Defending the “Summers” Memo
By Dylan Matthews - Nov 7th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
As I said yesterday, I don’t think Larry Summers is the best choice for Treasury Secretary. But some other Summers opponents are launching a deeply pernicious attack on him that is, at best, based on a misunderstanding of history. And at worst, it’s just a lie.
The attack, being pushed most prominently by Max Blumenthal at The Nation and spread by Matt Stoller, centers on a memo authored in 1991, when Summers was the chief economist for the World Bank. The memo was written by Lant Pritchett, an aide to Summers, but was signed by Summers because he thought it would spur debate. The controversial part of the memo was what Prichett describes as an “ironic aside,” in which he joked that the developing world was “under-polluted” and that it would be “welfare-enhancing” to move environmentally detrimental industries to poor nations.
Obviously, neither Pritchett nor Summers actually believed that the Third World could use more pollution. Indeed, Pritchett wrote the parody to indicate his frustration with the Bank’s argument that free trade is always environmentally beneficial.
Unfortunately, the memo was leaked to The Economist after being doctored to look like it was written by Summers and intended to be serious. An uproar ensued based on this misunderstanding of the memo, its authorship, and its intent.
So when Max Blumenthal writes that “Summers authored a private memo arguing that the bank should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries,” he’s lying. Either that, or he is guilty of gross journalistic incompetence for not researching the subject enough to know that Summers didn’t write the memo and that it didn’t earnestly argue for increased waste dumping. Neither option reflects well on him, and either way Blumenthal is pushing a false and defamatory story.
I can’t agree with this. During his term as Treasury Secretary Summers championed exactly these policies that you say he doesn’t support. He’s a Reaganomics guy without Reagan. It’s a very disturbing tone to set to put in a giant deregulator after we’re in a crisis borne of deregulation.
Why not tap Krugman or Stiglitz or even Warren Buffett (a name that McCain of all people threw around)? It seems like the corporate lobbies are well-represented in the next White House.
November 7th, 2008 at 4:17 pmWould people stop floating Krugman and Buffett please? If for no other reason than both men admit that they don’t want it, and don’t have the temperament for it. You have to be more willing to compromise than either of them are to be effective in government.
November 7th, 2008 at 4:28 pm[...] his tenure in the World Bank. This claim has been around since the early 90s and has been debunked plenty of times. If Larry Summers were really so horrible, would you need to tell lies about him? As far as more [...]
November 7th, 2008 at 4:45 pmWait, so Matt Stoller is pushing nonsense? What an astonishing development!
November 7th, 2008 at 9:56 pm[...] Matthews, at pushback, contests Blumenthal’s account of the Summers memo controversy. It seems that Summers took [...]
November 7th, 2008 at 11:17 pmYou know what? Your exculpatory narrative might be more plausible if :
(A) There were a shred of objective evidence beyond Summer`s say-so that he didn`t mean it seriously and didn`t have a role in authoring the memo, and
(B) Summers didn`t have a twenty-year long record as one of the biggest assholes in the Democratic tent who has done everything he can to drag the party to the right on economic issues, and
(C) Summers hadn`t used the same excuse — that he was just being “ironic“ and trying to “spur debate“ — when he got busted propagating crackpot theories of female intellectual inferiority as President of Harvard to rationalize Harvard`s failure to hire female faculty in the sciences.
But unfortunately for you, Summers`s record is what it is, and it is very much consistent with his authoring that memo and intending it to be taken seriously.
Sorry, DLC people — you can fool some of the people some of the time, but we`re not going to let ourselves get taken for a ride again.
November 7th, 2008 at 11:25 pmThis is not an even remotely convincing defense of Summers. Even if the account you link to is 100% correct in all its details, what is noteworthy is how consistent the argument of the memo — which of course, whether Summers wrote it himself he signed and took responsibility for — is with the actual practices of the Bank. Fee-for-service health care was all the rage for Africa, fiscal belt-tightening, etc. Forgive those who live in LDCs if they did not “get” Summers’ alleged irony, especially since The Economist responded in the following way to the leaked memo:
“The language is crass, even for an internal memo. But look at it another way: Mr Summers is asking questions that the World Bank would rather ignore — and, on the economics, his points are hard to answer. The Bank should make this debate public.”
November 7th, 2008 at 11:50 pm“Would people stop floating Krugman and Buffett please? If for no other reason than both men admit that they don’t want it, and don’t have the temperament for it. You have to be more willing to compromise than either of them are to be effective in government.”
And Biden didn’t want to be VP. They’re saying that because they don’t want to create an impression that they’ll get the post. Trust me, if they were asked they would jump for it.
As for “compromise” — well, most of the country is deadset against high levels of deregulation as got us into this mess. What is he compromising with, the lunatic hard-right?
November 8th, 2008 at 4:38 pm