Summers v. Geithner
By Dylan Matthews - Nov 6th, 2008 at 3:31 pmYou really owe it to yourself to read Noam Scheiber’s piece in The New Republic about Larry Summers and Federal Reserve Bank of New York president Tim Geithner, the two apparent finalists for Treasury Secretary in Barack Obama’s administration. Before reading the piece I was pretty agnostic on the choice between the two, but Scheiber makes it clear that Geithner is a far more effective bureaucratic operator, which will be needed when managing economic policies of the scale of the bank nationalization plan.
Just see how Geithner would deal with career bureaucrats as a newly-promoted wunderkind:
Geithner was not just highly competent [as a deputy assistant secretary under Summers in the Treasury Department], but exquisitely attuned to the sensitivities of being a thirtysomething in a job many bureaucrats spend their entire careers aspiring to. At meetings with subordinates, he’d rarely sit at the head of the table. In fact, he’d rarely sit at all, preferring to pace around the room prompting people for input. When he briefed a higher-up, Geithner’s habit was to bring along the bureaucrat who’d worked with him on the issue.
Compare to how Summers deals with colleagues:
Summers’s brilliance made him simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting to work for–a whirlwind of intellectual energy fueled by an endless supply of Diet Coke. “I remember once giving him a memo that was three pages long,” recalls Steve Radelet, a onetime Harvard economist who worked for both Summers and Geithner. “I’d worked on it for days and days. He read it in a minute and a half. He looked at me, saying, ‘I don’t agree with your argument. But, if I were making your argument, I could have made it better. Here’s how.’ “
The choice, to be blunt, is between a brilliant jerk and a supremely competent diplomat. Summers’ style may have worked well in the 1990s, but we need someone of Geithner’s character if the Treasury is to function effectively during this crisis.
Isn’t the real place to look Summers’ (in)famously rancorous time as President of Harvard? Summers trying to “spark debate” with controversial comments is a long-time trend, evidenced by his comments about women in science, but that was never Summers’ real problem at Harvard.
He had long been having trouble with faculty due to his pushy management style. (For a particularly public example, it was poor chemistry with Summers that led Cornell West to leave Harvard for Princeton. - NYT April 16th, 2002)
November 7th, 2008 at 7:40 pm