I've been covering Larry Summers controversies for most of my life

I'm sick of it, and also I think he's been right about some stuff

One of the biggest journalistic fuckups of my career came way back when I was a college student and news editor of a campus alt-weekly called the Harvard Independent. We reported, based on pretty good but not-actually-accurate sourcing, that Lee Bollinger had been selected to replace Neil Rudenstine as president of the university. The real choice, of course, was former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Which is just to say that “news about Larry Summers” has been a pain in my ass for literally most of my life, and on a purely personal level, my sincere hope is that the latest Epstein business will be the last time I ever need to cover a Larry Summers Controversy.

Because there have been a lot of them!

I first met Summers at a meet-and-greet before he took office as president. While there, he got into a remarkably contentious fight with an undergraduate who was pressing him about the harm done by American trade policies that pressured African countries to respect pharmaceutical company patent rights for HIV medication, making antiretroviral treatment far too expensive for residents of poor countries.

I hadn’t really thought about drug pricing before, but I learned from Summers the correct basic economic take on this, which is that if you price prescription drugs at the marginal cost of manufacturing them, you’re not ever going to get any drug innovation. He also said that super-cheap medication flooding Africa would invariably undercut the prices in richer countries and wreck innovation.

Summers’ position proved to be wrong on the politics — Bill Clinton through his charitable foundation and then George W. Bush through PEPFAR managed to finesse the reimportation issue just fine and got super-cheap medicine for people in Africa while residents of Western countries continued paying higher prices.

And that’s the difference between economics and politics.

To Summers’ credit, he was doing what an economic policy advisor is supposed to do and explaining the economic contours of the substantive problem with the activist proposal. But he was much too pessimistic about politicians’ ability to find an actual solution to the problem.

To psychoanalyze a little, I think that’s because he had a generally grouchy attitude about activists on behalf of the global poor, because they had a perverse tendency to hold Summers personally responsible for economic problems in poor countries.

This is a legacy of a widely criticized memo that he wrote back when he was chief economist of the World Bank (it was actually Lant Pritchett, but Summers signed it) arguing that “underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted” and it would be economically and socially optimal to shift more pollution to the third world.

This is, in fact, a correct analysis of the situation. As China went from desperately poor to middle income, it became a lot more polluted but was still better-off on net, and then over time they started focusing on cleaner air.

But I suppose it was an impolitic thing to say.

Which is just to say that not only have there been a lot of Larry Summers Controversies, to truly understand any given LSC, you really need to understand the context of previous LSCs. And because I was there in college, I have what I feel like is far more context than I actually want.

The lost reform opportunity at Harvard