Larry Summers in his own words

The President of Harvard has been in hot water over remarks he made about why so few women figure in the top ranks of certain professions and specialisms. I’ve heard so many selective quotes from his talk that I went looking for the approved text. It’s an interesting read. This passage — on the hypothesis that socialisation has something to do with it — struck me:

So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. And I think it’s just something that you probably have to recognize.

Mr Summers is famously bumptious in a you-won’t-like-this-but-I’m-gonna-tell-you-because-you-need-to-know-it way. Here’s an extract from a celebrated leaked memo he wrote while he was Chief Economist at the World Bank.

‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

After the memo became public in February 1992, Brazil’s then-Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenburger wrote back to Summers:

Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane… Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in… If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility. To me it would confirm what I often said… the best thing that could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.

If, as widely rumoured, Dubya carries out his intention of appointing either Paul Wolfowitz or Carly Fiorina to the Presidency of the Bank, Mr. Lutzenburger may find that his wish has been granted!

Quote of the day

“Individual sanity is not immune to collective insanity.”
Aldous Huxley, quoted by a guest on Radio 4’s Start the Week this morning.

Quote of the day

“People have changed more than the organisations on which their well-being depends.”

Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin: The Support Economy.

Quote of the day

“The IRA stopped short of declaring whether its offer to shoot those involved in the murder [of Robert McCartney] meant they were to be killed, or punished with a kneecapping or ‘six pack’ where victims are shot in the ankles, knees and elbows.”

The Guardian, March 9, 2005.

What’s in Dave Barry’s bag?

Gizmodo asked Dave Barry what he carries in his bag. Here’s part of his reply:

The main thing I carry in my gadget bag is about 28 different power converters. I don’t know what they’re all for: Some of them date back to the early 1990s. But if I ever need to recharge a notebook computer that I no longer own, I am READY.

[…]

My phone is a Treo 600. It’s a bit too big, but I like that it syncs easily with my computers, and it has everything in it — contacts, calendars, email, and a really, really bad camera, which I call “The CrapCam.” I take pictures on it and post them to my blog, mainly because the quality of the photos enrages the blog readers and causes them to rant in an entertaining manner. I’m thinking of getting the Treo 650, which apparently has a better screen. But it also has a better camera, and I don’t know that I’m prepared to get rid of the CrapCam.

In accordance with federal law, I also have an iPod. It has 15G of memory, which is at least 14G more than I actually need, since I realize in my old age that I really only like something like nine songs. I have Bose noise-canceling headphones, which are wonderful on planes. The plane could make an emergency landing in the ocean, and those of us with Bose noise-canceling headphones wouldn’t notice until squid swam past our seats.

Quote of the day

“You can only offer democracy to people. You can’t force it down their throats”.

Former US Secretary of State Madaleine Albright, speaking on BBC radio 4 this morning.

Quote of the day

“A brilliant European sociologist, Norbert Elias, wrote a history of manners called The Civilising Process. He figured out how people conducted themselves in the tntimate matters of daily life many centuries ago by reading what authors of etiquette books were telling them not to do. Why write books telling people not to defecate in public, he reasoned, if that’s not exactly what people are doing all the time? And so it is today. Change management would not be the industry it is if organisations were changing. Change management is huge precisely because organisations are not fundamentally changing”.

From The Support Economy by Shoshana Zuboff and James Maxmin.

Quote of the day

Peter Bazalgette on the central problem facing anyone trying to run the BBC.

‘British TV is an organised hypocrisy, where you have to say one thing to regulators and to government, who don’t have much sympathy for entertainment and don’t watch TV, and another things to viewers, whose primary reason for turning their TV sets on is to be entertained.’

From a nice piece in the Observer by James Robinson.