Lawrence Summers
Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist, politician, and academic. He is the current and 27th President of Harvard University.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Summers is the son of two economists, as well as the the nephew of two Nobel lareautes in economics: Paul Samuelson (sibling of father Robert Summers, who changed the family name from Samuelson to Summers to avoid anti-Semitic prejudice) and Kenneth Arrow (his mother's sibling). He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he originally intended to study physics but soon switched to economics (Bachelor's degree, 1975), and then Harvard University as a graduate student (PhD, 1982), where he studied under economist Martin Feldstein. He has had stints teaching at both MIT and Harvard. He became the youngest tenured professor in Harvard's history in 1983.
As a researcher, Summers has made important intellectual contributions in many areas of economics, primarily public finance, labor economics, finance, and macroeconomics. To a lesser extent, Summer has also worked in international economics, economic demography, economic history, and development economics. His work generally places emphasis in the analysis of empirical economic data in order to answer well-defined questions (for example: Does saving respond to after-tax interest rates? Are the returns from stocks and stock portfolios predictable?, Are most of those who receive unemployment benefits only transitorily unemployed?, etc.) For his work he received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1993 from the American Economic Association (an honor economists often considered second only to the Nobel Prize). In 1987 he was the first social scientist to win the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation.
Summers left Harvard in 1991 and served as Chief Economist for the World Bank (1991-1993) and later as United States Secretary of the Treasury (1999-2001) under the Clinton administration, a position in which he succeeded his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 2001, he left the U.S. Treasury and returned to Harvard as its President.
In December 1991, while at the World Bank, Summers wrote a memo arguing that "the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that". This memo, which he has since downplayed, made him known in the anti-globalization movement as a symbol of "the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in" (in the word then-Brazilian Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenburger).
Summers is a steadfast defender of free trade and globalization, and his positions on a number of politically-charged subjects tend to lie to the right of the consensus within American academia . This, together with his sometimes undiplomatic demeanour and his call to stressing the hard sciences in the undergraduate core curriculum, have made him somewhat controversial as President of Harvard. Early in his tenure, a spat with celebrity African-American Studies professor Cornel West over academic standards in research and grade inflation in undergraduate courses received much publicity. West resigned from Harvard shortly afterwards and moved to Princeton University. In 2002 he drew attention by claiming that the Noam Chomsky-led campaign to have universities divest from companies with Israeli holdings is "anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intention".
External links
- Who Is Larry Summers? (Business Week, May 24, 1999)
- Official bio (at Harvard)
- How the Great Brain Learned to Grin and Bear it Slate, June 29, 2001.
- "Larry Summers' War Against the Earth" (Counterpunch)
| Preceded by: Robert E. Rubin |
United States Secretary of the Treasury | Succeeded by: Paul H. O'Neill |