It’s Janet Yellen v. Larry Summers for the Fed chairmanship, or at least that’s what we’re hearing. The contest—waged on each economist’s behalf by politicians, executive branch officials, editors, and commentators of all types—might be the most engrossing recurring news story of the summer.
A pair of articles released yesterday saw current and former Harvard faculty jump into the debate over Summers, on both sides.
Cornel West, a former professor in the Harvard Department of African and African American Studies who moved to Princeton after a dispute with Summers, was interviewed by The Huffington Post. Here’s West:
To put it bluntly, Summers has always struck me as a legendary gangster with a high IQ, in service of the well-to-do. That was my experience the first time I ever encountered him in his office. … What’s interesting is I’ve noticed in a number of the newspaper pieces, they make more of his comment about women than they do his relation to black folk at Harvard. As you know, it really started with black folks.
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People are fetishizing Summers’ brilliance … and yet don’t want to accent that he hasn’t used it in the service of working people or poor people.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a Harvard professor and former chair of the African and African American Studies Department, said in the same article:
There’s no question that at that time, he [Summers] was skeptical about the intellectual legitimacy and academic legitimacy of African American Studies … But I’ve gotten to know Larry, and I know his attitudes about the field of African American Studies have changed dramatically since that time. … Larry Summers is a brilliant man, there’s no question about that. I have no doubt that he would be a brilliant chair of the Fed. He lives and breathes economics.
Meanwhile, Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and former head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a Bloomberg column defending Summers:
The paradox is that those who know him best, and who have worked with him most closely, are his biggest supporters — and that the objections are coming largely from those who know him little or not at all. (Disclosure: Summers is a colleague and a friend, and I co-taught a course with him last spring.)
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Some of Summers’s critics think that he is anti-regulatory and reflexively pro-business, and that he would undermine the important regulatory mission of the Federal Reserve. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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Some of his critics fear that Summers would be unable to work well with others. On the contrary: He is one of the best colleagues one could imagine. True, he’s not exactly a charmer. He’s a natural debater, and he can be tough, and he likes to start a conversation by telling you that you are dead wrong. But he is an excellent listener; he goes where the facts take him and he is willing to change his mind.
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The mission of the Federal Reserve Board is to help to increase employment, to promote economic growth and stable prices, and to protect consumers. For its next chairman, Obama has some extraordinary candidates, but no one knows more about how to carry out that mission than Larry Summers.
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