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TechnoratiWhy We Should Banish Larry Summers from Public Life
I vote to banish Larry Summers. Not from the planet. That wouldn't be nice. Just from public life.
The criticisms of President Obama's chief economic adviser are well known. He's too close to Wall Street. And he's a frightful bully, of both people and countries. Still, we're told we shouldn't care about such minor infractions. Why? Because Summers is brilliant, and the world needs his big brain.
And this brings us to a central and often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles. This is the process wherein the intelligence of an inarguably intelligent person is inflated and valued beyond all reason, creating a dangerous accumulation of unhedged risk. Larry Summers is the biggest Brain Bubble we've got.
Brain Bubbles start with an innocuous "whiz kid" moniker in undergrad, which later escalates to "wunderkind." Next comes the requisite foray as an economic adviser to a small crisis-wracked country, where the kid is declared a "savior." By 30, our Bubble Boy is tenured and officially a "genius." By 40, he's a "guru," by 50 an "oracle." After a few drinks: "messiah."
The superhuman powers bestowed upon these men -- and yes, they are all men -- shield them from the scrutiny that might have prevented the current crisis. Alan Greenspan's Brain Bubble allowed him to put the economy at great risk: When he made no sense, people assumed that it was their own fault. Brain Bubbles also formed the key argument Greenspan and Summers used to explain why lawmakers couldn't regulate the derivatives market: The wizards on Wall Street were too brilliant, their models too complex, for mere mortals to understand.
Back in 1991, Summers argued that the subject of economics was no longer up for debate: The answers had all been found by men like him. "The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering," he said. "One set of laws works everywhere." Summers subsequently laid out those laws as the three "-ations": privatization, stabilization and liberalization. Some "kinds of ideas," he explained a few years later in a PBS interview, have already become too "passé" for discussion. Like "the idea that a huge spending program is the way to stimulate the economy."
And that's the problem with Larry. For all his appeals to absolute truths, he has been spectacularly wrong again and again. He was wrong about not regulating derivatives. Wrong when he helped kill Depression-era banking laws, turning banks into too-big-to-fail welfare monsters. And as he helps devise ever more complex tricks and spends ever more taxpayer dollars to keep the financial casino running, he remains wrong today.
Word is that Summers's current post may be a pit stop on the way to the big prize, Federal Reserve chairman. That means he could actually make "maestro."
Mr. President, please: Pop this bubble before it's too late.
This column first appeared in The Washington Post.
120 Comments so far
Show AllIt's not fair to say that economists are the problem, they're statisticians.
If Obama was taking advice from Stiglitz, Krugman and Baker the citizen would be better off.
These guys are invaluable to the progressive cause. Nerd-Bashing.....really?
I just commented on Dean Baker's last post but can only read it if I'm logged-on.
Have I been black-listed from CD?
The evil of Summers is most apparent in his smile--a joyless grimace, almost a sneer. Even when he smiles, his eyes are dead. There is something surpassingly strange and chilling about this man.
The word "repulsive" seems to have been coined to describe Larry Summers.
Summers is very corrupt!! Obama will come to regret his selection. He should be gone, pronto. From an article called, The Summers Conundrum, in The Nation last winter, 3 key paragraphs.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081124/ames
"But let's return to the Summers timeline. After his stint in the Reaganomics brain trust, he returned to Harvard to serve as one of the university's youngest professors. In 1988, he was Michael Dukakis's chief economic advisor, but when that campaign failed to bring Summers to power, he turned to America's great rival, the former Soviet Union, to try out his economic experiments. In 1990, Lithuania, a restive Soviet republic seeking independence, hired Summers to advise on that country's economic transformation. Poor Lithuania had no idea what it got itself into. This was Summers's first opportunity to tackle a country in economic crisis and put his wunderkind theories into practice. The results were literally suicidal: in 1990, when Summers first arrived, Lithuania's suicide rate was 26.1 per 100,000 and falling. Just five years after Summers got his hands on Lithuania's economy, life became so unbearable under the economic transition that the suicide rate nearly doubled to 45.6 per 100,000, worse than any other ex-Soviet republic in transition. In fact, it was the highest suicide rate in the world, suggesting something particularly harsh and brutal about the economic transition in that country as opposed to the others, where suffering and pain were common. Things got so bad that in 1992, after just two years of Summers-nomics, the traumatized Lithuanians voted the communist party back into power, the first East European nation to do so--even though just a year earlier Lithuanians actually died on the streets fighting communism.
"Fresh off his success in Lithuania, Summers moved to the World Bank, where he was named the chief economist in 1991, the year he issued his famous let's-pollute-Africa memo. It was also the year that Summers, and his Harvard protégé Andrei Schleifer (who worked with Summers on the Lithuania economic transformation), began their catastrophic "rescue" of Russia's crisis-ridden economy. It's a complicated story involving corruption, cronyism and economic devastation. But by the end of the 1990s, Russia's GDP had collapsed by more than 60 percent, its population was suffering the worst death-to-birth ratio of any industrialized nation in the twentieth century, and the financial markets that Summers and Schleifer helped create had collapsed in what was then the world's biggest debt default ever. The result was the rise of Vladmir Putin and a national aversion to free markets and anything associated with Western liberalism.
"But that's not all. Summers, through Schleifer, was also tainted with some of that country's corruption, which resulted in a US Justice Department lawsuit against Schleifer and others. While Schleifer was being paid by US taxpayers to advise the Russians on capital markets in the 1990s, his wife, Nancy Zimmerman, bought and traded Russian equities for a Boston hedge fund she ran--they even used Schleifer's US taxpayer-funded offices to run Zimmerman's Moscow-based hedge fund operations.
I keep saying this, but no one cares to do the research !!!!!
Four men who attended meetings of The Bilderberg Club were: Summers, Geithner, Bernanke, and Paulson.........Do your research: Club Bilderbebrg, Council on Foreign Relations, Tri Lateral Commission........All "The Boys Are Members" from Zbigniew to Henry........They are all the same:"The Power Elite".......
How stupid are we? Bank of America and Wells Fargo show profits !!!!! Wow, after firing 15,000 employees and giving your debt to the people of the United States and you buy stocks at their low and sell three days later for a quick profit......Oh, and the Federal Reserve gives you "Free Money" The Fed is a pivate group with no government supervision, ole'!!!!!
Over 5000 have voted. Summers has 78% of the vote. The other nine candidates share 22% among themselves.
Check results here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/custom/2009/04/17/CU2009041702227.html
You have to register to vote in this poll. And I hope you do.
Joe
Now 79% and 56,381 votes cast.
J O E
Please do goto TINY URL, to make a link that works ( for free ):
http://tinyurl.com/
Namaste
Thank you. I did not know how to prevent the truncation. Meanwhile, the end of the above url is 702227.html.
Joe
J O E,
Another even quicker technique
___ is just to add a line-feed ___
on your own,
so that the extended URL shows up on two lines
Larry Summers and all of this cronies could take a few lessons from the mayor of the third largest city in Ontario who has been elected 11 times, is 88 years old, presides over a debt free city which boasts 700 million in reserves. That is a hard record to beat and one that probably wouldn't exist if someone had their fingers in the till at every turn..........and the mayor is a She, they call her Hurricane Hazel.
We have someone like that here in Atlanta, GA and her name is Mayor Shirley Franklin. She has made some tough, controversial decisions because the tax money is just not there for all the public services provided in the past. She has done a good job overall and has started a number of needed projects by executing bond projects. She is in her second term as mayor and will be sorely missed when she leaves office. I wish her well.
DeColores,
Rockerbabe1
"The laws of economics are like the laws of engineering,"
Comments as dumb as this are like the kind of thing a booze-monkey slurs in your ear in the bar after midnight long after the football's over and the atmosphere's gone sour. Then there are about 100 levels of 'intelligence' that just can't get away with it without being laughed out of the room. By the time you get up to the level of visionary (yes Naomi left out an adjective) suddenly it's not embarrassing any more and you get away with it again.
Joseph Goebbels: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it... It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
How's this truth? Economics is a way of measuring stuff not a force of nature. Anna 'nother thing buddy... That blonde at the en' of the bar's been givin' me the eye for hours now...
My IQ is nothing to write home about. To reach solid conclusions I have found that I have to be very cautious and self critical. It's been a leason painfully learned but very valuable. A quicker wit might give me the power to reach conclusions faster but it does not mean I would be more careful and self critical--in fact it might mean that I would be less--particularly if I deemed myself "brilliant." In contrast by plodding along and trying to express and test the logic of each step in a reasoning process I have found that not only can I reach the level of those more intellegent--though it takes more time and effort-- I have a good chance of being more correct. Becuase of the effort made I also have a way of uncovering the faults of other's more careless and grandious thinking when, in turn, I trace its steps. Larry Summers could steal a page from my book. He could humble himself and ask why he has been wrong in the past and why he may be wrong now. When instead he pontificates about banking problems, "first of all let's keep this in the private sector." he really shows his true colors and demonstrates uncritical arrogance. I believe that this faulty, untested, uncritcal major premise about the approach to solving the problems of our financial sector will lead to a disasterous result. A Harvard PhD does not change that.
In his talks on economics in 1991 on PBS; Economics is like engineering and certain rules apply, or something to that effect. What bullshit! If you are erecting a building or a bridge, dam, a rocket, a jet airplane; you apply certain engineering priciples or you have catastrophic failures. To effect change you build prototypes to eliminate failure and loss of life. You do not just put your ideas into production for economic gain and let the chips fall where they may.
Economics is a science of theories based on whatever whom is trying to further their own interest. Essentially, what Summers and his ilk have done. Highjack the governments right to control money. When we know that these to big to fail institutions are nothing but insolvent. The process of injecting money into them is useless; in essence what Japan did in the 1990's and are still suffering the consequences.
I've always heard and been told many times in my life; "You just don't see the big picture." What I took this to mean is, that they really didn't have a clue and they were faking it.
Mathematics is a science and most economics based on addition, subtraction, multiplication, and even statistics are sound if applied with certain caution.
Larry Summers is the same cretin who said about 10 years ago that---"We should dump our toxic wastes in Central and South America, because they don't value life the way we do." QUOTE!
Yep, we actually DO value life--whereas white culture just lives in a toxic waste dump and thinks shopping makes it smell better.
Yes, read the Summer's memo to see just a glimpse of his true colors. We should hand him over to the Somalia Pirates.
Great comments. I'd just point out that Summers (and Geithner) also reflect their employer, Obama. They're all peas in the same rotten pod.
A little while ago, some people on this site were arguing that Obama's right-wing Clintonite and Friedmanite cabinet appointments didn't really matter - or at least Obama himself argued that point. It should be clear by now that it matters a great deal whom Obama appoints.
On the economic side, Obama hired the economic torturers themselves - the Chicago School of Economics shock boys.
On the question of intelligence, being good with numbers is OK, but it's not everything - especially when such talents just go toward the general immiseration of humankind. Most of these clowns are just ideologues, getting rich on bad advice and self-dealing.
-TIA
America the land of WAR, CORPORATIONS and ISRAEL
Summers has gotten where he has because the elite like his ideas. But there is a far more significant issue. Why is it that we get on our knees and beg our "Great Leader" to please stop putting in the wrong people? Obama is every bit as wrong as Summers, and every bit as culpable. No president will burst this "bubble" of ideas, because it is not a "bubble," it is a system ideological control. Those whose ideas serve the elite are backed with funding behind their ideas. We cannot have "intelligence" without true free speech. Free speech is not free unless it is "free," as in you don't pay a dime for it. The people who are not only intelligent, but right on the issues, are the "crazy," "divisive," "offensive," "unconstructive," "nutjob," "radical," "socialist" people (well the people who make the most sense really ARE radical and socialist).
Shokku Masta
I think that the expense borne by the Federal Government to keep Summers engaged here is worth it. Perchance, that he would be advising other nations! Al Qaeda, eat your hearts out! We keep the Bubble Boy, the Brain Bubble here where we see the damage. Imagine him laying waste to large swathes of other nations with his brilliant advice, with his discoveries of the laws of economics! Ooooh privatization, is it? Market forces is it? Which market? Perhaps, he would like the economy to function like a piece of machinery, and all 'cept him cogs with pre-set actions. Seldom does the brilliance of things and people shine in the Sunlight. We are a generous nation to keep Summers off the Street, or are we? I mean keeping him off the Street. If unemployment does not dip to 4% by Q2 of 2010 some folk might suggest that Summers be dressed in a blond wig and a red dress and rendered to some other folk in dresses and living in caves. Uncharitable isn't it?
Once again Naomi Klein nails it head on with clarity and intelligence. I love reading everything she writes.
Mr. Summers needs to have all his money and assets seized and turned over to the public in whatever way is best. Then he should be put in jail for the rest of his life along with all the other deregulators.
Summers is the head Mountebank. The shill and chief will never fire him.
JAM4, you are trolling the wrong site. Obviously you haven't noticed your pocket as well as ours is being picked by the Summers crowd.
Maybe we need a president with a degree in economics a la Krugman, not Geithner. Obama did comment as a candidate that economics was a weak point with him. Well, he better smarten up fast on it or he will be toast. Obama's economic "team" makes me think of wagons circling to protect the bankers, who are refusing TARP funds unless they come without executive pay restrictions. Whose money is being spent on them? Am I missing something? And who do they think they are, dictating the terms by which WE save THEM?
I hear they are referring to themselves as the Masters of the Universe. Are they really? Or is there a yet deeper inner circle pulling the strings? I think yes. People who are quite out of sight and out of reach.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Marry Me Naomi Klein!
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then farce. (K Marx)
What can be done in this farce?
Get rid of knee-jerk reactions.
Change your perspective.
This is more "serious" than you imagine.
He sounds like a real tool. Klein has really nailed something with this article.
I wish that people were anti-authoritarian enough to question these men before they wreck whole countries, and to not be cowed by someone who intentionally talks above normal peoples' heads about crazy forms of regression and econometrics as a tactic for sidestepping the perfectly valid questions about their social values. But once they HAVE sunk entire economies with their advice--there's really no excuse left for the people who tolerate them.
I agree with you, and I'm a Particle Physicist. I've actually had this kind of thing tried on me. It was particularly satisfying to watch the economist blubber after I informed him that my understanding of quantum field theory and stochastic processes surely gave me the mathematical tools necessary to understand his theories and therefore he cannot simply dismiss my objections as simply the ramblings of a moron.
As I peeled away the layers it became ever more clear that his economics was really religion with math attached to hide the inner faith-based philosophy. Naomi Klein was right there too, his Ayatolla was Milton Friedman.
And when confronted with facts the economist does what any priest will do...ignore them because faith always trumps reason.
Dear physicscitizen - great post... Hope you will continue to use your education to discredit the economics of fantasy and fraud.
But one does not have to understand quantum theory and stochiastic processes in order to know that 2 + 2 = 4 and that when you lend money to someone who cannot pay it back, what you get is a bad loan. No fancy formula required.
Joe
Doesn't Obama fit under the same category of highly inflated big brain bubble?
Not really. He's just a lot better than the last guy who was in office and also a lot better than the guy who would be in office now if we hadn't elected Obama. Just how different do you think McCain's 'stimulous' package would have been? Would there have been ANY programs to help the poor? Would ANY infrastructure spending have been authorized? Maybe, but only if you were in a Republican district and had a bridge project that needed to go nowhere.
I think that creates a false floor above which he looks a lot better than he really is.
The media picks up on the collective sigh of relief from the public and then amplifies it...which then puts him in the category of "savior" really.
Nothing to do with brains.
Thanks Naomi. Banished from public life. Brilliant. let's do it.
A friend of mine went to vote and was blocked. Instead he got the following error message:
403 Forbidden
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Resin Professional 3.0.21 (built Thu, 10 Aug 2006 12:17:46 PDT)
Is anyone familiar with this?
Joe
Milton friedman's economics for the 'elite' by any other name is economics for the 'elite' and it doesn't make a bit of difference whether that puke was spewing from friedman's mouth or asshole or whether it is spewing out of summers' or geithner's mouth or asshole, it is grand larceny and a crime deserving of prosecution and punishment. I, for one, would rather dispense with the prosecution as what these and the other financial terrorists have done to many times more people than can be counted, is nothing short of criminal attacks and the people have the right to defend themselves.
To mark the 100 days, evidently, W'Obama decided to reassure our torturers that they have nothing to fear at all, not even fear itself; and as the NYT reported, he's declining to re-open NAFTA talks.
True decisive action would have crippled the rightwing in the US for decades; but that would've put the Decider the 2nd in the uncomfortable position of having to cut off the majority of Democratic reps as well.
Wasn't it Summers who drove Cornell West out of Harvard also?
don't know if this has been mentioned, but Summers had some pretty vitriolic remarks about women as Professors in Universities. Some of my colleagues were stinging when Obama chose him.
1) Yes, Summers was forced out of his post as Harvard University's President by the faculty in 2006. Reason: assertions of his to the effect that women were less intellectually able than men.
2) He was also the cause of Cornel West's departure from Harvard. West went to Princeton.
3) While Summers worked at the World Bank as chief economist, he came up with the brilliant idea (the man has been a genius for decades) of shipping toxic waste and pollutants from highly industrialized countries to little polluted Third World countries. Here is the memo in which he put forth this remarkable proposal:
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.
Summers, on the other hand, was appointed the U.S. Treasury Secretary on July 2nd, 1999, and served through the remainder of the Clinton Admistration. Afterwards, he was named president of Harvard University.
Give the dude a big hand for unsurpassed intelligence quotient!
Just what we need. Someone whose logic is merciless and whose heart is the size and temperature of an ice cube. This dude needs to be shown the door.
When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson
Abendland....did Summers really write about "prostrate cancer"? Maybe he didn't have to be able to spell correctly to be chief economist at the world bank, but it sure would have helped his credibility if he had...isn't one of the requisites of such a job to be able to sweat the details? And then to go on to head Harvard, and talk about the intellectual inferiority of women?? Sheesh!
Thanks for posting this!
It is so clear that Summers is just too brilliant to suffer any criticism.
Do I now have permission to kneel?
,
I vote to banish Naomi Klein.
She is a bad-mouthing, nagging newspaper writer and frustrated feminist.
Mr Summers may not be her cup of tea, however he has had a long career of both public and private service. Mr. Summers contributions have been of significant value. Never has this country and our President needed brilliant minds more.
Ms. Klein is the current Leader of the "No Nothings--International".
Ms. Klein should take her message off planet!!!
,
You disparage a smart, very attractive woman just like Summers did to Iris Mack and to women in general. She must be threatening to your ego. May I guess that you are fairly unsuccessful with women?
Joe
Is that you, Mr Summers?
"Mr. Summers contributions have been of significant value."
Name two and describe in detail.
Hmmm... a lot of name-calling here with very little to back it up.
I presume you have read "The Shock Doctrine"??
And have you also read "Capitalism and Freedom" by Friedman?
One of these is actually well researched and backed up with a lot of evidence, the other is an ideological statement.
You might not like Klein's message, but she has a point that requires a well-reasoned response rather than an ad hominem response.
I have no special objection to Naomi Klein. Only praise, in fact.
As for the use of the word 'thuggery', believe it or not, ad hominem calls and interjections have their place in the realm of political speech. We are not in a physics class here.
If you look closely at the indentation levels, you'll see that physicscitizen was responding to JAM4 April 20th, 2009 7:12 pm, not to your reply to that post. Keeping track of who's responding to whom can get a little confusing.
Yes, a long career of both public and private thuggery.
When he headed Harvard, Larry Summers fired Dr. Iris Mack, MBA, Ph.D (in mathematics from Harvard), for warning him that Harvard's trust fund investments stood to lose tons of money on risky investments in such things as derivatives. Of course Dr. Mack was right and Summers was wrong and Harvard lost somewhere around 30% of its portfolio (some people estimate 40%, no one in the public really knows).
Dr. Mack went on to create a wonderful math site for kids www.phatmath.com
Maybe that explains his disparaging remarks about lack of innate ability of women in math and science. Innate ability is a mysterious something given to the elite, like him. A woman who looks at facts and evaluates them correctly is just an ordinary intellect, a plodding worker bee. Narcissistic frauds use ridicule and then ostracism against truth tellers.
Joe
I don't think the world, and especially the so-called "Third World", can survive another round of idol-worship towards economists. That which was thrown towards Milton Friedman was far too destructive.
I agree with Naomi Klein - banish this man as far from the halls of power as possible.
smipypr
Banish Larry Summers and the rest of the spawn of Friedman and Greenspan. The ironic thing is that when there is anti-intellectual bias on the part of conservatives, the bias against any form of progressive thought - be that economic, social, or political.
Conservatives and libertarians never fail to trumpet the brain power of their own brand of intellectuals. The Freidmanites have always gotten away with considering the world as their own little laboratory for poverty creation. I had high hopes for Obama early on, figuring he'd attract a different crowd to the White House. Too bad for me. And for all of us, if he doesn't wise up.
AS I have said before, and many times...Obama is to young, to inexperienced for the job. If he feels that he needs all these former Clintonites, and Bushees, he is headed for a trainwreck, and proves my point of to young and inexperienced..
Like Bubba Clinton he does not have a clue. How much longer can we survive with
these on the job learning dummies?
Would the more experienced John McCain have given less money to the banks?
What about the more experienced Dick Cheney?
As you can see, I find this argument very hard to swallow.
Obama is making a mistake, this I agree with, but the problem is deeper than his "inexperience" the problem is an entire field, economics, where the good people are marginalized to University positions and the ideologues get the top-paying jobs in Goldman Sachs and are then accepted as part of the pool for selection in the Fed and as part of the administration.
"Promotion" in this field is not based on any kind of model that has successfully predicted the economic health of the whole population...it only takes into account how much money the economist himself made.
As one of my economist colleagues pointed out to me... If you are an economist, and you want a job as a top Banker, you won't get anywhere by writing articles saying that privatizing the Bank of England is a bad idea. You only get that job if you write articles saying it's a good idea.
Of course, such a statement exposes the fiction that economics is in any way a science.
So back to the original statement, just how is he supposed to pick a good person when the accepted short-list is packed full of the kinds of sycophants I just described?
I agree that he is making a mistake, but it's not one that he alone would have made. So a lack of experience is NOT the reason he is making that mistake.
This is not an issue of younger age equaling incompetency and therefore reliance on old ways of doing things. Younger elected officials are fully capable of enacting progressive and just public policy.
In order to deflect the death spiral economy we find ourselves in, we need to kick around another obviously flawed administration official. Look, it’s not Larry Summers that needs to be popped and hung up on the shed. He just happens to be convenient fodder for the current thrasher. We have ignored years of regulatory and state capture to the point where our economy has blown up and we are left with little worthy of a fresh start. Obama could have changed guards at the Treasury and Fed but saw fit to install more of the same. This only represents more capture. And now that we have just sat and let financial Armageddon take hold, we curiously need to whip someone.
It has been eight years since the investor flock has been sheared so they were due. I suppose the human need to make a lot of quick money keeps them coming back; on and on into the universe. There never will be a shortage of all too willing people with investment capital to fill up the clueless funds that generate the salaries of so many non productive advisors. They will have to be reduced to driving taxis or selling apples before becoming unwilling to return to a market that is posed to plumb depths previously thought impossible.
Klein is too, too kind to Summers. Too kind by far. The economic devastation, the human suffering, and the blighted lives, not to mention the suicides for which Summers and his greed-goon colleagues share responsibility are NOT victimless crimes. Summers and the crew of well-heeled, thieving financial services industry thugs he works with with should be investigated, charged, tried, and jailed for their misdeeds. Lock 'em up. Otherwise, they'll continue to steal from decent people who work for a living.
Yep, that's more like it.
"... the intelligence of an inarguably intelligent person ..."
Ms. Klein seems to believe that this characterization applies to Larry Summers. She later writes that "he has been spectacularly wrong again and again." The latter statement clearly shows that he's not very intelligent, but even Ms. Klein seems to be falling for his con job.
There's a widespread tendency to ascribe intelligence and virtue to powerful and wealthy people. It's probably a manifestation of a deep-rooted primate instinct to submit to the tribe's leaders (alpha males and all that).
Intelligence doesn't always result in being correct, though I suppose it's still the way to bet, given alternatives.
Could it be that Summers is wrong for another reason? Some people are still making a lot of money thrashing the economy about. Some might find sympathy with the right person being wrong in the right way at the right time.
corrupt systems never reform themselves.
brain bubbles and black holes, curious anomolies. Must be a connection.
Obama came to the White House with some very large IOUs to the "financial sector. A lot of the early nods and later bundles came from them. Summers, Geithner and some of these other hacks are the quid pro quo. It's weird, though, how they are failing so spectacularly, getting less and less result with each new, ever more expensive bailout. Geithner is looking like a buffoon or at least completely out of his depth. Summers just looks like a smug blowhard.
You just have to wonder...WTF is Obama thinking? Is this a battlefield feint? Allow the insiders to publicly blunder and discredit themselves, then strike out on a new course? Or is Obama himself out of his depth, dazzled by the suits and their empty "wisdom"? It's like with torture. First he backs the Pentagon's play at Bagram, then his JD defends Bush/Cheney era "stat secrets", then he releases the CIA torture memos, then he goes to the CIA to simultaneously praise them and give them a civics lecture, that was only a step short of a spanking for the Bush/Cheney years. How many times did Bush physically go Langley to give "the troops" a pep talk. And on Cuba and Venezuela! He has got to be severely pissing off South Com there, not to mention the cuban Americans, who are at least 50% Democrat. Is he just trying to see if we are awake (are we?) The guy is inscrutable!
The economic agenda should be to:
Resign Summers
Resign Geithner
In addition to the host of other pro-deregulation appointees Obama has made.
These advisors are not guiding Obama to adopt the populist policies that Americans wanted when they voted for him. These appointments are a great disservice to all of us.
I disagree: banish Larry Summers from Earth and send him to Mars.
The irony here is that the truly smart kids, in school.. were NOT the ones who get A's. The A-seeker is the kid who likes winning.. being " right," and that there is a vertical hierarchical ranking-scale by which all things are assessed.
The truly brilliant, gifted, and creative minds- are statistically- far more likely to
a. drop out
b. do drugs
c. die- suicide rate for gifted kids peaks at age 15, and is the highest demographic.. higher rate than even the gay kids.
SOOOO... what does that say about a society, and who/ what it values and promotes, in terms of social Darwinism?
additionally... years ago, there was a study done about kids and honesty, a quirk outcome, it was discovered that the kids who were the best liars.. were not necessarily the ones who would get A's.. but the best liars ( most believable, best at lying).. were the ones most likely to be voted class president, or most popular.
so- brain bubble... no.. these aren't the true wunderkids.. and they are generally pushing themselves trying to be something they are not, truly brilliant..
le plus ca change....
I'm with you in Rockland, kiddo.
Just a con man promoting the I'm-too-smart-to be challenged angle.
Obama is either a servile sucker or just another hack for the good ol boys club.
vern: "Obama is either a servile sucker or just another hack for the good ol boys club"
isn't that redundant
I understand your criticism that too often we look at personalities and individuals rather than the systemic problems and solutions. Summers however is a wonderful exemplar of what is wrong with our economy and culture. So many of our worst attributes (bullying, racism, sexism, elitism, ruthlessness, greed, dishonesty, arrogance...) are wrapped up in this one man who has been put in a position to rule our lives and those of several generations to come. I would say he has exhibited incompetence, but he has been very competent for those who he serves, the super super rich kleptocratic class. Most people are more likely to grasp these issues when presented in an embodied form than in a theoretical form.
Can you change anything without taking care of details? Do you eschew all action and stick to simply explaining the big picture until some complete solution emerges from somewhere? Of course say what you believe, but nothing will happpen unless people start to act. The campaign to get rid of Larry Summers provides an opportunity for people to do something on their own behalf. We need to seed the clouds if we want a hard rain to fall.
Joe
Clear sailing aside, tossing out the flotsam shouldn't slow the Grand and Inevitable Flow of History.
Obama is part of the dialectic that must be resolved before scoailism of communism can be realized.
My questions is, can you have a socialistic country that does not produce anything? Except weapons and pharmaceuticals.
Larry Summers is the classic fat boy who could never get laid. He took his revenge at Harvard; especially on women who would not fuck him.
My other favorite is Jeffrey Sachs, who according to naomi, destroyed two major economies before he saw the light.
Now he is a practising Messiah at Columbia, inflicting damage on Kenya and other third world countries. Beware the nerd who has come over from the dark side. He has that couldn't get laid chip on his shoulder.
Let Summers have the Federal reserve. It has already been destroyed by Alan Greenspan - another nerd who couldn't get laid (except by Andrea?_
The moral of the story ...never put anyone in power who couldn't get laid.
And you know all this because.....
Those morons in the ruling class always proclaim their adherents as geniuses simply as a means of making the masses believe they have the best people that could be got, when in reality they have the worst people. It's just another routine facet of dominance. Take that half-wit Greenspan; in his memoirs he cites Chile under General Pinoshit as an example of a country independently successfully following the IMF and WB's monetary policy as evidence that capitalism is the model that people prefer to choose, ignoring entirely that Pinoshit came to power through the coup orchestrated by that other half-wit, Kissenger.
And all their corporate media used to write that Sununoo was the big brain in Bush's government, but the most memorable thing anyone remembers about that idiot was when he pulled out an eyebrow lash, with a pair of tweezers cupped in his hand, from daddy Bush and the big brave president cried "OW! That hurt!" at a time when he was slaughtering Iraqi's.
The people in the U.S. government are not smart. They are just ordinary, and evil.
A certain portion of the human mind is dedicated to being cunning. In the beginning this portion was small, the way the financial sector of our economy used to be small (2% - 3%). Over the centuries, the portion has become larger and larger, along with civilization and our financial sector (now 12% - 15%). Summers is an exemplar of the cunning and is acting as Obama's mentor in this department (Rahm Emmanuel is both too obvious and too crude). For the Democrats, better that a cunning person be a former head of an Ivy League university than the kind of sharkskin Mack the Knife preferred 4 to 1 by Republicans.
morty: did you develop this concept on your own or did you learn it somewhere
My father taught it to me.
ok so did he develop that on his own or did he learn it somewhere
You might ask which part of his mind he used to formulate it.
My father taught it to me.
who cares
the country is over
finito
done like dinner
stick a fork in it
bye
ta ta
i say let the mexicans take it over - they couldn't do a worse job of running the place, besides they do all the work
plus they have that lovely mariachi music
Larry is not so smart. Had he and Obama made the tax cuts a bigger part of their stimulus plan, the Paradox of thrift would have added to bank reserves while simultaneously boosting consumption. This would have appeased the G.O.P. and united the investment class. Even the Stiglitz and Krugman clan could have been brought on board by taking $$ from t.a.r.p. and adding to stimulus. The bigger numbers would have bolstered confidence and the political harmony would have given the Obama team options to use returned t.a.r.p. $$ to further pet programs later on. The Lincoln idea of "keeping enemies close" requires a level of clever beyond the Obama team. There is a big difference between acting smart and being smart!
While we at it let's add the entire contigent of Obama's braintrust to the list. Obama is beginning to remind me of Jimmy Carter; decent but not up to the task. That or we really got snowed by him. I prefer to think him a decent guy but I am probably just projecting.
Where do we get "decent" here? Surely Bush has not become the standard?
With all due respect, I'm quite sure that you're projecting. Decent people often ascribe more virtue to others than they deserve. This country is in urgent need of a "Nice People Anonymous" group before the next presidential election.
What do Larry Summers and Stephen Hawking have in common?
Both brought us into a black hole.
Summer's was a financial one.
Hawking's was astronomical.
One is a real brain, the other's a fraud.
Unfortunately Mr. Hawking has fallen seriously ill and his outlook doesn't look good.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/
ALeqM5gXTqqeOkfGj1m48YIY_JoiFK-q3wD97MBFL03
let us not smear dr hawking with the bank shill summers
please, let's not do that
here is the message from his website today:
"Due to very high demand, the website has been simplified to keep the server online. We apologise for the lack of in-depth content, which would normally be available here.
Professor Hawking is comfortable, but will be spending the night in hospital. The Cambridge University Press Office have a statement to this effect, and do not expect to have any further updates until mid-morning tomorrow."
perhaps the most intelligent human to live he was also famous for his book on the history of time
read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking
god bless you dr hawking - live long and prosper
Well, I guess that makes Bugs Bunny the second smartest person to live because he used to throw black holes on the ground and stick his head up in China. There's no science that supports anything as stupid as a "black hole" in space and to believe in that kind of nonsense it is necessary to believe in an "aether" that encompasses the totality.
Exactly! These are the same idiots who claim that the very Earth upon which we stand is nothing more than an enormous BALL mysteriously floating in a vacuum. And-- get this-- that it ROTATES around the SUN instead of the other way around!
Sheesh!
· Yr Obd't Servant
It took rational people hundreds of year to persuade the Catholic Church that. I recall that Copernicus I believe was branded a heretic for suggesting the notion that the earth may not be the centre of the universe.
You're probably thinking of Galileo. I don't think the Church got around to denouncing Copernicus' heliocentric theory until much later. In fact, as I recall, in Arthur Koestler's book "The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe", he writes that after Copernicus spoke about his theory to representatives of the Church, the Pope had a gift sent to him as thanks. Unfortunately, people in the Church who bore a strong resemblance to our current politicians eventually got the upper hand.
They obviously still have the same cartel in the Vatican now, as evidenced by the pope's gift to Bush and his criminal associates; his visit to the White House. The hierarchy in the church know that they do well when things are bad for a lot of people and they wield their influence adroitly in conjunction with the capitalists. Any person who truly believes in Jesus and what He stands for wouldn't have been caught dead entering that abode of evil incarnate.
Why are black holes stupid? They aren't an actual hole in space you know. They are a region of space where the gravitational field is so strong that even light can't escape so it appears black. There are lots of suspected black holes in various galaxies.
Black holes are stupid because you can't have a gravity field that is independent of mass. Each particle of mass produces a small amount of energy that holds the particle together as an independent entity. The only way gravity can exist is if there is a mass particle to exude it. The more mass particles there are together, the stronger the gravity. Take away the mass, and there is no gravity. In the case of the black hole hypothesis all of the mass disappears but supposedly leaves the gravity behind from each body it swallows.
The idea of black holes needs other stupid hypotheses to support the original dumb idea, such as "infinite density" which compresses mass until it disappears. The need for large solid bodies to disappear is a sure giveaway, because it defies the Law of the Conservation of Energy.
All stars constantly exude energy and that means that their gravity, including the gravity of our sun, is constantly getting weaker as it ages. Eventually, when they can actually measure gravity instead of making cartoons about it, our sun will be the perfect body to study for the effects of gravity getting weaker as the amount of mass in the sun decreases. None of that nonsense is compatible with Einstein's E=mc² and if any hypothesis does not agree with Relativity then either the hypothesis or Relativity must be discarded. You can't have both.
Gibberish alert!
I think the Hubbell telescope has actually shown us some black holes hasn't it? And isn't a black hole simply a totally collapsed star?
But let me make a comment similar to yours regarding another cosmological anomaly. It is called ... drumroll ... DARK MATER! In order to make all of their other computations work, cosmologists posit the existence of DARK MATTER, matter that cannot be seen, and that supposedly makes up 95% of the matter in the universe. Can't get your formulas to work? Its DARK MATTER, baby. You can't see it. You can't touch it. But it EXISTS. The equations tell us so! Well, they don't work otherwise ...
Please my friend take a look at this picture:
http://www.cosmographica.com/gallery/portfolio2007/
content/bin/images/large/059_CygnusX_1.jpg
The people who labeled Summers as brilliant were probably nothing more than parasitic sycophants who stood to profit from his crackpot theories.
He's no more brilliant than the man on the corner with three shells and a pea. He's the same just on a much larger scale. You can go to just about any jail, prison, or business and find a con artist that is as smart as these "economists". It's nothing more than deception to take other peoples money.
"And this brings us to a central and often overlooked cause of the global financial crisis: Brain Bubbles."
Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them - Einstein
Bubble brains like McNamara and Kissinger.
Sioux Rose
Or maybe there's an inverse ratio/relationship between said "brain bubble" and heart/soul deficit? Ms. Klein was far too generous in her analysis. The pain and misery that results from the financial theories posited by these so-called experts is equivalent collateral damage by any other name. I'd like to turn the theorists loose in the nations where they devalued the currency. And my wrath is a direct result of reading Ms. Klein's lengthy analyses of the historical data, direct result of the liberalization programs "tried out" on lots of unfortunate persons before coming back to the Homeland Security State to really wrack up the numbers and ruin lives here.
Not really.
Klein pretty much delivered what is the ultimate insult to someone like Summers. That he just isn't smart. Given that his entire reputation, his entire career is built on his supposed genius, that is far more insulting than saying he is a nasty bully.
I agree--heart and soul are much more important than brains. Brains plus arrogance equals disaster.
My feeling exactly. Any strength without kindness becomes brutality.
Joe
Larry Summers' problem is not that he is intelligent. His problem is that he is an amoral banker.
While I agree that brains plus arrogance equals disaster, emotion plus arrogance is equally destructive. Intelligence is not goodness or compassion or altruism, nor is it coldness or shrewdness or greed. It can inform evil as well as beneficial enterprises. My experience still confirms that smart people are on average better people than dumb people, more effective, more responsible, nicer. With glaring exceptions of course.
There have been times in history when, riding on a wave of raw emotion, zealots have rounded up all the intellectuals and tossed them in prison or worse. So I am always leery of an anti-intellectual bias and the very bogus postulate that heart and mind are mutually exclusive quantities, or pictures of the human psyche that assume that human feeling is crowded out by some hydraulic law with an excess of intelligence. This is poppycock.
How about wisdom? I'll just take some garden variety wisdom in some of these people.
Wisdom seems to be inversely proportional to ego, which Washington has an abundance of.
Sioux Rose
TED: Bulls-eye!
What you wrote is sensible and eloquently written, but blessthebeast's statement that "heart and soul are much more important than brains" doesn't necessarily mark him as being anti-intellectual.
For my part, I believe that compassion is a form of intelligence - in fact, the deepest form of intelligence. At the most profound level of reality, heart and soul and brains are one. The trouble is, it's so hard to reach that level.
Amen to what you say Mr. Mitchell. I think intelligence is ambient. I think we are made out of intelligence. Our discovery of each other is an act of recognition.
It's strange that getting back to what we already are is so difficult. We are our own big mystery. Take the economy for example. When we emerged from the caves, some things were given. The seasons, the rotation of the celestial bodies, the laws of physics. Other things we invented ourselves, like violins and money and the economy. Now, many thousands of years later, we understand the planets and the laws of physics pretty well. But, as we now discover, nobody knows anything about the economy.
I didn't mean to accuse my longtime CD colleague blessthebeasts of anti-intellectual bias. BTB is plenty smart, and would not be bashing himself.
Impossible to reach because we are IT.
I, the one and only, dream on.
"I believe that compassion is a form of intelligence - in fact, the deepest form of intelligence"
Those who are compassionate have truly absorbed a great deal of knowledge of all kinds and put it together in a way that connects them with others and with the world. The false and facile intelligence of a Summers does not compare.
Joe
Well I suggest he has neither heart and soul NOR brains. Three strikes and you should be out.
GW, I agree. I think Naomi uses "brain bubble" as a sarcastic term.
Nicely observed.
· Yr Obd't Servant
Hitler was even smarter than Summers and look what happened to Germany.