What Does Larry Summers Think of Himself?

I have a guess, plus a lesson on capability

Over the holidays, a family member asked me what I thought about “this whole Larry Summers thing,” aka the really famous economist who turns out was emailing with Jeffrey Epstein up to Epstein’s arrest in 2019 and whose career evaporated within days as a result of those emails coming to life.

I said something like, “I look forward to his fall into total obscurity.”

(I’m not a robot, obviously I brought up every gossipy detail like how in 2005 Summers and his new wife took Epstein’s private plane to their honeymoon, with Maxwell on board, and visited Epstein’s island during the trip.)

I try to use this platform to educate, explain, empower, and help people feel like they can understand the economy that determines so much of their lives. But you know what, sometimes I might just use it to rant a bit. Like now.

Larry Summers can go F%#@ off back to Epstein’s island: he didn’t deserve the influence he had. He was his own brand of devout misogynist and he used his considerable intelligence to make it seem like if you called him a misogynist, you just weren’t capable of understanding what he said.

It’s not all a rant, I think there’s a lesson here about diversity, but not the one you think.

1. Larry Who Did What Now? Part 1: The Emails

2. Larry Who Did What Now? Part 1: The Speech

3. “Issues of Intrinsic Aptitude:” Larry’s Three Reasons (But Really Two Reasons) There Aren’t More Women Scientists

4. Issues of Intrinsic Arrogance: Kathryn’s Reasons Why Larry’s Arguments are the Work of Self-Serving Smug Nepo Baby

5. Is This Really A Rant?

Larry Who Did What Now? Part 1: The Emails

Larry Summers is probably the most influential economist of our time, he has lived and worked in close proximity to power for the better part of three decades wielding an enormous, incalculable influence over economic policy. He worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations, as well as serving as an unofficial economic-advisor-cum-consigliere for Biden.

The big tranche of Epstein emails shows that Summers was in touch with Epstein regularly and in fact, was discussing with the sex trafficker about how he wanted to have sex with a younger female economist. The Harvard Crimson newspaper has detailed coverage of the exchange.

It’s been a quick and brutal fallout: he’s either resigned in disgrace or been kicked out of almost every professional post he has. He’s no longer a member of the American Economic Association, even, and he might even be the first person truly expelled from it.

But there’s a nugget in those emails that has been overlooked or downplayed. Among the sex pining, seduction strategies, comparing a weekend with his family to an Ibsen play, notes of “going horizontal” with a woman seeking professional advice from him, Summers wrote to Epstein in 2017:

“I observed that half the IQ [in the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population…”

Translated to, “Women don’t have as much IQ as men do, on the whole.” It’s a reiteration in another setting of the same argument he made in front of a room of female scientists in 2005 when he declared women weren’t as smart as men.

And then he just got to go on having power, influence, and privilege.

Wait, Larry Who Did What Now? Part 2: The Speech

In 2005, while president of Harvard (for those keeping track, about 11 months before his Epstein honeymoon collab), Summers gave a speech to a group of women scientists about “the issue of women’s representation in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions.” When it was over, it became a full-fledged she-said, he-said battle. Many of the women in the room said he claimed women are less intelligent than men, something the press quickly picked up on. He said he has never thought or claimed women were less capable of a career in science. He resigned the presidency the following year.

(Full remarks here. Full apology here.)

For twenty years, he won. He served in the Obama administration and was massively influential in crafting the federal response to the financial crisis, housing crisis, and recession. He was on corporate boards, including OpenAI. He was a fellow at a half-dozen think tanks.

Truly it’s amazing to me how much rewriting of history Summers was able to pull off after this talk, how successful the spin and how long it endured. Check out this line in a Wall Street Journal piece about Summers’ expulsion from the American Economic Association:

“Summers’s Harvard presidency was marred by a 2005 incident in which he suggested at a conference that women might have less aptitude for math and science—a comment that Summers later said had been misunderstood.”

Translated to, “Larry doesn’t hold problematic views! It’s just a one-time thing where a group of women scientists were really sensitive and took his words too seriously and also didn’t understand him.”

Turns out they did.

“Issues of Intrinsic Aptitude:” Larry’s Three Reasons (But Really Two Reasons) There Aren’t More Women Scientists

In this January 2005 talk, Summers lays out three arguments why women are less represented amongst tenured science research faculty.

1 “The high-powered job hypothesis”

Jobs at the very top, whether they are in banking, academia, the arts, etc, require a level of time, emotional, and mental commitment that typically only married men have been able to make. He careful to say that’s not necessarily how it should be, but how our economy and society are structured at that elite level. Spending 80 hours a week at a job is not for everyone, and married men, married women, unmarried men, unmarried women will opt into a career that requires as much commitment at different rates.

2 “Different availability of aptitude at the high end”

Here’s where he gets ugly, but you have to understand a bit about averages and the distributions behind them to get it.

• Say I have ten people who are all 6’ tall—their average height is 6’.

• Say I have ten people, five are 5’ tall and five are 7’ tall—their average height is 6’.

• Say I have ten people, six are 6’ tall, one is 5’ tall, one is 4’ tall, one is 7’ tall, and one is 8’ tall—their average height is 6’.

They all have the same average but if you were to line them up and stand them against a wall, these groups of ten people would have a very different outline, one uniform (all 6’) and the others more varied. The people in the middle would be near the average and the people at the end are what we call “the tails.”

Summers’ main point is that if you were to map the intelligence of men and women ala lining them up by height, men and women could have similar averages but different tails. In this example: women’s intelligence is more like the group of 5’ and 7’ tall people, but men’s intelligence is more like the group of 4’, 5’, 6’, 7’, and 8’ tall people.

It’s not that men are necessarily smarter than women, it’s that men’s intelligence has a longer tail, a thicker tail, so that it produces more men who very, very, very smart: the truly brilliant. It takes ‘tail-level intelligence’ to be a tenured research scientist. Or to keep the example going: the elite is at 8’ or higher.

He’s not saying that women can’t be brilliant, he’s saying that there are more brilliant men. So pointing to any number of extremely intelligent women wouldn’t refute his point; he’d say that they exist, but men of such brilliance exist in higher numbers.

3 “Different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search.”

After making clear that he thinks 1) the demands of the job and 2) the natural capability of men relative to women explain most of why men are more likely to be tenured research scientists, he then talks about socialization and discrimination.

For socialization—the idea that as they are raised and entered into society girls are conditioned to have less ambition, to not pursue science, to value motherhood, to care more about appearance than intelligence, and so on—he remarks that he thinks socialization is blamed for too many things.

For discrimination, he says that were women discriminated against, it would mean that there’s a pool of just as talented women that are mal-employed and an enterprising employer could snatch them up at a deal, i.e. the market would correct for discrimination.

In his words, emphasis mine:

“So my best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.”

Issues of Intrinsic Arrogance: Kathryn’s Reasons Why Larry’s Arguments are the Work of a Self-Serving Smug Nepo Baby

Pretend for a second that instead of asking him to explain why women are not represented among tenured research scientists, he was instead answering why he himself is included in the realm of tenured research scientists. After all, it’s the same basic question: for there to be less women, there need to be more men.

By this account: he’s willing to forego time with his family and children in order to give the job his mental attention, and he is brilliant, really as brilliant as possible. That’s what mattered most.

Generalizing his case: men who are more dedicated and more brilliant. Indeed, the group of dedicated, brilliant people who exist in the world are majority male, by a wide margin.

^Now imagine someone saying that, with a straight face, who is himself a nepo baby.

Summers got his undergraduate degree in economics from MIT in 1975, where his Nobel-prize winning uncle Paul Samuelson was on faculty (Samuelson was awarded the prize in 1970).

Summers got his graduate degree in economics from Harvard in 1982, where his other Nobel-prize winning uncle Ken Arrow was on faculty (Samuelson was awarded the prize in 1972 and left Harvard for Stanford before Larry finished his degree).

That’s right—both his mom’s brother and his dad’s brother were both Nobel-prize winning economists, and if that weren’t enough, his parents were tenured faculty in economics at Penn, itself a formidable department on top of being in the Ivy League. As far as economic goes, Summers is the equivalent of being from the royal family. There’s no comparison, no one comes close this pedigree.

I’ve always found that people have a way of showing their hand, and Larry’s here is on full display. Emphasize the natural advantages in intelligence that men like him possess, downplay the social advantages and preferential treatment that men like him—and himself in particular—possess.

Convenient to his own self image, no?

Is This Really A Rant?

No. It’s a warning, an on-the-record reminder that in case anyone forgets, do not let this man return to power and influence. His public life should have ended in 2005. Let’s not give him a third chance.

But it’s also a chance to say: we don’t need him or his thinking.

He presents the world of elites as if they are the chosen few, the only ones capable of making it to a position like tenured research scientist at Harvard or Treasury Secretary. As if there are only a handful of people who could possibly have what it takes.

That’s dead wrong.

When I applied for my PhD in economics, I was only accepted at the University of Wisconsin, and was rejected from seven higher ranked schools and seven lower ranked schools. That didn’t make sense to me. I thought that rejections would come like an ordered ranking, some cutoff above which I wasn’t good enough and below which I was. Once I was good enough for a department I should be good enough for all the ones worse than it, right? Apparently not.

I asked the faculty member in charge of admissions about this during my first year. How did I get in, and why didn’t get in anywhere else? He explained that over 500 people applied for the roughly 20 spots they filled in my year and probably a quarter of them had the metrics of those admitted—perfect scores on the GRE, top GPAs in undergrad, some research experience, and so on. If there were a capability cut off, it’s much, much lower than the admission cut off. Schools essentially had their pick, and so he filled out a cohort to bring together people from different backgrounds, interests, and skills among the capable to try and foster the best research and learning environment.

Research, he said, needs contrast. Twenty identical people will not come up with as good of a solution as twenty very different people, at least not to the type of questions economists ask. And then he added, it doesn’t serve students well in their career to not give them that during graduate school.

This answer stuck with me, as did the many lessons it contained.

Summers is wrong about men—they aren’t preternaturally smarter. Summers is wrong about elite positions—there are many more capable people than there are admitted people. So he misses the consequence of being wrong about men in elite positions: it’s a worse way of approaching the problems they take on.

Don’t ever let Summers or men like him fool you, and remember the most devastating thing you can say to them is the one that is also true: they are replaceable.

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