The Worldview of Lawrence Summers
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“I wrote on a graduate school application that while some children were taught to believe in God, I came to believe in the power of systems analysis.”
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Lawrence H. Summers :
Lawrence H. Summers is an American economist. He is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard University, where he became one of the university's youngest tenured faculty at age 28.
The author of over 150 journal articles, Dr. Summers' wide-ranging contributions to economic research were recognized with the John Bates Clark Medal, given every two years to the outstanding American economist under the age of 40. He was also the first social scientist to receive the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award for outstanding scientific achievement.
Beyond his academic career, Dr. Summers has held a number of distinguished appointments in government. He previously served as Director of the National Economic Council for the Obama Administration, Secretary of the Treasury for the Clinton Administration, and Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Lawrence Summers received his S.B. from MIT and his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. He and his wife Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard, have six children.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Lawrence Summers:
Question: How do you see the world?
Lawrence Summers: Well I wrote on a graduate school application that while some children were taught to believe in God, I came to believe in the power of systems analysis. And I suppose ours was a family where a certain form of analytic reasoning was something that was just in the air and part of what was discussed at the dinner table. And certainly we had lots of schemes for allocating the rights to watch what was the only TV set in the family.
But actually, economics didn’t play a large role in my childhood. I left high school to go to MIT thinking I was going to pursue mathematics or physics as a field. I came to economics really because I wanted to use the kind of quantitative analytical tools one uses when thinking about the hard sciences; but also wanted to be involved in the issues of the day. And it seemed to me that economics gave one an opportunity to do both of those things.
And I think the modes of reasoning around probabilities and uncertainties, around focusing on incentives, around thinking about issues of coordination that economics provide are enormously powerful - and when more and more widely applied, have great potential to make the world a better place.
I think that I developed the habit of mind very early on of not taking anything on faith. And so when somebody tells me “it’s generally accepted that …”, I tend to bristle and be skeptical about any proposition that’s said to be generally accepted. Most of the time, things are generally accepted for a reason, and I’ve taken the posture to come to understand why it’s generally accepted to a greater extent.
But sometimes, by having that reflexive skepticism and proclivity to challenge, you’ll learn that the emperor doesn’t have any clothes. You’ll learn that it’s less a proposition than a platitude, and that’s how interesting things start to develop. So I try to maintain the habit of mind of skepticism, and I try very hard also to not live with contradictory belief. And so I find myself constantly balancing the different things that I know; and when they seem inconsistent with each other, try to understand which one is right, or what the right synthesis is.
Sometimes that leads to productive approaches. Sometimes that leads me to change my mind. Often it leads me to feel more secure in my prior belief. But without those exercises of challenge, I find it very hard to know and to believe things with conviction.
You know this is a kind of approach to thinking, and approach to ideas, that’s very much the habit of science. It’s very much the habit of debate. But it’s something that is somewhat less fashionable than it once was. We have an administration [the George W. Bush administration] that takes pride in the fact that its policies are based on faith and conviction rather than reason and evidence.
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