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Larry Summers makes sense up to a point — 21 Comments

  1. I guess Summers modulates his message for this audience for fear or being dismissed out of hand and ostracized even further? So he feels he has to heavily imply that of course Republicans and The Right are ignorant and backward, and of course Progressives are morally superior beings with noble intentions regarding higher education, but they’ve (we’ve) gone too far here. It’s tedious.

  2. So, leftist academics have repeatedly misbehaved, but the real problem is that nasty right wing. Sure.

  3. There is no academic freedom at harvard not the likes of banfield or huntington would be welcome

  4. I wonder what “progressive values” Summers thinks are at risk. The Democrats are no longer Bill Clinton’s party. They have moved hard left, so that what the 1990s Democrats thought is considered by today’s radicals to be regressive.

  5. He told the vinklevossi not to sue zucke
    rberg he told the russians shock therapy would be fine he didnt object to the so called inflation adjustment act that i can recall

    Arthur schlesinger made similar arguments 30 some years ago

  6. Virtue signaling is more important than facts or truth. Case in point from this week. I received my former employer’s quarterly PR magazine. Lead article was about how they spent $35k on a “solar flower”. Cute design of a tracking solar panel. The school claims 5000 kWH per year and it will support 40% of the electric energy needs of the building it’s connected to. It took me about a 10 minute calculation to show that the thing will provide on a sunny day about 400W…7 light bulbs worth.

    Truth? Facts? Hell no! As long as they can lie to show how wonderful they are. I wrote a letter, but I doubt it will published.

  7. physicsguy….”Lead article was about how they spent $35k on a “solar flower”. Cute design of a tracking solar panel. The school claims 5000 kWH per year and it will support 40% of the electric energy needs of the building it’s connected to.”

    France has also entered the dumb-energy-ideas sweepstakes with miniature generators connected to the turnstiles in the Paris Metro system…the idea is that all the people going through would generate enough electricity to make a significant contribution to powering the Metro trains.

  8. Well, Larry doesn’t want to be excommunicated from the cool kids club like Alan Dershowitz was. You can claim to still be a Democrat while strongly disagreeing with many of their key ideas and platform, but it won’t matter. They will punish you severely.

    Plus, there is the added wrinkle that these words like “liberal” and “progressive” have been effectively skunked. Thomas Jefferson was a classic liberal. Progressive ideas should lead to social or economic progress. The words have become meaningless.

    It’s all about the cool kids club. And the more inane the ideas of the club are, the stronger the litmus test as to your loyalty.

  9. It almost makes me forgive him for working for Clinton and chiseling the Winkelvosses out of the Facebook gazillions.

  10. “the idea is that all the people going through would generate enough electricity to make a significant contribution to powering the Metro trains.” – David Foster

    Which gives me an idea. Let’s build electric factories where people peddle bikes with large gear systems to power generators hooked in parallel. Pay people minimum wage to ride the bikes. Time and a half for 5pm to 1am, and 6am to 10am.

    Homeless people need a job? The electric factory is waiting.

    Need to lose some weight? Take a job at the electric factory.

    Need to fight cardio-vascular disease? Take a job at the electric factory.

    Want to get in shape and get paid while doing it? The electric factory awaits.

    Watch your favorite TV and get paid at the electric factory.

    Playing the market? Ride the bike while making trades at the electric factory.

    The mind boggles. 🙂

  11. Alan Bloom spoke of the Larry Summers in academia
    in his The Closing of the American Mind. Those who give lip service to academic integrity but who invariably follow it with contradictions that expose their intellectual dishonesty.

  12. “It took me about a 10 minute calculation to show that the thing will provide on a sunny day about 400W…7 light bulbs worth.”

    Point of pedantic nitpickery: These days a typical 60 Watt bulb* only draws about 9 Watts. So a 400 Watt power source will power fortyish light bulbs.

    * The LEDs are rated, of course, to be as bright as an X Watt incandescent.

  13. @ Neo > “After all, he’s just spent quite a lot of verbiage to say that on campuses it’s the left that’s been wishing the process of thought and wishing academic freedom ill – and not just wishing these things ill, but actively stomping on them. But he continues to cling to the idea that it’s somehow the right wishing it and doing it.
    When I read the interview, the sudden change startled me although it absolutely shouldn’t have. It is completely standard”

    This post about Joe Scarborough may have an explanation for the phenomenon, which we have seen in countless pundits & plain people, Left or Right (but mostly Left because the Right is more often correct in the first place).

    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/daily-memo/2909317/the-best-biden-ever/
    by Byron York

    Scarborough said he had “spent a couple of hours with Joe Biden, sitting, talking, going around the world as far as talking issues, talking the economy, talking inflation, talking.” After those discussions, Scarborough came to believe that Biden “might misplace a word here or there” but is in fact really sharp. “I undersold him when I said he was cogent,” Scarborough said. “He’s far beyond cogent. In fact, he’s better than he’s ever been intellectually, analytically. Because he’s been around for 50 years.”

    So what to think? Scarborough said he is basing his view on face-to-face discussion with Biden. He did not offer any more details, but talking to journalists and activists behind the scenes is part of the presidency. So you can’t discount Scarborough’s case even if you disagree with it. But public appearances are also part of the presidency, and millions of people have seen Biden struggle through the basics of presidential performance. It is just a fact that many in Biden’s own party are concerned about his condition.

    Here’s something to consider about Scarborough. The Morning Joe cast and indeed all of MSNBC have long been fanatically anti-Trump. Biden is now what stands between the nation and another Trump presidency. So to play armchair psychiatrist: They feel a deep need to believe in Biden, to suppress doubts about Biden, and to declare that he is not only not weak but strong, strong, strong.

    Another partisan who went into television, George Stephanopoulos, described the process in a memoir of his time as a top campaign and White House aide to President Bill Clinton. In that memoir, All Too Human, Stephanopoulos related the experience in the 1992 campaign when a woman, Gennifer Flowers, claimed she had had an affair with Clinton. Clinton denied it. (It was in fact true.) When Flowers produced a tape of Clinton talking with her on the phone, Stephanopoulos instantly decided it was fake. (It was in fact genuine.) Stephanopoulos became a Clinton attack dog against any and all suggestion that the presidential candidate had had an affair with Flowers.

    Later, when he learned that Clinton had been lying, Stephanopoulos asked himself why he believed so deeply in Clinton’s lie. In All Too Human, he got pretty philosophical about it, and described it this way:

    A dynamic had already started that would repeat itself many times in the years ahead — one explained well by Reinhold Niebuhr: “Frantic orthodoxy,” he wrote, “is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.” I now had doubts about Clinton, had seen his flaws up close, which caused me to focus even more intently on his strengths and believe even more fervently in his ideas. … I didn’t want our enemies to win. They’d stop at nothing to defeat him, so nothing would stop me from defending him. Now I was a true true believer.

    So now, in this armchair psychoanalysis scenario, Scarborough cannot bear the thought that his enemies, the Trumpists, might win. They’d stop at nothing to defeat Biden, so nothing will stop Scarborough from defending him. That includes making a preposterous case to deny something millions of people can see with their own eyes.

    Again, that’s armchair psychoanalysis. But it might be simpler than that. On Wednesday, the X account End Wokeness posted a video of Scarborough’s discussion with the message: “Joe Scarborough goes full state TV.” Indeed, claiming that a leader who appears to be on his last legs is in fact incredibly vigorous is perfectly consistent with the denial of reality we have seen many times in government-run media.

    There’s one last possibility. Scarborough didn’t exactly say Biden is super sharp. He said Biden is the best he, Biden, has ever been, intellectually and analytically. In light of that, remember the words of former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Robert Gates, who in 2014 wrote that Biden “has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Certainly Biden’s handling of some of the key events of his presidency has done nothing to prove Gates wrong. In that sense, it might be fair to argue that Biden is as wrong as he has ever been. He could arguably be “the best Biden ever,” but that still wouldn’t be very good.

  14. Suggested improved wording:

    “Go figure; it’s another case of a mind being a difficult thing to change, especially in-absentia.”

  15. }}} We’re never going to find some ultimate perfect truth, but through argument, analysis, discussion, and study we can get closer to truth.

    Indeed, this is entirely and absolutely, exactly what the process is about. A continual refinement of what can be objectively known to get closer and closer to objective truths.

    And, for things that are inherently subjective, a clear dialogue/debate to clarify public understanding and develop an actual “wisdom of the crowd” (as opposed to mob rule) to be used as a standard for what is expected in those scenarios.

  16. That york piece is defining devisncy down biden was never any good yet they vouched for him

  17. it’s another case of a mind being a difficult thing to change, especially regarding politics.

    It’s more the case of the enormous pressure to conform in academia. I happened to know Larry Summers early in his career pretty well, and he seemed at that point to be moderately conservative. He was a protege of Martin Feldstein, who was Reagan’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (and Larry was a senior staff economist on the CEA under Feldstein for a couple of years). It’s possible he was more liberal but played it down the middle because of his relationship with Feldstein, but my impression is that he shifted from Republican to Democrat in the late 1980s after joining Harvard. Change in that direction seems relatively easy.

  18. Probably an overgeneralization:
    On the left, the people are “in” their and the generally left viewpoints, and the viewpoints are “in” them.
    On the right, the viewpoints are external to the individual.
    Thus, on the left, change is a personal issue, not solely a matter of taking in new facts are rearranging one’s assessments.
    And personal issues are…personal. You don’t want to become a Very Bad Person just because of some facts, do you? Facts, then, must go away.

  19. What Larry Summers said that drove him out of the Presidency of Harvard is that while male and female average IQs are the same, the male distribution has a higher standard deviation, meaning that males are more prone to extreme low and extreme high IQs than females, who tend to be clustered towards the center of the Gaussian curve.

    Basically, he said there are more idiot and genius males than females.

    This is scientifically accurate as has been shown by > 100 years of IQ testing.

    Erronius

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