Monday, March 16, 2009

Larry Summers: A Hagiography

From The New Republic. An excerpt for the Pigou Club:
In the late '80s, an acquaintance introduced him to Robert Rubin, then a top executive at Goldman Sachs and a major Democratic donor. Rubin eventually helped pull Summers into the Dukakis campaign as an unpaid economic adviser. Summers was a well-intentioned flop. He sometimes pushed the kind of proposals academic economists love--say, raising gasoline taxes or eliminating the minimum wage for teenagers--and which drive political hands batty. But the experience did, for the first time, cast his worldview in a more overtly political light.