worked for him, and that Summers, after a cursory review of it, co-signed it to stimulate internal debate."
Of the furor the memo provoked, Summers told Cassidy, "I learned to read a lot more carefully what I sign." He went on to say that "The basic sentiment...is obviously all wrong," and that although there are "real issues about trade-offs between growth and the environment," in this case, "the way those thoughts were expressed wasn't constructive in any sense." Cassidy interviewed Lant Pritchett, the memo's author, who said, "I strongly recommended that he say I had written it and he had just signed it. Larry said no, that wasn't his style. Whatever he signed he would take responsibility for. He took the flak...."
Pritchett joined Harvard's Kennedy School of Government as a lecturer in public policy in the fall of 2000. In a recent interview, he explained that at Summers's request, he reviewed a draft of the bank's annual Global Economic Prospects report, focusing on trade liberalization. In a seven-page memo to Summers, he critiqued several aspects of the argument, including a claim that free trade would necessarily produce environmental benefits in developing nations. He questioned the data supporting that claim, and in criticism wrote as an "ironic aside" suggestions that if (in conventional economic terms) dumping pollutants on poor countries would be "welfare-enhancing" for the world as a whole, the bank ought to endorse that policy. Summers scanned the memo, absorbing its general criticisms (Pritchett doubts he read the environmental section, but thinks Summers devoted sufficient time to the memo), and then had Pritchett reformat its heading for forwarding to other bank staff over Summers's signature.
Thereafter, Pritchett says, someone with access to the memo doctored it, combining the heading and the sentences on pollution and toxic waste, shorn of their context and the intended irony. In this one-page form, appearing to be a policy proposal, the memo found its way to the Economist. "In my mind it was a deliberate fraud and forgery to discredit Larry and the World Bank," Pritchett says. He interprets the incident not as an indication of bureaucratic insensitivity, but as "bureaucrat stands up for junior colleague for 10 years for something he never did."
As a coda, Pritchett notes, at a staff picnic in the summer of 1992, he found himself paired in a tennis doubles round-robin with Summers. Trailing 3-4, and with Pritchett serving, the twosome fell behind love-30. Summers left the net and told his partner, "You know that environment memo? That was your first mistake. If they break your serve, that will be your second." Pritchett won the game. "Competitive?" he says of playing tennis with Summers. "You don't know the half of it!"
THE END
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