This Is Astounding

In macroeconomics, Larry Summers is huge. Professor at Harvard (youngest tenured economics professor ... ever). On everyone's medium list for a future Nobel Prize. Entered MIT at age 16. Won the John Bates Clark Medal (given to the best economist under the age of 40) — widely seen as a Nobel predictor — in 1993 (the two people who won the medal before and after Summers already have won their Nobel prizes).

In Democratic politics, Larry Summers is huge. Economic advisor to the 1988 Dukakis campaign. Chief Economist at the World Bank (not political, but generally liberally oriented). Undersecretary for International Affairs, and later Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration. Served on Obama's transition team. Then directed Obama's National Economic Council (an alternative to the Council of Economic Advisors, doing more policy and less research). Initially an advisor to the Biden campaign, but he got pushed out.

In economics, Larry Summers is royalty. His mother and father were both economics professors at Penn (she's in the Wharton School, he was in the economics department). Mother, Anita, was recruited as one of the initial faculty in the first public policy schools in a business school, where she taught urban economics specializing in census data. Father, Robert, did seminal work in applying purchasing power parity to the GDP of countries around the world, and helped created the original Penn World Tables on which a lot of cross-sectional macroeconomics are based. Oh ... and her brother, Ken Arrow, won a Nobel Prize in 1972, and his brother, Paul Samuelson, won a Nobel Prize in 1970 (and both of them won the John Bates Clark Medal earlier, in 1947 and 1957).

Oh ... and being an economist on the White House's Council of Economic Advisors is not very political. But maybe a little embarrassing for a Democrat if you worked on Reagan's, as Summers did. 

Oh ... and President of Harvard for a few years (not a Republican place).

Oh ... and important enough to be portrayed in The Social Network.

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I have personal reasons to dislike Larry Summers (did not play nice academically with friends of mine).

Professionally, I've read a ton of his papers and I like them, but I've never read one that super-impressed me. That's OK.

Summers has come up many times on this blog, since its inception: here's a search page linking to the 20 times I've written something related to him.

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In short, if you're an economics major, and Larry Summers says something ... listen. If he writes something ... try and find time to read it. That's hard: it seems like he writes more paragraphs than most professors write words.

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Summers is on the outs with the Biden White House. He was pushed out by progressives before the election.

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Soooooo ... Ezra Klein, a progressive economics guest columnist for the New York Times (and co-founder of Vox) interviewed Summers on what's gone wrong with inflation and current policies. You can read the transcript or listen to the podcast. They're both easy to find online, and ungated.

I've posted a highlighted and commented version to the class's folder on Google Drive. DO NOT just read the highlights and comments ... that's the regurgitated version for my principles students. The big kids get to read the whole thing.

This piece is astounding. He all but calls President Biden and/or Senator Warren idiots (amongst others). And he suggests that White House advisors are so off base and have lost so much credibility that they should get less attention. 

He says this because his read on the data is that inflation is bad, continuing to get worse, intentionally caused by political operatives who were dismissive of the economic concerns voiced by economists, and who still don't get it. 

He also notes, with some evident disgust, that poor Democratic policies in the 1960's and 1970's led directly to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. He sounds worried about the current situation.

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There's an acronym, RINO, short for Republicans In Name Only. It applies to Republican politicians who tend to vote for Democratic proposals more often.For example, Senator Romney is often called a RINO.

There's needs to be an alternative one — DINO — for Democratic In Name Only. But for very different reasons.

I heard a joke about a month ago that the Republican Party is being held political hostage by its crazy majority, while the Democratic Party is being held political hostage by its crazy minority.

So to me, a DINO is one of the minority of contemporary progressives who are in frequent conflict with the way the majority of Democrats thought as recently as a few years ago.

Economically, the Biden White House is all DINO's. It is hard to emphasize sufficiently that being in an intellectual war with Larry Summers is repudiating everything Democrats have stood for the last 2 generations. What we are seeing is not Democrats vs. Republicans, it's DINO's vs. {Democrats & Republicans}.

And the DINO's are proud of this. They view the 2020's as a big referendum on their progressive policies. If the economy turns out great, they win the argument. They've been very clear about this (see here, here, here, here, and here). I'd say it's still before halftime, but they're already behind.