Larry Summers floated as possible Obama Treasury Secretary: Please, tell me you're joking!

Although Obama defeated McCain just three days ago, there has already been a lot of speculation as to what his cabinet might look like. Given the current state of the economy, which seems to get worse every day, one of the most talked about cabinet posts is naturally the Secretary of the Treasury. Indeed, discussion of likely candidates for Treasury Secretary under an Obama Administration began weeks before Obama was elected. One of the prime candidates for the position, according to New York Magazine and other sources, is Lawrence Summers, former Treasury Secretary under Clinton and President of Harvard University. That Obama might legitimately be considering this guy, indeed that this guy is at the top of the list of candidates for this position, ought to strike fear in the hearts of progressives.

Dean Baker has a great post today that discusses Summers's record and current and former policy positions and folks, let's just say it ain't pretty. As a member of the Clinton administration, Summers contributed to the the 2001-02 recession by doing nothing to contain the stock market bubble and also helped bring about the current economic crisis, through his support for reckless financial deregulation. More generally, if Summers is chosen as Treasury Secretary it will signal that the Obama administration will look a lot like a second Clinton administration. The Clinton years were certainly better than the Bush years, but I and many Americans, including Obama's strident and unyielding supports in the labor movement, expect much better from Obama than 8 more years of neoliberal corporate globalization with a bit of a human face. We want real, fundamental change.

In addition to his contributing role in the past two recessions, Summers has other skeletons in his closet which ought to be equally, if not more horrifying for progressives. Yesterday, Max Blumenthal pointed out in his blog on the Huffington Post a little known fact about Summers:

On December 12, 1991, while serving as chief economist for the World Bank, Summers authored a private memo arguing that the bank should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries, particularly "under populated countries in Africa," which Summers described as "UNDER-polluted." Summers added that public outrage over the heightened rates of prostate cancer caused by his proposed dumping would be mitigated by the fact that poor people in developing countries rarely live long enough to develop prostate cancer.

That's right, I haven't copied it wrong, Summers actually said countries in Africa were under-polluted, as if some level of pollution is optimal for human welfare. In 1992, Brazil's Secretary of the Environment, Jose Lutzenburger, responded to the Summers memo with great eloquence:

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.

Furthermore, there's Summers's 2005 speech he gave before the National Bureau of Economic Research on Women and Science. You can find the full text of the speech here. In essence, Summers advanced the argument that women are underrepresented in the hard sciences because they're just not as smart as men and in the case that they are as smart, they're too unwilling to put in the long, hard hours away from their families. Anyone who's even vaguely feminist will no doubt be taken aback by such statements. What maddened me most about his speech was that his reasoning was fundamentally flawed and he used statements that are scientifically false to back up his claim that science venerated his prejudices.

Back in 2005 when Summers gave that speech, I was enrolled in an introductory course on Social Psychology (the one and only psych course I took in college). My professor at the time decided to make the Summers speech the subject of one day's lecture and we were asked to examine what he said in light of the basic psychological theories we'd been taught. Why? Because she thought it was pretty much BS. What stood out to me most from that speech was his truly maddening assertion that human beings are more likely to attribute human behavior and achievement to environmental causes than intrinsic/genetic ones:

First, most of what we've learned from empirical psychology in the last fifteen years has been that people naturally attribute things to socialization that are in fact not attributable to socialization. We've been astounded by the results of separated twins studies. The confident assertions that autism was a reflection of parental characteristics that were absolutely supported and that people knew from years of observational evidence have now been proven to be wrong. And so, the human mind has a tendency to grab to the socialization hypothesis when you can see it, and it often turns out not to be true.

Anyone who's taken an intro to psychology course or has even a basic familiarity with the subject will immediately recognize that the above statement is utterly ridiculous and patently false. Why? For many years, Psychologists have known about a phenomenon known as the Fundamental Attribution Error. In essence, this empirically verified and universally accepted theory states that people tend to attribute the behavior of others to their disposition and their own behavior to environmental factors. For instance, if on your way home to work one day there's a driver on the road who cuts you off and speeds ahead, people tend to think the driver is overly aggressive, a jerk, or perhaps worse. However, if you yourself behave that way, you probably have several possible explanations: you're late picking up your kids from soccer practice, just had a really stressful day at work, etc. Or let's think about this a bit more broadly. For many, many years people believed that persons of African, Latino, or even Irish decent were inherently less intelligent and/or lazier than whites, native-born Americans, protestants, etc. Does our long history of ignorance on racial and ethnic issues, which is certainly far from over, illustrate a natural human tendency towards attributing environmental causes to human behavior over intrinsic ones? Or how bout our long history of ignorance as humans, at least in the west, with regard to the status of women? To anyone willing to sit and think about what Summers said for just a second, they'd realize it's totally bogus.

From my incredibly influential and wide-reaching platform that is this blog, I offer this advice to Obama: don't pick Larry Summers. A neoliberal sexist who advocates dumping toxic waste in poor countries is not change we can believe in.