Sociopaths

Per CNN, Elizabeth Warren is calling on Harvard to cut ties with Larry Summers after Jeffrey Epstein's emails released last week by House Dems featured Summers making sexist comments + asking for Epstein’s romantic advice.

— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) November 17, 2025 at 12:55 PM

Sure. He's "deeply ashamed" now that his name is out
Larry Summers says he is ‘deeply ashamed’ after new Jeffrey Epstein emails and will pause public engagements | CNN Politics share.google/VDFV79lIsDEA…

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— muffinman420.bsky.social (@muffinman420.bsky.social) November 18, 2025 at 12:31 AM

Larry Summers said Monday night that he was “deeply ashamed” about his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, telling CNN that he would pause all public engagements as he works to “rebuild trust and repair relationships” — but the Harvard University professor added that he will continue teaching as some call for the university to sever ties with him…

New details of Summers’ relationship with Epstein emerged last week when a House committee released emails showing years of personal correspondence between the two men, including Summers making sexist comments and seeking Epstein’s romantic advice.

Summers’ first statement addressing the newly unveiled Epstein correspondence comes on the heels of Sen. Elizabeth Warren calling on Harvard to sever ties with Summers and putting new pressure on the elite university to hold Summers accountable for his close friendship with Epstein.

Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor and now the Democratic senior senator from Massachusetts, had said in response to a CNN inquiry that she believes Summers — Harvard’s former president and one of its most prominent faculty members — “cannot be trusted” with students given his past relationship with Epstein.

“For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment,” Warren told CNN. “If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.” …

Summers served as Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary and Barack Obama’s director of the National Economic Council and has been one of the country’s most influential economic voices for decades. Warren, an economic populist, has clashed with Summers over financial regulations in the past.

But her new call on policymakers and institutions to shun Summers represented an even sharper critique of his character.

Summers resigned as Harvard’s president in 2006 under pressure amid multiple controversies, including his suggestion that men may perform better in the sciences because of genetic differences from women. He currently serves as the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard…

I, too, have long awaited Larry Summers’ ejection from polite society. The original spark for me was the ‘Summers memo’, which has its own Wikipedia page:

The Summers memo was a 1991 memo on trade liberalization that was written by Lant Pritchett and signed by Lawrence Summers who was then Chief Economist of the World Bank. It included a section that both Summers and Pritchett say was sarcastic that suggested dumping toxic waste in third-world countries for perceived economic benefits…

‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least 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 thought 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[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality 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.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

It was *sarcastic*! And besides, Summers didn’t actually write it — he just absently-minded signed something his subordinate put in front of him, as one does…

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Open Thread: Larry Summers, Ever the ‘Victim’Post + Comments (119)