There *is* a grand jury sitting in Boston. But I was unaware that Andrei Shleifer was a target of its investigation. Your sources are probably better than mine, however...
>(This is not, of course, to
>mention the human misery and official corruption let loose by the Russian
>privatization schemes Schleifer, Hay and Chubais authored, which the AEA
>wouldn't be expected to trifle with.)
I would take issue with the claim that Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais "let loose" corruption. I think that the first stage of privatization-by-voucher was a good deal less corrupt than the privatization-by-managerial-theft which was taking place before (and that is still taking place in regions like Belarus and Ukraine which did not do mass privatization), and a great deal less corrupt than the Communist regime that preceded 1991. To imply that what came before was less corrupt than what we have now in Russia seems to me to simply be in error...
At least when I look at east central and east Europe, I see that those countries that have reformed the most (the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary) are best off, those that have reformed partly (Slovakia, Russia) are at least semi-stable, and those that have reformed least (Ukraine, Belarus) are doing worst of all.
That suggests to me that Gaidar's and Chubais's biggest problem was that they took office in too weak a position--that they weren't able to do price liberalization, privatization, macroeconomic stabilization, and fiscal reform in rapid succession; but that instead price liberalization happened in 1992, privatization happened in 1994, macroeconomic stabilization in 1996, and fiscal reform happened not at all. And I think they must dearly envy their colleagues in Poland and the Czech Republic (who were able to spend Solidarity's and Havel's accumulated political and social capital on more rapid reform, with what appear so far at least to be significantly better outcomes).
Of course, I'm not an expert on what is optimistically called "transition." And from this distance (and without knowing the languages, and without immersing myself in the issues for years) I can't tell whether those that have done best have done so because they reformed, or whether those that have done best have thereby been most able to reform...
>
>I hear from people at Treasury that Larry Summers played a decisive role in
>engineering the award for his disciple.
Larry Summers has exceptionally high respect for Andrei Shleifer, and I'm sure that he made his opinion of the proper award of the Clark Medal very clear. But "decisive"? I hope not. Looking at those others who are reported to have gotten votes--Michael Kremer, Bo Honore, Alan Krueger, and Josh Angrist--I'm left with the impression that each of them (and I certainly wouldn't claim that awarding the Clark Medal to any of them would have been a clear mistake) has wowed people in their subfield, but that Andrei Shleifer has wowed people in a number of different subfields. In this case I think that breadth matters.
And I'm not sure that it is right to think of Andrei Shleifer as Larry Summers's "disciple." Larry is at bottom a social democrat, interested in rapid economic growth, a substantial amount of redistributive leveling of the market-generated income distribution, and an active government that does good thing. Andrei by contrast is at bottom a more subtle and thoughtful version of Friedrich Hayek, and believes that unless proven otherwise you should presume that all governments have the benevolent aims and organizational competence of the senile Leonid Brezhnev.
I think these differences in fundamental orientation (the product, I would argue, of the difference between growing up in greater Philadelphia in the 1960s and growing up in greater Moscow in the 1970s) swamp what looks to me like a great similarity in analytical style and in attitude toward different kinds of evidence (which Andrei Shleifer did indeed learn from Larry Summers)...
Brad DeLong