Voices
sion was fully engaged.
“The probability that you left me
a message that I did not receive is
approximately zero,” he said. When
it turned out that his secretary had
been mixed up about the date of
my messages (or maybe it was Larry who was mixed up?), he turned
on her, criticizing her sharply with
me on the line.
There are worse things in life
than terrible phone manners, imperiousness and excessive confidence, but these traits have just
become more relevant amid the
disclosures that Larry Summers
appears to be the front-runner
to take over as Federal Reserve
chairman assuming Ben Bernanke
steps down early next year.
By intellectual pedigree, Summers may be unrivaled as claimant
to the chair. He has a bachelor’s
from M.I.T., a Ph.D. from Harvard,
a slew of academic awards and an
unmistakably brilliant mind. Anyone who has talked to Summers
must surely grasp what prompted
President Barack Obama to bring
him aboard as his leading economic adviser. Summers excels at
boiling down difficult subjects to
their essentials and analyzing competing positions crisply. He speaks
in PowerPoint sentences, with the
PETER S.
GOODMAN
HUFFINGTON
08.04.13
sort of authority and sweep that a
president needing to make a tough
decision must crave.
But history is full of examples of
people whose remarkable brains
have effectively inured them to important dimensions of reality. This
is how Ivy League-trained technocrats in the Kennedy administration led us into the pointless killing ground of Vietnam, so certain
of their world-views that they did
History is full of
examples of people whose
remarkable brains have
effectively inured them
to important dimensions
of reality.”
not bother to examine conditions
on the ground.
This is how Greenspan persuaded Congress and several presidents
to trust in his libertarian fantasy
that leaving the markets alone
would make milk and honey spew
forth from the earth. He was so
resolute in his views and so forthright in his articulation that those
around him were fearful of challenging him lest they risk embarrassing themselves. The result was