Larry Summers at 70

The enfant terrible as eminence grise

Last night I was double-booked for Harvard activities. Over at Lavietes Pavilion the Harvard women’s basketball team was playing BC at 7.00. And Larry Summers was talking about Trump’s economic policy at the Kennedy School at 7.30. I chose to go to the Kennedy School. There will be many other basketball games this year.

Larry was talking with a finance journalist, John Ellis, ostensibly about Economic policy before and after Trump, but of course much more widely ranging than that.

I am a Summers fan, ever since he taught me macroeconomics in the first year of grad school. It was back in 1983, his second or third as a tenured economics professor at Harvard, and he was about 30 years old.

I remember him mostly for the pizza sessions he sponsored to help us grad students understand basic macro. I think I remember the pizza (from a place on Mass Ave near the Law School) more than the content of those sessions.

I never found him particularly warm, but always engaged and interested - with a view of the economic world that was many times more complex and accurate than mine.

As I reflect on yesterday’s session at the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, I was most intrigued by the current wide scope of his thinking - he seems quite happy to paint with the broadest strokes possible - for example, summing up the age “before Pericles” as one where humans were economically indistinguishable from rabbits - more food = more population; less food = less population. (Well, let’s not forget, um… the Egyptians, for a start …).

But he’s making a point - one about economic growth - and as an ancien economist, he doesn’t need to tolerate quibblers. His point is that, viewed historically, the last 150 years have seen the fastest rates of growth, by order of magnitudes, than any other time in human history.

He’s very explicit in pursuing this perspective - the question he often finds himself asking, he says, is “when historians look back on these decades, what will they say?”

And when asked what will be the biggest story for historians of the first quarter of the 21st century, his answer is (drum roll please) … artifical intelligence.

(Just to note that he is on the board of OpenAI).

This echoes what a lot of people are saying, and reminds me of Gartner’s famous hype cycle. Certainly we are in the core hype phase with AI.

But when Prof Summers says something, I believe it. He tried out this analogy with the audience last night.

A.I. : Internet as Computer : calculator.

The other thing about Larry as ancien is how accessible he is. Certainly there’s the personal accessibility of posing for selfies, which he does with a good-natured smile. But there’s also the accessibility of his examples and stories.

When he talks about Trump’s 60% tariffs on Chinese goods, for example, he brings it to a question of whether Trump voters will want to pay twice as much for their toys next Christmas.

When he talks about the inefficiency he sees in the US economy, he talks about the Larz Anderseon Bridge that connects Harvard College and the Business School, and the fact that it took 64 months to complete its reconstruction. “We won World War II in 44 months,” he deadpans.

I expect if I were to hear another session like this from Larry, I’d hear some of the same stories, but he has a way of making them seem fresh and unique each time. Perhaps that’s the mark of a great teacher.

In the end, the Harvard Women beat BC, and Harmony Turner, Harvard’s irresistible senior point guard, scored a record-high 41 points.

I’m still glad I had a chance to hear Larry. But I need to get to one of those basketball games.

Here’s a link to the session from the Institute of Politics (which starts around 14 minutes in)