In 1956, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School, her class of more than 500 students included nine women and one black man. Erwin Griswold, the school’s dean, summoned the nine women and asked each to answer a question: How could she justify taking a place that would otherwise have gone to a man?
Larry Summers has been unnaturally silent on President Obama’s surprise decision to pass him over for the World Bank presidency in favor of Dartmouth University president and public health hero Jim Yong Kim. Well, one of Summers’ closest chums at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Lant Pritchett, has now gone public with a scorching blast at Kim. Pritchett toldForbes magazine, “It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. You cannot with a straight face say this person is the most qualified to lead the World Bank.”
President Barack Obama startled handicappers by selecting Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim as the U.S. candidate to lead the World Bank rather than the reported front-runner Larry Summers, Obama's former National Economic Council director.
The Korean-born Kim is a medical doctor, anthropologist, and MacArthur fellow, best known for his pioneering work to fight HIV and tuberculosis in the Third World. Kim helped develop treatments for drug-resistant TB, and then successfully pushed to reduced the cost of anti-TB drugs. He is close associate of Dr. Paul Farmer, the lead founder of Partners in Health and subject of Tracy Kidder’s 2003 book, Mountains Beyond Mountains.
Why does Larry Summers have more lives than a cat?
He was fired as president of Harvard, did not exactly serve President Obama brilliantly as economic policy czar, and now seems to be in line for the presidency of the World Bank, a post traditionally chosen by the president of the United States.
The deadline for the selection is this Friday, March 23. The appointment is supposed to be made official at the April meeting of the World Bank.
Earlier this month, the White House leaked a short list of three names, Summers plus U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and Massachusetts Senator John Kerry—neither of whom want the job. Brilliantly subtle signaling, that.
The sophisticated political observer doesn’t need public opinion polls to weigh the odds of President Obama’s re-election. Economic indicators drive voters, and if the president and his party come up short in November, the recriminations won’t be aimed at campaign headquarters in Chicago but at the staffers and wonks tasked with turning around the American economy.
The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery, provides just that opportunity. Noam Scheiber, an editor at The New Republic, susses out the Obama administration’s most important internal debates to find exactly where the supposed dream team of economic wonks failed.
If you want to understand why the Obama administration's heart is in the right place but it suffers from a chronic lack of political nerve, you need look no further than former chief economic advisor Larry Summers.
On Sunday, Summers published a piece in the Financial Times warning that the recovery was at risk of sputtering out. His analysis was spot-on. But his proposed solutions were feeble, bordering on pathetic.
This is actually a fair criticism of the president:
Republicans, after two years of criticism from the White House for blocking government appointments, have started to complain that the Obama administration is failing to fill senior financial and economic jobs.
Sam Steinhas excerpts from Richard Wolffe's new book on the White House. Here's a somewhat contrarian take on the dynamics between Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and President Obama as the White House moved toward supporting former Fed Chair Paul Volcker's plan to ban proprietary trading at Wall Street banks.
With the announcement that Larry Summers is leaving the Obama administration at the end of the year, speculation has begun about who will replace him, with reports indicating that the White House wants a "woman CEO." Please, please, spare us this terrible idea.
So John Boehnerthinks the announced resignation of Christina Romer, in combination with the latest jobs report, is evidence the Obama administration needs to seriously retool its economic policy:
Via Brad Delong, here is some egregiously bad work by Dana Milbank, The Washington Post reporter sent to cover stories the newspaper doesn't take seriously.
There’s yet another angle on the “Is the public too stupid to realize all that the stimulus has done” debate that Adamweighed into earlier this afternoon. Adam and Matt Yglesias took Joe Klein for task for condescending to the the public when it’s the responsibility of the media and other elites to help them understand what the government is doing.
Felix Salmonwrites up a broad review of regulatory reform efforts, but I think his description of what Democrats in Washington have been trying to do over the last few months misses several key factors and ends up being too pessimistic. There are really only two main visions of regulatory reform for the Democrats, and there is a way forward. Let me explain.
This profile of Larry Summers has brought about a rethinking of the bank nationalization* debate from last winter; Mattthinks the arguments presented by Summ
