Larry Summers says buh-bye
The White House has announced that economics adviser Larry Summers is leaving.
I’ve been anticipating this move for quite some time (see this), and I’m certainly not the only one (see this). The real question is: why is Summers leaving? Don’t think you’ll find the answer in the formulaic articles about his wanting to return to Harvard before he has to reapply for tenure.
Was Summers’s ego not fed enough by the position, and was he also hurt by Obama’s failure to nominate him as Treasury Secretary? Was there a personality clash between the two? An ideology clash? Both? Neither? Will he write the tell-all book, or keep silent?
And who will replace him? Rumors are that Obama would like it to be a woman CEO. I have no quarrel with the CEO part—Obama’s financial advisers are predominantly academic types, and it would be nice to get the perspective of someone who’s been out more in the real world of business. But seeking a woman in particular bothers me.
It’s not that I’d mind at all if a woman were to be appointed (I have nothing against women; some of my best friends…). But to specifically look for one is PC offensiveness. Of course, that’s the way it goes these days. And of course, the Obama administration has said it will hire the best person (“Administration officials emphasized there’s no litmus test for the job and they will hire the most qualified person they can find.”) But it’s a good guess that that “best person” will somehow turn out to be a woman, perhaps this one.
The departing Summers is famous for rubbing people the wrong way (abrasive, like sandpaper), and his tenure as Harvard’s head featured fuming faculty members and a controversy over remarks he made about the scarcity of women in the most upper echelons of science (see this and this for my take on the matter).
Now that Obama would like to get some fresh blood into the administration, Summers will be on his way back to Harvard in a few months. And what does Harvard think of the return of the prodigal? Fine, as long as he doesn’t want to be President again, or hold any position of power and influence, according to this professor:
“Larry is always a source of lively argument and ideas,” said Theda Skocpol, a professor of government and sociology who had been one of Mr. Summers’s toughest critics, adding, “The Summers presidency ended quite a long time ago, and everybody at Harvard has long since moved on.”
Ouch.
Why would anyone swim away from the S.S. Hopenchange?
It’s not that I’d mind at all if a woman were to be appointed (I have nothing against women; some of my best friends…). But to specifically look for one is PC offensiveness.
I couldn’t agree more. “We need someone with business experience, and the following type of plumbing…”
Ridiculous.
I wonder what hand Summers had in the Stimulus and the BIG DEFICIT spending. IOW, it might not be such a tragedy that he left.
It is absolutely insulting to any woman to be tainted with the affirmative action stain, which is exactly what Obama did.
Gringo, given that Obama let Pelosi and co draft so much of the disastrous legislation, I wonder how much input Summers had. Obama does seem to order his people to produce square circles. I hope Summers does a tell-all.
The problem is that no one explained it enough. after all, when they took down the labels that said Titanic, and then put up the signs “good ship lolly pop” that fixed everything
If people leave a company because they know that it’s about to have serious problems, or turn their back on a person about to be in a similar situation, they are said to be like rats deserting a sinking ship.
According to this article, he’s “…returning to Harvard to teach and write about the economic fundamentals of job creation”. With unemployment at 9.6%, it should pretty obvious that he knows nothing about job creation.
Oops. Down the memory hole. The article in the above comment has been modified without making note of the change. Probably got too much blowback, like mine.
Herb Allison, the head of the government’s $700 billion financial bailout program, announced on Wednesday that he would resign. He is the latest in a series of departures from President Obama’s economic team. AP
I’d distinguish leaving a company that’s about to have serious problems from turning one’s back on a person similarly situated.
The latter is reprehensible, albeit all too common. The former is just prudent, in my opinion.
The difference is in the loyalty owed to each. A company will cut an employee’s air hose in a heartbeat if doing so seems in the company’s interest, and so employees have no duty of loyalty (in the sense of sticking out looming tough times; they do, of course, in the sense of advancing the company’s interest in good faith while employed).
Even with people, there is no obligation of loyalty to those who would not extend loyalty in return, IMO.
Reciprocity is the key.
Look for “a woman” is just nonsense. When I was a feminist activist (of the sort that Artfl despises), I never dreamed that the idea of “equal opportunity” would be so distorted.
Seriously, folks, what is so hard to grasp about this idea? It’s common sense. However, it’s also common sense to know that Affirmative Action (quotas) would never work. Anyone who has ever worked with quota people, as I have, knows that you generally have to do their work for them because they are rarely qualified.
I would personally be very embarrassed to work as a Affirmative Action quota employee. I’m surprised that more women and blacks haven’t spoken out against it. Aren’t they embarrassed?
Regarding “loyalty,” forget it. Organizations have no loyalty to the individual. That’s just the way it is.
Finally, what kind of fools in their right mind would ever think that they would know how to “stimulate” the economy. I just started reading “Basic Economics” by Thomas Sowell. He talks about this stupid idea in the first few pages of his book, written for laymen. I hope arrogant fools like Summers who have ruined our economy are financially ruined (and sent to jail, where applicable). They are like apes with chainsaws. They must be stopped.
On the contrary, it would be easy to stimulate the economy. Just get the Dems in DC to commit public seppuku. Watch the economy skyrocket!
I know it won’t happen, but Summer’s replacement needs to be / should be someone who understands this column:
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2010/09/22/1920_the_great_depression_that_wasnt_98679.html
The current crowd believes the pathway to recovery is thru keeping prices up (e.g. housing), when it is more likely that we should let the market reset prices. Interfering with prices causes / prevents a real recovery taking hold and keeps employment down.
“Instead, today our Fed officials artificially set their fund rate at zero – during a time of extreme economic distress – then wonder why nobody is willing to lend, all in a misguided effort to ward off falling prices for all, bankruptcy for the insolvent, and to keep money “cheap”. I believe that it is not money that lubricates an economy, but prices. Prices are the clearing mechanism that moves goods and services efficiently. Break down the price mechanism – and constant political and monetary interventions are an excellent way to do so – and you can have all the money supply that trees can provide and it will do nothing of any benefit.”
OR,
I think we have been watching that in slow motion for the last six months. November will be time for the coup de gras…
Well, Summers is nothing if not consistent. He blew a massive hole in Harvard’s endowment, then went on to do the same to the country as a whole.
He’s the financial world’s answer to Jamie Gorelick, the Mistress of Distress, who also went from disaster to disaster. Strictly coincidence, I’m sure.
Occam,
its a quote from a dictionary site… not me.. i hit enter too fast. 🙂
Otiose
Exactamundo. The Japanese government wasted a decade in trying to keep housing prices up when the housing bubble burst. Let them fall.
Doesn’t the Administration want affordable housing for the poor? Falling prices will help that out, not setting the poor up with a $500,000 mortgage with nothing down.
I do not think it was Summers who gashed the Haavaad endowment. It was the very highly paid best and brightest that put the endowment into lots of longterm, illiquid vehicles.They were very successful for a quite long time, until their sh*t hit the fan along with all other similar endowments using the same, copycat, strategies, and that includes Yale and Princeton.
But poor old Larry really cannot tolerate life outside Haavaad. Anyone with true self-respect would have hustled out of the institution that canned him for wholly unjustified reasons, instead of staying on and then returning, after a stay with BHO, back to Mama H.
In my limited experience, no, because they don’t consider themselves affirmative action hires.
For example, I once had an overseas grad student for whom I’d talked a company from his home (Third World) country into sponsoring through grad school. One time he made clear before the rest of my research group that he thought his good fortune had arisen through his own efforts and achievements.
Although I hadn’t breathed a word about it to anyone, the rest of my group had divined what had happened, and there was much coughing and shuffling of feet. They knew. He didn’t.
I suspect that that is not a lone incident. No one wants to believe he achieved his present position through juice, rather than through merit.
I had read that Clarence Thomas had graduated 8th in his class at Holy Cross, which is impressive. He greatly resented allegations that he needed AA to get into Yale Law School, given those grades.
An engineering classmate got hired at a good lab position at a major corporation. “They hired me just because I am a woman.” No, they hired you because you graduated with a 3.8 GPA and got things done and done very well.
The best person to replace Summers is Nobody.
As our society becomes more and more complex the urge is to put more and more of it under top-down government control which is less and less of a good answer.
And maybe it’s time to give the Dr.’s a little rest. I am enamored of Dr.’s Sowell, Hansen, and Williams, but not one of them would suggest that their wisdom came from their ph or their d but from their watching the current scene, which any of us can do.
When it comes to the federal government imposing a top down wisdom upon us all I am reminded of what happened to the water temples in Thailand.
For centuries the Thai had been going to the priests at the water temples to get water rights handed out.
Then the UN showed up with experts and computers to fix the situation to make it more fair and efficient.
And you know what happened: they had a drought.
That’s almost guaranteed. Hubris always is rewarded. When allowed to flower on a national scale the results are staggering.
No one wants to believe he achieved his present position through juice, rather than through merit.
the opposite is true…
no one wants to realize that they are losing because they fail to meet some aesthetic for the future mandated by a few who self proclaim their superiority.
Without merit us Autodidactic Rennaisance people cant move things, and so we then become social cranks to people.
meanwhile, libraries, airline industry, automotive industry, desk top computers, telephone, light bulb, virtual reality, moving pictures, television, harvesters, great literature, and more all came from autodidactics….
Even Einstein technically was an autodidact, in that he really didn’t educate from the academy. he was a patent clerk when such would have been going after a degree…
I am beating my head against the wall with some really cool incredible stuff. the professors agree, and have even sent back articles to show how i was right.
but, just as they are overwhelmingly giving lots of money in record amounts in midterm elections for obama and liberal democrats.. they too, have internalized the rules as to who can or cant participate.
so the problem is kind of what happens when you INVERT a section. the smartest, dont become dumb, but are forced to live that kind of life with that kind of end, and the not so smart, dont become smart, but they are placed in a position which the other would be in, but then cant function (because the idea we are all Procrustean equal is a farce meant to destroy all of societies comparative advantage from merit as the arbiter).
This same thing blocks the advancement of women and people of color as well as blocks whites and chinese and jews.
Ramanujan, discovered by Hoyle, would never make it today, despite being of color. he is self educated, and would not have given a hat tip to the socialist organizations who would pretend to have facilitated him.
[which is why they dont celebrate Emmy Noether, Catherine Elizabeth Hughes, Clare Luce, Muriel Siebert, Dawn Steel, Benjamin Banneker, John Henrik Clarke, and many more]
So now we have people in the labs who can barely do the incremental work, make only paper, and are way way way too scared to take a risk and bring their idea to completion as IP in a market.
and outside that, we have people like me clamoring for just one chance, one time to shine without some wet towel and confounding being thrown on their heads, with platitudes about not competing, being greedy, and much more…
The more I try, the more outsiders like here think i sound nuts, the more isolated i am made, and the less chance i have to accomplish any of the technological ideas i have (and not have them stolen as has happened several times).
You walk into one of these academics offices, and you ahve some interesting things in computational biology and digital evolution, and what you have is not comprehensible to them easy, and so they dawdle, and diddle… that is till someone else does the same or similar thing, then they send you an email saying wow, you were right again… you must have a lot of first premises to work from.
they incorporate your ideas into their grant writign, but they dont help you write one, as your not part of the system. you volunteer to do work for them, to move their work out of the way, to buy time. and they inform you that if you save them time, they will use it on their own things.
so what does one do?
well, one can HOPE for CHANGE and perhaps someone like occam or an out of work EE might help a bit…
but the truth is that this game puts you in the pile of crank and crazy masses who have ideas they think is inventing and no engineering, electronics, physics, material science, manufacturing skills etc.
without the academy stamping you approved each step, your in the pile of freaks!!!!!!!!!!
I go upstairs and its 60% women, the rest are minorities and foreigners, and you realize that if it wasnt for the same policy your discussing here from the other end, i would be in the labs or of my own company, rather than moribund writing simple software with a stagnated salary, and no hope (given attempts make me out to be a freak)
you know what?
i would rather be the stupid person working hard to do something in that higher place, as there i have a chance to change and actually do it if i worked really hard.
than to be the smart person assumed to be dumb, nutty, con artist, wrong aesthetic, greedy, narcissistic, scheming, and everything and anything OTHER.
Engineers have to get things right. They design things which have to work in the real world. When bridges fall down, there are consequences. If your computer doesn’t work, there are consequences. If a rocket crashes, there are consequences.
By contrast, many scientists have the luxury of living in the world of thought. They can toy around with ideas and models and concepts, normally without consequence for being wrong. You would not want a scientist designing a bridge, or performing surgery. They generally don’t have the necessary skills.
i will write a program in a day that blows the docs away… i will over the weekend construct some basic electrical stuff and enable their research for under 50 dollars when they cant get the 6000 for some expensive catalogue item that does the same.
i volunteer this outside my job. do i get raises? awards? how about paid for the materials i use up?
Personally, the more this goes on, the more futile it is, the more you realize that you wasted a life that you cant get back. the more your skills are failing, your eyes are failing, you cant do the work, you have fewer resources, and everyone thinks and treats you like a pariah, for thats what failures get.
The more it goes on, the more you understand, and and the more one thinks that maybe Edwin Armstrong, Phil Katz, James B. Lansing, Rudolf Diesel, among many others known and unknown had the right idea after merit failed them and vultures came, and they had little chances.
Each of them had their technology stolen, were prevented from succeeding, or lost control of their dreams… by the design and games of others.
They were never in the leveraged position of Galt…
there is only one thing worse than being a has been and thats being a never been (and wasting your life and resources to get there!).
So what DOES one do?
It was hard enough when merit was the measure, but now?
As a Rochester, NY native and someone very familiar with one of its name brand companies – Xerox, I’ll make a prediction. There was talk a couple years ago that a certain female CEO was going to join the Obama team, which did not happen at that time. And this CEO retired not all that long ago incidentally.
Hmmm, if your guess is true, then I’ll say it here first – Anne Mulcahy
Watch how press coverage of this announcement drowns out the Black Panther hearings tomorrow. Don’t think that wasn’t planned.