Greg Mankiw's Blog: Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary?

The blog entry Greg Mankiw's Blog: Larry Summers as Treasury Secretary? contains references both to Michael Kinsley's argument in favor of selecting Larry Summers to be Secretary of Treasury and also to Stanley Fish's oppositional column.

Kinsley's comments on Summers' infamous pollution memo are so silly that they barely merit refutation and are generally completely off target. Among other questionable assertions, Kinsley claims:

The general point is that clean air and other environmental goods are luxuries. The richer a country is, the more of them it can afford. And if rich countries like the United States had had to meet some of the standards being wished upon poor countries today, we would still be poor ourselves.

In point of fact, protectionism, disregard of international intellectual property rights, and encouraging the immigration of skilled scientists, engineers, and technologists were far more important in modernizing, industrializing, or expanding the economies of Russia, Prussia and the USA in the nineteenth century than obliviousness to pollution. Not only does Summer's pollution proposal show a complete inability to think "outside of the box," but it also shows a total lack of historical and technological comprehension or perspective.

On the other hand, as one of the main sources of external tension during Summers' tenure as Harvard University, I certainly agree with Stanley Fish that Summers did not have a clue how to run Harvard University and note that Summers' tolerance of the Shleifers' questionable financial practices sends the wrong message.

Yet, I will grant that serving as Secretary of the Treasure is a role quite different from the presidency of Harvard and that failing miserably at Harvard hardly implies that he would mess up if he returned to his old job.

Summers is an inappropriate choice for the Obama administration because he is an extremist Zionist close to the fanatic Islamophobic and Arabophic racist Charles Jacobs of the David Project.

There are probably at least $3-6 trillion available in Arab and Muslim sovereign wealth funds for potential investment in the USA, but Summers wants to create a special category of Arab or Muslim ownership, which would confer fewer rights than an investment from the Swedish sovereign wealth fund would have.

Could a Secretary of Treasury looking for investment to unfreeze credit possibly entertain stupider ideas?

To put it bluntly, Summers is probably the dumbest smart person on the Harvard faculty* and would be an utterly wrong choice for Secretary of the Treasury in a situation where the USA has to work closely with the rest of the world to undo a financial nightmare that the US created.

Former Harvard Fund Manager Mohamed el-Erian,

• who has returned to PIMCO,
• who knows how to manage, and
• who has a much greater understanding of debt than Summers,

would be the right choice for the sort of globalized economy in which the USA must function.

Note

* Noah Feldman, who wandered around Baghdad for a month with an Iraqi Arabic phrasebook in the early days of the Iraq occupation, is the second dumbest smart person on the Harvard faculty. Here are two blogentries that pertain to him:

1. Feldman and the anguish of the disinherited
2. Gary Rosenblatt: Noah Feldman and the Confrontation of American with Jewish or Zionist Values (Rosenblatt's article seems to have been expunged from Jewishweek archives)

Feldman is debating Duncan Kenned on Wednesday.

THE FUTURE OF US FOREIGN POLICY AND ISRAEL/PALESTINE
A debate and discussion with Professor Duncan Kennedy and Professor Noah Feldman
WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 19, 7:15 PM
POUND 102, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL

According to Wikipedia:

In 1977, together with Karl Klare, Mark Kelman, Roberto Unger, and a number of other like-minded scholars, Kennedy established the Critical Legal Studies movement. Although outside legal academia he is mostly known today for his monograph Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy*[1], famous for its trenchant critique of American legal education, among legal scholars Kennedy is considered one of the most original and influential modern writers on legal theory.

Lama Abu Odeh was a student of Duncan Kennedy when she studied at HLS.

She skewers Feldman in The Yale Law Journal - A Radical Rejection of Universal Jurisdiction.

Fortunately, I have not heard that Feldman is not going to DC, where he would add next to nothing with regard to addressing critical legal or economic problems.

Nowadays Abu Odeh teaches at the Georgetown Law School. Both Kennedy and Abu Odeh are at least an order of magnitude superior in legal scholarship to Martha Minow. Either or better both Kennedy and Abu Odeh would do very well and benefit the nation in leadership positions at the DOJ.

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