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Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist, politician, and academic. He is the current and 27th President of Harvard University.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Summers is the son of two economists, as well as the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson (sibling of father Robert Summers, who changed the family name from Samuelson to Summers to avoid anti-Semitic prejudice) and Kenneth Arrow (his mother's sibling). He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he originally intended to study physics but soon switched to economics (BS, 1975), and then Harvard University as a graduate student (Ph.D., 1982), where he studied under economist Martin Feldstein. He has had stints teaching at both MIT and Harvard. He became among the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history in 1983 (though not the youngest; Alan Dershowitz and Noam Elkies were both younger when appointed full professors).
As a researcher, Summers has made important intellectual contributions in many areas of economics, primarily public finance, labor economics, financial economics, and macroeconomics. To a lesser extent, Summers has also worked in international economics, economic demography, economic history, and development economics. His work generally places emphasis in the analysis of empirical economic data in order to answer well-defined questions (for example: Does saving respond to after-tax interest rates? Are the returns from stocks and stock portfolios predictable?, Are most of those who receive unemployment benefits only transitorily unemployed?, etc.) For his work he received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1993 from the American Economic Association (an honor economists often consider as prestigious as the Nobel Prize). In 1987 he was the first social scientist to win the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation.
Summers left Harvard in 1991 and served as Chief Economist for the World Bank (1991–1993) and later in various posts in the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton administration. From 1999 to 2001 he served as Secretary of the Treasury, a position in which he succeeded his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 2001, he left the Treasury and returned to Harvard as its President.
In December 1991, while at the World Bank, Summers signed a memo an excerpt of which has become known as the infamous Summers memo. This excerpt included a satirical argument that pollution from first-world countries should be dumped into third-world countries. The "memo" made him a favorite target of the anti-globalization movement as a symbol of "the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in" (in the words of then Brazilian Secretary of the Environment Jose Lutzenberger).
Summers is a steadfast defender of free trade and globalization, and his positions on a number of politically-charged subjects tend to lie to the right of the average members of American academia. This, together with his candid demeanour and his call for stressing the hard sciences in the undergraduate core curriculum, have made him somewhat controversial as President of Harvard, particularly among his left-wing colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. Early in his tenure, a spat with celebrity African-American Studies professor Cornel West over academic standards in research and grade inflation in undergraduate courses received much publicity. West resigned from Harvard shortly afterwards and moved to Princeton University. In 2002 Summers drew attention by claiming that the Noam Chomsky-led campaign to have universities divest from companies with Israeli holdings is "anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intention".
In January 2005, Summers gave a speech at an economic conference in which he discussed reasons for the current underrepresentation of women in science and engineering. He said that it was vitally important to study the real reasons, which may include the biological differences between the genders. These remarks were reported in the media and were criticized by some. Summers stood by his comments but said he regretted if they were misunderstood.
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