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Somebody Help Larry Summers. He’s Stuck In A Textbook
"Look, we need to help people," Larry Summers said, in a kind of deliberate drawl on Monday, during another chat with Bloomberg Television.
Taylor Riggs stared back at him, her trademark smile bent into a slight smirk.
"There are millions of people who desperately need help, especially right now, but at all times, as inequality has risen and our economy has stagnated," Summers continued.
[video width="1280" height="720" mp4="https://heisenbergreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/CTf2MZV87CKI
Summers is not sure “we should be encouraging consumer spending beyond what we are now” because “it is not that they don’t want to spend, but that they can’t spend; they can’t take a flight or go to a restaurant”. Did you get that? He thinks people are forming historic line-ups at food banks because restaurants are closed!
That last sentence ought to be made into a slogan… Bravo!
Thank you for the insightful article. This article confirms to me that you are for more insightful than Larry. You also helped confirmed for me that economics is a soft science and always will be. I think that the real issue is our unemployment system is not set up to deal with long term systemic unemployment. Most states pay 30% – 50% of what your previous job paid. So if your in the middle class and could save up for a rainy day, you can pay your bills. But if your working in one of those restaurant jobs and you live from week to week your unemployment is killing you because you could barely survive.
We should adopt the European system where you get 100% of what your previous job paid. This way the government doesn’t have to guess a stimulus number, 300,600 or 2000. Unfortunately in today’s political environment this would be impossible because Republicans would bring up the fallacy of moral hazard.
“Summers is stuck in a textbook. And I’ve read those textbooks. They’re like cheap, manual can openers: Useful, necessary, but prone to failure and occasionally conducive to injury.” Classic TRH. Keep it up.
I don’t know enough to argue about Summer’s viewpoint on the $2,000 stimulus issue.
However it seems to me that he did a good job in the Clinton administration, first as undersecretary
under Rubin, and then as treasury secretary. Earlier he received a prestigious prize, given annually,
to the best economist under the age of 45. He may be wrong on this issue, but I don’t think he is
as clownish as the article would lead us to believe.
Really? Are you being serious or is this meant to be tongue in cheek?
He’s not a clown, he’s an economist who lacks the receptors for bonding with the real world….
Summers was an academic economist who grappled with real world problems working in the
Clinton administration. I believe that he and the administration did well with the economy. You
guys probably disagree. He does not have his head in the clouds, and is data rather than ideology
driven. He did err in not advocating fora larger stimulus in 2008, and may be making the same
mistake now, but he is serious, knowledgeable economist. That’s just my non-expert opinion.
Summers was totally tone-deaf as Harvard’s boss as well and they saw through him quickly. I have an UG degree in Econ plus a required econ field in my finance doctorate and I can say with certainty that all newly-minted economists should come with a sell-by date, 20 years at the outside, after which they can never speak about anything regarding economics, nothing, period. Nothing less grounded in reality than a used economist.
I’m not that crazy about some of the new ones either…..
I think that Janet Yellin may be an exception to Mr. Lucky’s rule.