Former Economist Larry Summers

On Tuesday, the American Economic Association banned Larry Summers for life from all activities. He was allowed to voluntarily resign his membership. This bars Summers from participating in any of its conferences, publications, editorial work, or refereeing of articles. It is an extraordinary rebuke, and as far as I can tell, unprecedented. The AEA statement barring Summers described his conduct as “fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity and with the trust placed in mentors within the economics profession.”

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This action by the AEA almost surely foreshadows Summers’s firing from Harvard, where he is currently on leave from teaching but still holds Harvard’s most prestigious chair, a university professorship. Summers’s ultimate status at Harvard is still under review, but in his email correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein, Summers was seeking advice on how to get a “mentee” whom he fancied to go to bed with him. She was seeking his advice on an academic paper.

Harvard seldom revokes tenure, but did so this year when professor Francesca Gino was accused of fabricating data in academic papers. Gino has denied the allegations. It was the first time in decades that Harvard revoked a professor’s tenure. According to an investigation in 2020 by The Harvard Crimson, every tenured Harvard professor embroiled in allegations of improper sexual advances either chose to retire or remained on the faculty. None was removed.

The process that led to AEA’s decision is confidential; however, ethics complaints are referred to an ethics committee, whose members are not disclosed. The committee’s recommendations are then referred to the AEA’s executive committee and officers. The decision of the executive committee is final.

The AEA’s current president is Lawrence Katz, a fellow Harvard professor who has published with Summers. The president-elect is Katharine Abraham of the University of Maryland. The executive committee, which is elected from the membership, fittingly enough, is currently made up disproportionately of women.

It was Summers’s disparaging comments about women’s intellectual abilities that set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to his ouster as Harvard president. But the latest revelations depict a much cruder look at Summers’s adolescent id.

Stepping back from the immediate events in Summers’s long-deferred downfall, the question remains: Given how wrong Summers has been in every major area of policy advice, from pushing a fire sale of Russian state assets ultimately bought cheap by corrupt oligarchs, to promoting financial deregulation that produced the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, to lowballing the needed stimulus under Obama, why did his public disgrace require the Epstein files rather than a reckoning with his serial failures as an economist. (They don’t throw you out of the AEA for that.)

Even after Summers virtually wrote Republican talking points in his churlish attacks on Biden’s stimulus program (which unlike Summers’s stimulus was adequate and spared Americans a prolonged recession), Summers was welcomed at the premier center-left Democratic think tank, the Center for American Progress. With the Epstein revelations, the Center has prudently dumped Summers, along with Bloomberg and the Times.

Why was an economist who made mistake after mistake treated like a seer by these institutions? The answer, I think, is that if you are the American oligarchy, Larry Summers is exactly who you want making economic policy for Democrats.

The other obvious comparison is between the downfall of Larry Summers and the non-downfall of that other sexual creep, Donald Trump. We don’t need more Epstein files for proof of that. Yet while Summers’s career is in ruins, Trump soldiers on.

The checks and balances in our democracy are failing, while the standards in our civil society, though battered, are mostly alive and capable of regeneration. That’s another reason why Trump hates universities.