-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Michael Perelman
I had one personal experience with Summers while he was with the World Bank. Many years ago, I organized a panel at the economics meetings. It included Summers, Robert Pollin, Benjamin Friedman, and Robert Eisner. Summers went ballistic on the panel to the shock of everybody in the room, denouncing mindless attacks on the United States. His target was not Robert Pollin, but Friedman who was worried about excessive debt. Afterwards, Summers kindly let me come to his hotel room to use his laptop to download files from my little Atari palmtop. While I was there, he was on the phone screaming. I could not help hearing his exchange. It was probably somebody in the Pakistani government. Summers was tried to tell the other party that it was imperative that young girls be given of education. Although I agreed with him on this matter and disagreed with him in his attack on Friedman, his personal manner remained the same. A young prince of the economics profession, the nephew of two Nobel prize winners, tenured at Harvard and an early age, very productive in many areas of economics, and presumably used to a certain amount of deference. It was very kind of him, however, to give me the use of his laptop.
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I'd love to subject Summers to a Neuroeconomics experiment [with PET and SQUID machines] designed by Shaun Hargreaves Heap and Yanis Varoufakis that tested him for empathy/solidarity and racism/sexism in one fell swoop. The first test round he would be his usual biochemical self. The second he'd be on a tab of clean X. I'd have you as the control, Michael...... :-)
In a reductionist mood,
Ian