Larry Summers Makes Intemperate Remarks About Relative Intelligence Shocker!

As a psychologist, I am just happy when an economist notices my worthless self.

In my more dismal moments, I tend to tweak Oscar Wilde’s observation:

Economists are people who now the price of everything and the value of nothing.

;-)

Why didn’t he just take all the money away fromt he humanities arts and sociazl sciences and give it to the mathematicians and physicists (and one or two of the biologists)?

”Can’t imagine how we missed this the first time around …”

Wearing glasses will not only help with news reading, they make you look smarter at the same time. If you have good vision already skip the plain glass models and go nuevo chic and get a nice horn rim tat.

“smarter than” = “to the right of”.

GRE scores would seem to support Summers’ claim. Contra ‘mcd’, it is not the case that “smarter than” = “to the right of”. Philosophers are much higher on the list than Business students, for example.

It’s not the “truth” of the claim that is at question here – it’s its usefulness. How does this conversation improve our respective lives/help us construct policies to improve society? Where do other qualities such as judgment and goodness of character fit in? After all, a lot of really smart/technically proficient/math smart (which is what we’re ultimately talking about here, right?) people have done some really bad (and stupid) things lately.

The GRE scores Richard cites are, unsurprisingly, a flawed guide; most obviously, they give tremendous weight to being in a math-heavy discipline. Assuming the numbers to be accurate, no category of test-takers averages more than 585 or 573 verbal (philosophers and English majors), but students in math-heavy fields shoot to the top of the list by averaging as high as 720 quantitative (electrical engineers). This doesn’t mean that the electrical engineers are smarter.

Shorter Larry Summers: Economists are the investment banks and sociologists the domestic auto companies of the academy.

Ignore the erroneous ‘our’… -_-

OMG! Horrors! Petty academic gamesmanship! Offhand remarks by an academic ribbing a rival discupline! WHY HAVE I NEVER HEARD OF THIS BEFORE?!

I am constantly amazed that the Summers appointment didn’t raise more objections. I wonder what would have happened if Bush, say, would have appointed an accomplished economist who thought African Americans are less intelligent than Whites (heck, the test scores “prove” it!).

22: that comic should have another sociologist (possibly Bruno Latour) at the right end of the panel saying “I know you think that what you’re doing is something other than human social behaviour …”

Of course, anyone who thinks that GREs measure intelligence, isn’t intelligent.

Ehud,
I believe Summers said there was more variance in Female math scores, not that women weren’t as good at math. g-loving psychologists believe that blacks are on average less intelligent than whites: there’s a world of difference.

Further, I think it’s perfectly fine to argue that what’s measured on IQ tests is not quite intelligence. However, I’m unable to think of a good reason to think why standardized math tests do not actually measure mathematical ability.

OT: It feels weird to be talking about group identity and IQ as though this were the intellectual baggage of Economics. This issue is 100% Psychology’s bag, so let’s all take turns denouncing THEM for a change.

“use of high-powered but unrealistic mathematical models devised by mathematicians with a weak econ background”

I don’t know if the present financial troubles can be blamed on that, but I do know that often times when mathematicians (and physicists too) grab hold of econ or finance topics they go all wacko with hubris and have no idea of what they’re doing. Probably a lot like when economics get hold of sociology topics.

An “lol” to John Emerson in 28.

I’m pretty aware of the shortcomings of IQ tests (I spend hours each month arguing with my psychologist coworkers about them). I wasn’t aware that there was a similar race of presenter effect on pure math tests. Peter, could you provide a link?

My general thoughts are:
1. Testing psychologists care a whole lot about the reliability of the constructs they measure.
2. Math skill seems like an easier thing to measure than general intelligence.

From that I just reckoned that psychologists would be pretty good at it. Personally, I’d love to hear why they are not.

I love lbtj’s attempted intellectual jujitzu: “We aren’t outraged by the falsity of the statement (since, on any concievable objective measure, it is in fact true). We are outraged by it’s uselessness.” Yes, that’s why so many humanities professors dedicate their lives to studying incredibly useful texts of postmodern critical theory.

I also love the many commenters who have decided that, the results of any sort of objective measurements being extremely inconvenient for their side of the argument, any sort of objective measurements are highly dubious and should not be trusted. These are practictioners of disciplies that, in a desperate attempt to introduce some sort of quantitative rigor despite the fact that their undergraduates must labor mightily to comprehend a 2X2 contingency table, regularly tollerate all sorts of highly dubious quantifications and ignore all sorts of confounding factors. Yet suddenly these same people are expert de-constructors of controled tests that professional statisticians have worked on for decades.

The humanities types can exercise their outrage on blogs and in faculty senates all they want, but the rest of the world knows the score. My local newspaper recently ran an “expose” revealing the shocking fact that, now that we are requiring college sports players to actually get decent grades, most are still sucessfully evading academicly challenging work by majoring in subjects like sociology and anthropology.

LarryWright, I disagree. The score is crap. The idea that you can measure intelligence, a bogus fiction that simply reflects the prejudices of a small group of white guys in Europe in the nineteenth cenury, with more specificity than you can, say, unemployment, which is subject to enormous controversies concerning the metrics used to plumb it, simply shows the continuing irrelevance of people who have built their self-images on the fantasies of a small group of White Guys in Europe in the nineteenth century. There’s no g. There’s no mathematical intelligence. That of course doesn’t even make any sense – math covers an amazing range of subdisciplines, and I don’t know why I’m supposed to believe algebra intelligence is the same as, say, topological intelligence. Why group them together? Is there any reason in neurology? Do they exist in different brain wrinkles that the white guy brain phrenologists – the ones that will be quoted with religious fervor on Slate – are gonna ferret out?

In fact, as science is a community product, the testing of it as though it were still an institution stuck in the virtuoso phase of the 18th century is laughable. No intelligence testing should be done singly. Otherwise, the test results will give you nothing – bullshit in, bullshit out. Termin already did his little study of his geniuses back in the golden days when you could still believe that racists, sexist dreck, culling them carefully out, keeping in touch with them over the courses of their life, and they all turned out to be your usual mediocrities. If Termin had had the fortune to meet Einstein, of course, who didn’t have a great deal of “mathematical intelligence”, he would surely not have gone into the genius group, and would have gone into Summers beta group. The mystification of science here is typical of the pseudo-scientific, where math is some magical characteristic that explains what those people in the laboratory are doing. Except for extremely theoretical physics, it is difficult to know what Summers is talking about. Does he think, even if his bogus points are true, that the tests he is talking about have anything to do with, say, bio-engineering? Or genomics? Etc., etc. In fact, as his own brief career at Harvard shows, if you are socially blind – if you have a social intelligence quotient at the 90 stage – you will eventually land on your ass, and as punishment, become a hero to talk radio dittoheads. What a sad thing to happen to a person in his own lifetime!

Chased the most intellectually generous man then at Harvard off to Princeton, for reaching out to nonacademics.

I wouldn’t consider this a fair assessment of the Cornel West situation. An equally (un)fair statement on the opposite side would be that he chased the lightest-weight university professor at Harvard off to Princeton, for neglecting to continue doing high-quality scholarly work.

Then (to Harvard faculty’s embarrassment, and MIT’s great pleasure) he busted the budget poaching Pinker (of the pop-psych/development books).

You may not like Pinker’s popular books, but I know a bunch of people in the relevant departments at Harvard and MIT. On the whole, MIT was very unhappy to lose him and Harvard was pleased to get him. In any case, the Harvard president simply doesn’t have the power to force an unwanted hire on any department.

Made up the money by unilaterally rejecting tenure for people who weren’t already famous in fields he didn’t like so much.

Yeah, well, that’s how tenure works at Harvard in most departments, so he was just extending this procedure to the departments that had lower standards. The most notable case was the law school, where he was 100% right that Harvard Law had much lower scholarly standards than Yale and that there was no good reason they couldn’t recruit Yale-quality faculty if they cared to.

And just to complete the trifecta, does everyone remember the Summers memo about exporting pollution to third world countries because life is cheap over there? If anything, that memo shows that Summers is a Beckerite imperialist who brushes away the ideas in other fields rather than to address them.

I recently saw speculation that some of the recent problems with finance were the result of the use of high-powered but unrealistic mathematical models devised by mathematicians with a weak econ background.

It is more of a case of models being devised by matematicians with no econ background. I think it is telling that the Financial Engineering degree at Columbia is taught by the Industrial Engineering department. FE courses spend most of their time teaching mathematics and computer science. Any finance courses taught to them are usually electives at the advanced undergrad/MBA level. And most people entering FE are former scientists/engineers.

That said, I don’t think knowledge of economics would have averted the crisis, as the whole mess was caused by good old fashioned greed. The problem wasn’t one of the models coming up with the wrong security prices, but that of banks knowingly selling worthless securities at inflated prices. Even if the bankers and quants knew more knew economics, the incentives to do what they have done will still be there.

And just to complete the trifecta, does everyone remember the Summers memo about exporting pollution to third world countries because life is cheap over there? If anything, that memo shows that Summers is a Beckerite imperialist who brushes away the ideas in other fields rather than to address them.

You know, there really should be a “political intelligence” component in the GRE scores. Let me suggest a question for that part of the test:

A noted economist at the World Bank with notable liberal leanings is reportedly the author of a leaked World Bank memo in which he allegedly wrote, in part, “I’ve always thought under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”

From your first impression, what would you say this memo is most likely to be?

(1) In dead earnest, and after all, what else do you expect of the globalizing corporate planet-rapers at the World Bank, so let’s make a big paper-mache sculpture of Larry Summers and burn him in effigy.

(2) A forgery cleverly written in the usual style employed at the World Bank, possibly designed to discredit Larry Summers, but also possibly a policy trial balloon. Let’s discuss.

(3) Bwahahahahaha!! Who wants to bet that if we go look up “Summers memo” on Wikipedia, we’ll find clueless morons who would answer (1) or (2) still edit-warring over it?

Scoring:

(3) 10 out of 10
(2) 0 out of 10
(1) 0 out of 10, and we’re going to subtract 500 points from your scores on the other components of the test, just to make sure no graduate school on Earth gets accidentally saddled with you, even for one term. After all, they might sue us if your Summers effigy topples over and ignites their Anthro Department library on fire.

Vivian, re Summers:

“Now, maybe the man works really well together with other high-status economists, and as long as they stick to the subject at hand, they do good for the world. But it should take an awful lot of good work before we stop mocking him.”

Do *good* for the world? Collect money and power, and aid the upward redistribution of money and power, but people like Summers don’t do good; good doesn’t pay nearly as well as evil.

We’re watching the majority of elite economists proven to be at best far more ignorant that they pretend; more likely to be every bit as much evil as leftists believed.

“Perhaps it’s just me, but does it matter one bit whether Summers’ statement can be defended or not?”

I should think it does: The truth has some value, does it not? At least, whatever claim academia has to fatten itself at the public trough, and attack public prejudices, is based on the claim that there’s some truth to be found there, and that truth is important.

Otherwise you’re just a competing set of prejudices, and we ought to cut you off at the financial knees.

NY Times, “Furor on Memo at World Bank”, Feb 7, 1992:

. . . . Mr. Summers said in a recent interview that the seven-page memo was a strongly worded and sarcastic response to a vague draft text on environmental issues by another World Bank division.

The World Bank said in a statement today that the memo did not represent the institution’s position and that Mr. Summers had apologized “for any misconceptions it may have generated.”

In other words, the whole point of the memo was to say something about the World Bank that many anti-globalization protesters would probably have heartily agreed with. If it was the World Bank, and not Summers himself, reporting the apology, it was probably because Summers’ idea of an “apology” in this case would be “I’m very, very sorry there are so many stupid people in the world who think I’d seriously endorse any such positions, just because I work for an organization that — much to my amazement and chagrin — employs some people who actually do believe things not wildly different from what the obviously satirical memo expresses. We just weren’t up to the challenge of making it satirical enough for everybody to get the joke, I guess. And for that, we couldn’t possibly apologize enough. So — screw it. We won’t.”

Let me be the 127,473rd person to express my utter and complete outrage at the outrageously outrageous behavior of Larry Summers in the matter of this memo. He should be sentenced to 8 years of making paper-mache effigies of himself and burning them every Friday evening on the White House lawn, while also maintaining a full-time schedule of economic rescue planning at a salary of probably less than one-fifth of what he could command in the private sector. For the sake of appearing merciful in sentencing, we can throw in the standard qualifier of “time off for good behavior”, under the safe assumption that he’s incapable of that anyway.

In my experience, most economists are either people who very specifically couldn’t hack it in a real science in college or right-wing poli sci people with a delusion of mathematical capability. The use of math by economists is largely a joke designed to give the veneer of neutrality to blind ideology. The absurdly high percentage of economists who so dramatically understate transaction costs an other inefficiencies built into the markets they study as to make their mathematical models completely useless is a major indictment of the profession. Economists may or may not be smarter than Poli Sci and Humanities people on average, but they’re definitely far more delusional about the world and about their own capabilities than are people in just about any other area of study.

Any economics “profession” that didn’t see the housing bubble and burst coming and collectively raise the alarm bells is a completely useless “profession.” Anyone even slightly mathematically literate knew what was coming and was very, very scared.

Anonymous @41 seems to think that one has to be “already famous” in a field in order to get tenure in most departments at Harvard. That was largely (though never entirely) true a good many years ago, but even a non-inside casual observer can discern that it’s not true now and hasn’t been for quite a while.

slocum:
We, in the west, have much more expensive, stringent standards than we did in previous generations, and—assuming we continue to get richer—will have even more stringent standards in future generations.
Stringent tandards for pollution near us, but not for pollution caused by us. That’s the point eh? Can’t see it from my house.
Not being an economist I find myself lately increasingly prey to fears of a Russian-style rape by oligarchy. Of the US, my country, not me personally.
I keep looking to these economist types online for reassurance, but alas currently have found none whose message provides that comfort.
So your “assuming we continue to get richer” will have to do.
Unless by “we” you mean you and yours, and not me and mine as well.
Which is sort of the point about Summers.

It sounds like slocum hit the nail on the head.

The idea that Summers’ message was ironic would be more plausible if we didn’t have a practice in the US of dumping pollution on Indian reservations and upstream from poor black communities — whichever people have the least capacity for resistance. It’s not that poor communities choose pollution for the sake of a higher material standard of living, it’s just that they don’t have much political power.

That kind of glib jocularity is more offensive to the people being talked about than it is to the people making the jokes. They know that someone else is going to decide their fate, and they’re a bit touchy about the things the decisionmakers say.

@62 The core idea being that pollution control could be less important in very poor countries than it is in rich countries, compared to other health/productivity-related goods, like vaccinations and better roads, being provided in poor countries.

But as John points out, people or even governments in poor countries aren’t even necessarily making a choice about their own pollution levels. For example recently I read about illegal dumping of nuclear waste and other toxic waste off the coast of Somalia.

Are Michael Turner and trane in agreement here?

According to Lant Pritchett, the memo was “a deliberate fraud and forgery to discredit Larry and the World Bank.” because the “memo as leaked was doctored to remove context and intended irony”. Now, I can see how people think Summers is a jerk. But Pritchett is not and his saying this makes the claim a lot more credible.

“Are Michael Turner and trane in agreement here?”
I think yes, as regards the direction of the comment: Summers may have done other things criticisable, but the memo is not one.

About the exact wording of MT, the scoring and stuff, I don’t know.

Re: Pritchett
I have never met the man, but my impression from reading some of his work is that with his choice of and angle on topics it would be very odd to draft a memo like that without being ironic about it.

Michael Turner, quoting the NYT: “The World Bank said in a statement today that the memo did not represent the institution’s position and that Mr. Summers had apologized “for any misconceptions it may have generated.””

To me, this sounds like a classic non-denial denial. If Summers didn’t write it, then why is he apologizing for it?

“The core idea being that pollution control could be less important in very poor countries than it is in rich countries, compared to other health/productivity-related goods, like vaccinations and better roads, being provided in poor countries”
-Kaveh Hemmat

Less important by who’s estimation? Surely you don’t suggest that if the matter were put to a referendum in the prospective countries that the population would accept the dumping of our toxic pollutants in exchange for vaccinations and road repair? Fascinating.

Surely you don’t suggest that if the matter were put to a referendum in the prospective countries that the population would accept the dumping of our toxic pollutants in exchange for vaccinations and road repair?

Well British coal miners heartily protested the closure of their coal mines, despite the immense human cost of coal mining. Admittedly that was for a wage paid directly, rather than public services like vaccinations and road repair, but the willingness of people to risk their lives often amazes me.

Another example is the lack of interest in the West to giving up driving in response to fears about carbon dioxide emissions, or indeed the many vivid and obvious examples of how lethal car crashes can be. (Note, I drive too).

“I believe Summers said [variance, etc.]

text and subtext; any stick will do to beat some womenz.

Prosecute away, Emerson. You’re standing in front of a jury, pointing to obvious parody, and you’re either saying “That’s not funny!” or “Maybe it’s funny, but I know that Larry Summers wouldn’t recognize it as such.” I’m on the jury side, and from where I sit, you’re either laughably humorless, or you’re implying you have some intimate knowledge of Larry Summers’ sense of humor (or rather, lack thereof) that you’re actually quite unlikely to have.

I suppose there are lots of reasons to dislike Larry Summers. However, when I imagine him signing Lantz’s “memo” with a lordly flourish, as a practical joke on self-serious morons and/or corrupt bureaucrats in the World Bank, I see only a reason to like him.

obvious parody

But it’s not at all obvious that it’s a parody. Here is the passage in context (from here):

3. _”Dirty” industries_ Just between you and me, shouldn’t the
World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to
the LDCs? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurement 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 underpopulated 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 got prostate cancer than in a
country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of
the concern over industrial atmospheric 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.

Turner, it’s not an obvious parody. Chicago school economists actually think that way, and a lot of globalizers think that way. In order to absolve Summers, I’d really want to see the full memo and also know what he actually thinks on the topics in question.

We’re talking about China here, so saying that “The Chinese have accepted” is a bit far-fetched, as is the idea that there might be a referendum there.

“caveman” is pejorative from the get, so anyone defined as “caveman” automatically doesn’t get a full vote as to progress. Being as how they are primitive and all.
See also, bushman, indigenous, etc.
People who are not cavemen debating the interests of the cavemen.
What helps disguise the real parameters of the debate is the illusion that species evolution doesn’t happen in “modern” humans. So the essence of what we are goes along unchanged through whatever conditions ensue from progress. When in fact what we are is changed, and changing. And those once marginal, in the “caveman” time, are now central, and will defend those changes as important, necessary, inevitable. And see living like a caveman as tantamount to a dog’s life.
Even as the changes modern man brings wreak havoc on the whole world, and threaten the species itself with extinction.

I don’t know about Wittgenstein but…

“Pff. Civilized men! They poison all around them and call it progress!” – Conan the Cimmerian.

“Listen to them jabber away. From how many lands have they come, to hunker here all day and talk nonsense? Pretty nonsense, to be sure, but nonsense nonetheless…” – Conan

Whereupon, to continue the analogy, the prosecution shouts “Objection! Presumes facts not in evidence!”

You missed the part of the analogy where I’m in the jury, imagining that. Emerson’s analogy sucks anyway, because this is not a trial. We’re trying to piece together what really happened, in a situation decidedly fraught with politics and personalities and unverifiable claims. If we had a trial, we’d have statements under oath under penalty of perjury, document discovery, etc. (But also, inconveniently for Emerson’s case, the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty.”)

Without the benefit of all that,you have to read what you can into it, and what I read sounds like humor. If you don’t read it that way, you’re tone-deaf to humor. Selectively tone-deaf perhaps, perhaps, but aren’t we all like that, at least a little bit? After all, I found myself laughing at roy belmont’s “Caveman Has Wittgenstein’s Back” riff just above, then noticed it was from roy belmont, and tried to make myself stop laughing because I don’t want roy belmont to be able to make me laugh, but then I kept laughing anyway. Sometimes, funny is funny in the same way red is red. If you’re sufficiently color-blind, red is brown. And I’ll never be able to explain “red” to you. Not much you can do about it, though I suppose you can always hope that in both cases the conmdition might caused by an old blood clot that could eventually be safely dissolved with some new ultrasound technique.

I’ll admit there’s a possible satirical wrinkle here that hadn’t occurred to me before, raised by Michael Kinsley’s WaPo op-ed defending the infamous Memo (Kinsley being hardly lacking in a sense of irony himself): maybe Lantz and Summers had been infighting with some environmentalist purist faction at the World Bank, maybe they’d been favoring certain investments even though they might give rise to development that didn’t meet First World environmental standards (which, not so many decades ago, weren’t all that great either), only to meet a rather hysterical line of criticism at the Bank. And maybe that’s what their obviously satirical comments were lampooning: how they were being badmouthed. In that case, we should all, naturally enough, pile on Paul Krugman too, for being similarly callous. (And of course, many did. Go far enough left and/or Green and you’ll still find people who call Krugman a right-wing corporate planet-raping running dog lackey of a fascist octopus about to sing its swan song.)

Well, they say it always ruins a joke to try to explain it, and the only thing that might be funny now is how people can be so blind to humor you can’t explain. And I’m bored with that. Can I just go? Oh, I see: I have to ask the judge to be excused from jury duty mid-trial. How about if I tell him it’s because of a severe allergy to kangaroo fur? (But what if he sniffs his armpit and says, “what kangaroo-fur allergy? I’m not getting any reaction at all! I don’t think there’s any such condition! Sit back down before I charge you with contempt of court!” Would that mean I have to stay and sit through this to the end?)

Michael Turner,

How do you explain that this “obviously satirical” argument was accepted as essentially correct by several people (Slocum and Kaveh Hemmat) on this thread? And don’t you yourself, in your next to last paragraph (which turns Lant Pritchett into “Lantz”; not helpful to your credibility) agree with the basic thrust of the argument yourself?

Read the last paragraph of the excerpt again. The point of the memo is that if you believe in the conventional arguments for free trade and free capital movement, then Africa *is* vastly underpolluted. I think this argument is correct; if you disagree, you should explain why. And what do you think was Summers’s actual position on this question?

What sounded like humor to him sounded like Chicago School economics to me.

I searched on “under-polluted” in Google Scholar, hoping to assemble a list of Chicago School economists who have addressed the vast and growing problem of under-pollution and how it might be mitigated. Perhaps someone had even written a dissertation on the idea of paying developing countries to increase emissions of common industrial-society pollutants, to help stimulate economic growth.

Oddly, nothing came back, in any area of study. Why, you’d think “under-pollution” wasn’t even a word, when it’s obviously an important concept that has dominated neoliberal and Republican thinking on development for decades.

Should I report this to Google as a bug? On second, thought, no. After all, google.org was often characterized as “the Clinton administration in exile,” and the Obama administration is “center-right”, which is code for “Larry calls the shots around here.” So obviously, Google Scholar is just covering Larry’s ass. The depth of the perfidy seems astonishing, but we in the One True Left have long known what kind of people we’re dealing with.

I’m going to try “under-genocidal” now. But only because (as Google says) I’m feeling lucky.

Surely the very best satire is almost indistinguishable from reality? Otherwise it slides towards crude parody, which nobody would mistake for reality – except in the Bush White House, of course, where it is reality that is all-too-easy to mistake for crude parody…

If we had a trial, we’d have statements under oath under penalty of perjury, document discovery, etc. (But also, inconveniently for Emerson’s case, the doctrine of “innocent until proven guilty.”)

No, it’s inconvenient for your case. We have the redacted memo. Looks pretty guilty to me. You claim that it’s taken out of context. Fine. That means the burden of proof is on you to prove that it is, not on others to prove that it isn’t. To continue the analogy, it’s as if we have Summers standing over the body with a smoking gun in his hand and claiming that it’s not what it looks like, that there’s a perfectly plausible reason for his actions. Well then, it is up to the defense to prove this is the case, not on the the prosecutor to prove that there isn’t a perfectly good, perfectly innocent, perfectly reasonable explanation for why Summers is caught in such an incriminating pose.

And I think this goes to the crux of the matter, Michael. Against all good practices, you want to say the burden of proof flows in such a way that it is contrary to accepted scientific (and legal) procedure. To a lot of people here, it looks as if you are playing the ‘if you can’t make me say I’m wrong I win’ game[1]. To steadfastly claim at this point that you don’t owe anyone an explanation strikes this juror as pose of a poor loser.

[1]You’ve never, for example, given indication of what you would accept as proof that Summers’ statement was not taken out of context. Again, this is considered bad practice.

Pointlessness? On the internet? That’s not possible.

If the defense offers exculpatory evidence, it’s required to show it, not just allege that it exists.

So, I guess that’s your tacit admission that you’ve got nothing, Michael. I myself am much more graceful when I have to say something similar, but apparently, it’s your way to just be as poor a loser as possible. Oh, well.

Dave 12.02.08 at 2:26 pm

Actually, in a criminal trial, I think the burden of proof always falls on the prosecution.

Well, yes Dave, these accusations aren’t coming out of a vacuum. We have the memo. As I said, that memo looks like pretty good evidence of guilt. If there’s no further evidence offered, I’d vote to convict. Do you have such evidence?

John Emerson 12.02.08 at 3:13 pm

Pointlessness? On the internet? That’s not possible.

If the defense offers exculpatory evidence, it’s required to show it, not just allege that it exists.

Exactly right. If you want to say that these remarks were offered ‘out of context’, you’ve got to come with with proof that this is the case, not merely allege that they were, in fact, taken out of context.

This isn’t rocket science.

My “personal” attachment to Larry Summers? As if. I have an attachment to Big Funny. “Vastly under-polluted” is a Big Funny in my book. You can’t see the humor, John, but it seems (unless you were playing with me just then) that you couldn’t tell that my “Google test” post was a joke either.

ScentOfViolets: you might try looking up burden of proof. Handy link there, found it searching the Intertoobz with this Gurgle thing. Note that, if what Summers is guilty of is somehow criminal, the prosecution must establish the charges “beyond a reasonable doubt.” I’d say it’s more like a civil case if it’s actionable at all (wasting taxpayers money writing weird memos? You tell me, I can’t get the charges straight). So that would require the prosecution to provide “preponderance of evidence” in favor of conviction, a weaker standard, but still on the prosecution, not the defense. Your problem in that case, though, is proving that Larry Summers never thought the memo was funny. Lie detector? PET scan?

BTW, where did I write that the memo was “out of context”. My initial reaction was entirely in context: I saw, I laughed. I was actually surprised to learn that anyone took it seriously, so if there’s any “context” to look at here, it’s whether Summers has a more-or-less functioning sense of humor. For some reason, Manmohan Singh thought Summers was a pretty funny guy, or at least was willing to say so:

“I have known Larry since his days in the World Bank and have always been impressed by his mastery over his subject, and his quicksilver intelligence. My interactions with Larry – in any capacity – have always been marked by warmth and cordiality. These interactions have remained particularly memorable as a result of his sharp wit and sense of humor.” – Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India

So I guess you’ll have to subpoena PM Singh and give him a lie detector test, too. Diplomatically tricky, since he’s still a head of state. This has all the makings of a high-profile landmark case, doesn’t it? Go to it, guys. Prepping it could be a lot of work, but think of the exhilaration you’ll feel when it first goes into pre-trial proceedings, and the judge grins broadly, and says something like, “Oh, this is special. Very special. You guys did this yourselves, eh? Nice. Yes, taking this to trial would be an excellent use of taxpayers’ dollars. Positively exemplary.”

I don’t really understand the argument here really. If one’s arguing that Summers/Pritchett were “being ironic”, then what do they really think?

1. Is the assertion that Summers/Pritchett don’t believe that the average wage rate is a proper basis for estimating the value of a life for purposes of cost/benefit analysis of pollution? If Summers didn’t believe this then he did a poor job of stamping it out at the World Bank – here it is, for example showing up in 1999 in a working paper on valuing mortality reductions in India.

2. Is it that Summers in fact believes that the costs of pollution are linear (rather than non-linear) or that they do not have high income elasticity? Again I don’t think so.

3. More likely perhaps, the irony comes in with the paragraph “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”. Which appears to be what Pritchett actually says the context was – a paper by Pritchett arguing that World Bank liberalization proposals and the economics underlying them don’t actually benefit the poor in important ways.

But, although Summers allowed this memo to be circulated (on the charitable interpretation), he didn’t, in fact, stop being a very vocal advocate of WB proposals for liberalization. So in nearly all other contexts, he did not believe that arguments based on “intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc” were convincing objections to Washington Consensus economics. So why would we assume that he thought differently in the pollution case?

I suspect that all that MT is trying to establish is that Summers wouldn’t intentionally have been rude to the LDCs to their face. But that’s hardly what John and SoV are annoyed about, is it?

“Irony”, in one of the many non-Alanis Morissette definitions, is when a character’s actions achieve their intended effect, but with a contrary result. There are many levels of irony here, but it looks like a Kinsley gaffe on Summers’ part.

107 is where I was trying to get to before I lost my cool.

Michael Turner is wasting his ideas here – he needs to take them to the Bush Library! They could use an official ironist. In fact, Bush is well known for having a sharp wit and a fine sense of humor. The irony defense would be a perfect fit. The claim that Iraq had WMD – irony. The refusal to seriously try to take Osama bin Laden out at Tora Bora – irony. The seeming complacency about the reconstruction of the AQ and Taliban network – total irony. This was the romantic irony kind of irony – bittersweet laughter. The deadly rush to either deregulate or render regulatory agencies null and void – irony. One of Bush’s most ironic gestures has to be the appointment of Norris Alderson, a specialist in animal husbandry, to the post of head of the Office of Women’s Health in the FDA. That’ s the kind of thing that would make an Indian Prime Minister bust a gut laughing, but those wet blankets out there, totally without a sense of humor, get all scandalized and shit.

I love this irony defense – I think it will go far. Perhaps McCain can use it in his memoirs to explain the Palin pick?

Oh, by Crom! Every parody has to have a grain of truth in it, the one here being that imposing rich country environmental standards on poor countries is generally a bad idea. Which is what Slocum was arguing, but that doesn’t change the fact that one can take that grain of truth, go extreme with it and start talking about “vastly under polluted” as a joke in a “Bwahahaha Look at us being Teh Evil Economists!” kind of way. In other words, the memo is not a parody of what some economists think but rather a parody of what people like Emerson think that economists think (which is what Michael has been saying, and what Emerson has provided plenty of evidence for, here and on other threads, Mitra bless his dirty heart). And Daniel’s wrong here too. What the phrase “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”.” is saying is:
‘look, if we the World Bank has a right to shove environmental regulations down the throats of LDCs that they might not want themselves, wouldn’t we also have a right to ask these LDCs to lower their tariffs? Isn’t this what anti-globalizers always complain about?’
As to the stuff about non-linear costs, come on, that’s just throwing in some jargon and faux-theory to make it sound legit – which is what you want with a parody.
But by the dark Gods of my race, on this one, like much else, all are gonna believe what they want to believe and the discussion is pointless.

Dave @ 108: Does it count as half-credit if I just knife a banker, without giving all my money to the poor? I feel very bad for poor people in poor countries, but I’m not ready to do anything drastic yet.

OK, seriously (no, really, I’m seriously serious): not long ago, there was a post on CT about OCLC, a library catalogue database service, tightening up their intellectual property claims a little, somewhat stealthily, too. Remember that?

I saw this as a non-issue compared to, say, a major humanitarian disaster still unfolding in Somalia, and I said so. Yeah, Somalia had an authoritarian Islamic regime centered in Mogadishu, but really not much more authoritarian in legal spirit than Saudi Arabia (our “ally” doncha know) and because of Somalian culture, less authoritarian in actual effect. The U.S. supported, to some degree sponsored, and (in providing a little air support when Ethiopian troops had the government forces bottled up in the south) actually fought in unseating this government, which had been providing the first respite of stability many Somalians had ever known.

Of course, we weren’t very popular with those Somalians before, but now they really think we suck. And the supposed casus belli was anti-terrorism, in part because this government had supported the claims of some ethnic somalis in Ethiopia (IIRC, anyway). Now, weren’t there better ways to resolve this?

Obama has since announced Susan Rice as his pick for UN ambassador. Susan Rice visited Rwanda not long after the genocide there, and says she vowed never again; she said she would fall on her sword to prevent anything like that happening again. Somalia is a huge humanitarian emergency, and the U.S. is basically complicit in it. Clearly, this has to be on her plate. But is she up to it?

I think the way forward here is very clear: we should circulate a petition demanding that the Susan Rice not serve in Obama administration unless she denounces Larry Summers for something he didn’t even write over 15 years ago, and furthermore demand that Susan Rice require of Obama that he reverse his choice of Summers. Because only in that way can we have any confidence that Susan Rice a truthful person, with real integrity, and overwhelmingly concerned with justice. Somalians deserve no less, and I’m sure they’ll be willing to wait as long as it takes. In the meantime, we can send paper mache effigies to Somalian refugee camps, so they can at least have the satisfaction of burning Larry in effigy. Later, we can send them Larry.

OK, I lied about the “seriously serious” part. As the scorpion said to the frog: it’s my nature.

I’ve only claimed that Chicago school economists think and talk that way, and they do. Someone might have noted that Summers is not a Chicago School economist, but someone seemed to want to rely entirely on intuition, assertions, and insults instead.

I also noted that the best way to convince people that you’ve been quoted out of context is to show the context, and that for whatever reason this was not done. Another way is to say in so many words that you didn’t really mean what you said and were speaking as a devil’s advocate, but as far as I know Summers didn’t do that, though his flunky did.

And while it may be true that non-Chicago-school economists do not talk like that except when joking, it also true that dumping toxins on poor people is a common practice even within the US., and especially internationally. Summers’ little joke functions pretty well as the justification of policies which are actual. In general it’s not a good idea to jokingly propose doing something objectionable that’s already being done; the irony, humor and paradox tend to be missed.

Someone above pointed out that people affected by public policies don’t always enjoy the humor, snark, and cheerfulness with which the policy-makers talk among themselves. I’m not tactful either, but then I’m not a policymaker in the public eye.

Policymakers in third world countries are often only minimally concerned about what the general populace wants. (Mobutu anyone?) So you can say “force strict environmental standards on third world countries” but you can also say “Bribe a dictator so you can lay waste to his country while he parties on the French Riviera.

So no, not much sense of humor here. The audience which would appreciate Summers’ joke is quite a restricted one, I think.

It’s disgusting, of course, that there are Chicago School economists who favor smoking for supposed net social cost-benefit, when all medical and pension costs are accounted for. Why can’t we have more voices in public health and tobacco policy, like the author who wrote the following?

Does this [regulatory] concern over [cigarette tobacco] additives make sense from the standpoint of risk policy? In terms of the overall risk, concern over additive is akin to asking whether the car that ran you over also had lead paint on it. Cigarette smoking is a tremendously risky activity even for cigarettes without flavor enhancers or other artificial additives. The states’ disclosure efforts are misdirected. The warnings effort should focus consumer attention on the overall product riskiness . . . .

Oh, wait, that’s Kip Viscusi, the very (supposed) Chicago School economist John Emerson was talking about. Of course, Viscusi does in fact take research funding from tobacco companies, but his research and his book raise some troubling questions. When a government has “sin taxes” on risky behavior, it can gain points with the public by pointing to public health benefits from discouraging consumption of the problematic product, but there’s also a moral hazard — for government. If, in fact, a smoker’s risk of early death is actually a net bonus for society as a whole (and I don’t think anyone has proved Viscusi wrong on this point), government has a financial incentive to keep raising taxes to smokers only up to the point where the financial benefits diminish or even reverse. Are we even there yet? Viscusi argues that the way litigation has been settled so far obscures the cost-benefit issues.

I live in a country where there’s a government enterprise — Japan Tobacco — sitting astride the industry. There’s a much bigger problem with smoking here. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Japan Tobacco analysts worked out, long ago, what Viscusi has concluded. Now, Japan is anything but “Chicago School”. It has relied on (rather low-quality) Keynesian stimulus to get through its long slump, and is quite a bit more socialist in most ways than the U.S. Imagine a government tobacco monopoly in the U.S. Imagine even suggesting such a thing! Public health policy on tobacco here is perhaps 10-15 years behind the U.S., though catching up. I haven’t asked yet, but I suppose if I did, the average person here, upon hearing that smokers might actually (on average) be subsidizing public health and welfare for everyone else, would probably shrug and say, “Well, if true, would that be so bad?”

Now, you might disagree with some things here, especially where it’s my speculation alone, but ask yourself: Did you learn anything? If you read with any attention, you did. Now ask yourself: when John Emerson posts on this thread, what do you learn except what his vague memory was of reading some economist (or more likely, some tendentious commentary on some economist) that he actually knows next to nothing about? Can he actually believe, for example, that Paul Krugman has just recently woken up and noticed labor? Does it occur to him to, say, go look at Krugman’s earlier titles for the layman and see how often labor is mentioned? (Pervasively, in some work.) Can he actually believe, for example, that Larry Summers is a Chicago School economist? What rock would have to have been sleeping under for two decades to think that? When does Emerson ever offer up a quote, a link to a resource, or do much of anything except grump about how nobody has handed him the memo he requires to prove someone innocent or guilty, on the presumption that this person is guilty until the memo surfaces?

OK, dsquared, let’ s say you were an editor at an environmentalist journal and commissioned me to write a piece on World Bank policy disasters. What you got back was passable from your POV, but went a little over the space limit. You trimmed some my words. Let’s say the edit looked like this:

The World Bank finances a good many efforts that have failed in their development objectives, such as encouraging the building of huge hydroelectric projects which deliver very little benefit and do much harm, because they cause environmental pollution, despoliation of scenic resources, and worst of all, dislocation of populations by flooding their localities, all rationalized on the theory that such efforts enhance economic growth.

Now, let’s say I happen to get a look at the copy before you go to press, and protest: “That’s not what I meant! I hate the World Bank, but the way you have it, it looks like some weird parody of what you’d find in some wacko anti-globalist anarchist ‘zine put out by the kind of people who go visit Ted Kaczinski in prison. And for all I know, even Ted still has enough marbles to look at an edit like that and say ‘Uh, hey, don’t get me wrong, I had a red thumbtack on my U.S. map for the World Bank’s headquarters, I just never got around to them, but . . . this doesn’ t actually make a whole lot of sense.'”

From your last post, I get the impression that you’d think such an edit would be acceptable. Have I missed something? If you do think it acceptable, how would go about defending it to the editor-in-chief, if I as the writer could somehow take it to that level?

If it matters: the unedited sentence is the kind of thing I’ve written myself. These days, I might go look at exceptions, but would mention them in writing only for balance and credibility with the reader.

Michael, your #120 doesn’t really address any points about Larry Summers or the World Bank, and is just a sort of “I get the impression that you think xxxxx” post, which experience has taught me is usually preliminary to a fishing expedition where you see if you can catch me in an unguarded remark (how ironic, in context, hahaha) and then flog it to death. Maybe you didn’t intend this, but that’s how it looks and so I’m not really going to respond, sorry if this seems rude.

I say, let’s bump him up to a thousand. 875 to go.

ScentOfViolets posts while I was writing that.

I’m amused by his attempts to get out of the hole he’s in by digging deeper.

Me, in a hole? While ScentOfViolets doesn’t admit to getting the assignment of burden of proof wrong? Oh no, that’s no hole. It never happened. ScentOfViolets steps right over it, it passes out of the field of vision, it no longer exists, it never did.

I haven’t said what it takes to disprove my hypothesis? Yes I have: you put Larry on the best polygraph you can find and ask him: “When you read that bit about certain places being ‘vastly UNDER-polluted’, did you think it was funny? Did you think the memo in any way represented serious policy discussion at the World Bank?” Then you can ask him why. I’d accept the results.

Remember: you’re the prosecution. Burden of proof is on you.

Michael, you’re not coming across as terribly coherent here. As Radek said, it’s actually quite orthodox economics to suggest that LDCs ought to have lower standards of environmental regulation than developed countries, so why are you so quixotically determined to prove that Larry Summers didn’t also believe this in 1999, particularly when his career throws up so many examples of him and the institutions he worked for making precisely this tradeoff (environmental despoliation for economic growth)? And what on earth does the 1994 peso crisis have to do with this? Frankly, this constant raising of oddball hypotheticals, unrelated issues and constant impugning of other people’s motives is going to bite into your own doubtless impeccable reputation for intellectual honesty, sooner or later.

I think you really need to face up (as Radek has) to the fact that the orthodox economic position on enviromental protections in LDCs is
a) accurately summarised in the infamous memo,
b) as a result of a), almost certainly believed by Larry Summers at the time of writing, and
c) politically, very unpopular indeed.

and that because of c), the World Bank didn’t want to state this as its official policy, let alone to do so publicly and in such stark language. But the only sense in which the memo could have been regarded as “ironic” is that it was an in-joke between members of a crowd, where the author was trying to achieve a sort of shocking effect by saying out loud something which everyone had tacitly agreed not to mention.

At the moment, you seem to be trying to claim that Summers didn’t believe this – or rather, you’re just trying to randomly say nice things about Summers and blow a lot of smoke around in the hope that everyone will stop noticing.

Where is Chun, anyway? He showed up briefly somewhere once.

Ditto 129. The memo’s author enjoys annoying people, but that’s Summers. The content is too deeply enmeshed in orthodox economic theory to be satire.

I mean, for example, PJ O’Rourke writes:

Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there

and it’s satire. But it’s also a fairly accurate summary of PJ O’Rourke’s views about Africa. And if you happened to be someone who thought that PJ O’Rourke was an asshole because of views like those, then being told “ooooh it’s satire, don’t you recognise satire, idiot” isn’t really going to convince you that PJ O’Rourke is a good guy after all.

137.
Where’s Michael?

I’m not sure what Michael’s hypothesis is about Summers’ memo anymore. Is it:
a. funny because it is untrue to Summers’ real opinion
or b. funny because it is so true of those crazy environmentalists that they’d think this is the kind of bad thing we’d think!

Both of which can be ironic in their own ways. The irony defense loses by winning and wins by losing.

There’s a version of Poe’s law to be formulated here. We could call it Emerson’s Law.

“you seem to be working here from the premis that the World Bank’s intervention in LDC environmental policies in 1991 was generally in the direction of “forcing developed country standards” on them. ”

No, I’m working from the premise that there were people at the time who thought that “forcing developed country standards” on LDC’s WAS the World Bank’s job and that the memo can be seen as a reply to those people.

And while this is true:
“it’s actually quite orthodox economics to suggest that LDCs ought to have lower standards of environmental regulation than developed countries”

it’s not the same as
” face-ing up to the fact that the orthodox economic position on enviromental protections in LDCs is
a) accurately summarised in the infamous memo””

Orthodox theory would say that since in order to industrialize you’ll pretty much have to pollute (and if you don’t, then, hey, that’s great!) and that if there’s something like diminishing marginal utility of income (i.e. an extra dollar of income is worth a LOT to a very poor person) then trading off some environmental quality for more income in poorer countries – industrializing and developing – is worth it.

Actually, let me pause here and inquire if you agree with this idea – given that there really is a trade off between environmental quality and income at low level of development (you can’t have both), is there anything wrong with this statement?

Ok. Anyway, the memo says something else – in particular 1) and 2) and 3) in the memo are talking about something completely different, make different kind of (faux) “arguments”.

When talking about third world pollution, you at least need to exclude the worst-case plunder scenario (Mobutu). How many development economists are even able to do that? Even though few Congolese benefited much, I suspect that even during its worst days the Congolese economy was Kaldor-Hicks efficient.

Orthodox theory would say that since in order to industrialize you’ll pretty much have to pollute (and if you don’t, then, hey, that’s great!) and that if there’s something like diminishing marginal utility of income (i.e. an extra dollar of income is worth a LOT to a very poor person) then trading off some environmental quality for more income in poorer countries – industrializing and developing – is worth it.

Problem is, notsneaky, orthodox politics of a certain stripe says it’s OK to paint this as “orthodox theory is something you don’t need to know in much detail, because it’s just an elaborate rationalization for industrialists in developed world countries to poison LDC people instead of themselves.”

Actually, there’s more. In defense of poor people in LDCs against the ghastly deadly tide of globalization, it’s OK to

(1) never admit you were wrong when you were proven wrong,
(2) avoid obvious connections where it’s inconvenient to see them,
(3) lay stress on very strained connections where that’s convenient,
(4) wildly distort your opponents’ positions on other questions if that helps you make the ad hominem case.

As an example of how somebody just went after me with (4), in comments on Michael Berube’s exchange with Peter Singer, I mused (admittedly rather vaguely) in ways that I assumed would be construed as follows: (1) We’re direct descendants of cro-magnons. (2) Cro-magnons might have wiped out Neanderthals. (3) One could speculate (and many have) that we thrived and they are extinct for a not very flattering reason — that we have genocidal tendencies that they didn’t have. (4) The concentration of the mentally retarded in institutions, to the very likely detriment (at least for a while) of their health and welfare compared even to the previous laissez faire environment (brutal enough) might have both brought out and facilitated the expression of cro-magnon-rooted genocidal tendencies, in this case against a people who weren’t even a race in any sense. (5) The theories that Down syndrome people might be Neanderthal “throwbacks” could be considered a sort of romanticization of the long travails of an oppressed people, hardly a new narrative, in fact very derivative, but in this case with a scientific veneer that would be very appealing in a kind of science-fictional way. If anything, Dr. Down might be considered a kind of mythic hero or Moses figure for this notional “people”, even though he pointed to the expression of “mongoloid” and “ethiope” facial features in DS children of a variety of races to argue in favor of the idea that racial differences must actually be very superficial, and against a common argument of the time that the human race was not really one family.

Anyway, that’s a direction or thread of the discussion that I thought might develop.

But lemuel sarcastically pounds this down into: “[Michael’s] off explaining to Berube that his son is actually a Neanderthal.”

Why? Because I’m evil and/or stupid, and by hardly more than mere association with the evil and/or stupid Larry Summers.

Need an example of (2)? I believe if you asked Summers what he thought his most important contribution to LDC public health was, he’d at least considering answering: “Successfully arguing for bailing out Mexico after the peso crash, and helping to get it through against public opposition.” Why? As he argued (with Lance Pritchett) while at the World Bank, income is the dominant factor in health, it can’t be explained as little more than “healthier workers make more money.” Bailing out Mexico might have saved hundreds of thousands of Mexican lives by keeping its economy from crashing seriously.

But dsquared says I’m just picking random nice things to say about Larry Summers, as if incomes had no possible relation to public health, which is, after all, most of what we’re concerned with when we concern ourselves with toxic dumping in LDCs, isn’t it? (Or did I miss a whole Singer-esque point here, that Summers is guilty of valuing homo sapiens over other species? Of supporting an “impeccable” economic logic that’s actually flawed because it’s species-ist?)

Anyway, notsneaky, I’m gonna go out and get run over by a trolley now. I’m sure that would be more fun than staying here with you and arguing with these people.

“If I worked for the World Bank I think I’d be quite strongly of the view that these tradeoffs were to be made by the democratically elected governments concerned rather than being imposed by external technocrats.”

I’d be perfectly happy to have “these tradeoffs made by democratically elected governments” of the LDCs (in the cases where they exist) while at the same time opposing imposing standards-they-can’t-afford so they won’t compete with DCs’ industries. But sometimes environmental standards are imposed on LDCs as a form of indirect trade protection (since under WTO rules direct trade protection is a no-no) and sometimes they are even “voluntarily” adopted by target countries, democratic or not, through political pressure.
In terms of net effect on environmental quality there’s two things going on here; requiring certain kinds of environmental standards that cannot possibly be met by poor countries to price them out of the world markets and at the same time insisting on keeping other kinds of environmental standards low so that DC firms can move there and produce at low cost. To be a bit cynical, it’s probably the case that the LDCs probably get the shaft on both counts. Of course both of these shafts are voluntarily adopted by their democratically elected governments.

I believe if you asked Summers what he thought his most important contribution to LDC public health was, he’d at least considering answering: “Successfully arguing for bailing out Mexico after the peso crash, and helping to get it through against public opposition.”

I doubt it; Larry Summers would presumably be aware that Mexico is an OECD country, and was in 1994.