Larry Summers is an American economist who served as Secretary of the Treasury during the Clinton administration and head of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama. He has been involved in politics for much of his career and has been criticized for controversial comments, including the infamous Larry Summers Memo and perceived sexism during his tenure as president of Harvard University. Summers comes from a family of economists and excelled academically, earning a PhD from Harvard at a young age.
Larry Summers is an American economist who was also president of the School of Government at Harvard University. He was the Secretary of the Treasury during the second Clinton administration, and was selected by Barack Obama to be the head of the National Economic Council. Though widely respected as an economist, Larry Summers has been criticized for various comments he has made throughout his career.
Coming from a distinguished family of economists, both of Summers’ parents taught economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and both his father and mother had brothers who won the Nobel Prize in economics. From an early age Larry Summers excelled in academics and showed an unsurprising interest in economics. At sixteen, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), initially studying physics before switching to economics and graduating with his BS in 1975. He then earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1982 and 1983 he became a tenured professor. at Harvard at age 28, one of the youngest in the history of the University.
For much of his career, Summers has been involved in the political side of economics. During the Reagan administration he served on the Council of Economic Advisers and in 1988 joined the Dukakis campaign as a top economic adviser. In 1991, Larry Summers joined the World Bank as chief economist, helping to shape development policy around the world. Later that year, he signed what would become one of the most infamous letters in business, the so-called Larry Summers Memo.
In 1993, Larry Summers left the World Bank to join the Clinton administration as undersecretary for international affairs, soon after transferring to the Treasury Department and in 1995 becoming deputy secretary of the Treasury. When Robert Rubin, one of his main mentors, stepped down, Larry Summers took over as Secretary of the Treasury, a position he held until the end of the Clinton administration.
Two of the things Larry Summers is most famous for are controversies. The first is the Larry Summers Memo, a memorandum written by a World Bank economist at the time, Lant Pritchett. In it, the argument is made that free trade would probably not help the environments of developing nations; one part to the memorandum actually made an economic argument for dumping toxic waste in countries with the lowest possible wages. Larry Summers’ memo has generated a firestorm of controversy, particularly in developing countries most affected by the memo’s rationale.
The other major controversy of Larry Summers’ career occurred during his tenure as president of Harvard University. In 2005, during a conference on engineering and science workforce diversification, Summers set out what he considered to be the three main hypotheses about why more men than women join higher-level general science and engineering disciplines. From what he considered most to least important, he listed them as: men were more willing to devote time to high-level careers, men and women were inherently different in their levels of aptitude for the skills these careers required, and the discrimination. He came under intense criticism for this view and perceived sexism, and although he survived the ensuing controversy, he eventually resigned in 2006.
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