Larry Summers is invoked across four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show as an economist whose authority and political alignments are contested by guests. He is described in the excerpts as a Harvard economics professor, a former Treasury Secretary, and a former president of Harvard Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022). He is also identified as the person under whom Larry Lindsay wrote his dissertation at Harvard David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019). The excerpts do not present Summers as a guest; he figures only as a reference point in arguments about economic policy and the conduct of economists.
The Trump election and economic prediction
In the October 2018 episode with Stephen Moore, Summers appears in a list of economists who predicted economic disaster if Donald Trump were elected. Moore says that “people like Paul Krugman and Larry Summers said this would be a complete economic disaster,” and contrasts that prediction with an economy Moore describes as being in its best shape in 40 years Stephen Moore on Trumponomics (2018). The citation is to Moore’s statement, not to Summers himself, and the excerpt does not quote Summers directly or give the date or venue of the prediction.
Moore’s broader argument in the episode is that Keynesian economics failed under Barack Obama and that supply-side economics was being tested under Trump. He cites the lowest unemployment rate, a stock market up over 42% since Trump’s election, seven million more jobs than people to fill them, and after-tax wage and income gains for middle-class workers. Summers enters only as one of the prominent economists whose pre-election warnings Moore treats as refuted by those figures. The excerpt does not record any response from Summers or any qualification of Moore’s characterization.
The Laffer curve and the Lindsay dissertation
In the March 2019 episode with David Henderson, Summers appears in a different role: as the dissertation adviser of Larry Lindsay, who worked in the office next to Henderson’s at the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan David Henderson on Trumponomics, Deficits, and Immigration (2019). Henderson says Lindsay did his dissertation under Summers at Harvard a year or two later, based on evidence Lindsay found while sitting in that office. Henderson describes Lindsay’s study as examining the change in revenue from the top 1% after their marginal tax rates were cut from 70% to 50%, correcting for the factors one would want to correct for, and finding that the federal government actually got more revenue than otherwise from the highest income people—those making over $200,000 in those years’ dollars, which Henderson says would be like half a million today.
Henderson’s use of Summers here is genealogical rather than polemical. The point is that a study supporting a supply-side claim about the top marginal rate came out of a dissertation supervised by Summers, who is not otherwise characterized in the excerpt. Henderson’s larger argument is that the Laffer curve must be correct at its endpoints—zero revenue at a zero tax rate and zero revenue at a 100% tax rate—and that the real question is where an economy sits on the curve. He says Art Laffer was careful to claim only that a 10% cut in tax rates would reduce revenues by less than 10%, and that this has been borne out. Henderson adds that he is “really positive” that given current tax rates a cut in the marginal rate would not raise revenue, and gives the example of Canadian cigarette taxes, where revenues fell as Canadians shipped cigarettes across Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and the St. Lawrence River to avoid the taxes.
Advice Biden did not take
In the July 2022 episode with Steven E. Rhoads, Summers is described as someone Biden had a chance to consult. Rhoads says Biden “had a chance to get Larry Summers to help him understand economics,” and calls Summers “someone who’s left-of-center, but he loves markets and he wouldn’t do the stupid things if Biden had listened to him that Biden has done” The Economist’s View of the World (2022). The excerpt does not specify which policies Rhoads has in mind, and the surrounding discussion concerns competition, layoffs, and labor regulation rather than a list of Biden administration measures.
In the same episode Rhoads discusses a debate between Bill Gates and Summers over a tax on robots. Rhoads says Gates argued for such a tax because so many people are losing their jobs, and that Summers replied, “Why just robots? You know, anytime there’s a machine puts any person out of a job, does the same thing as a robot. Why pick on robots?” The exchange is used to illustrate Rhoads’s argument against heavy regulation of business, which he says harms the employees at the bottom. He cites France, where companies of more than 50 people face requirements including paid vacation and restrictions on firing, and says a bright economist found almost nobody with 51 employees because firms do not want to cross the threshold. Bob Zadek frames the point as the marginal cost of the 51st employee, who he says is legislated out of a job.
The “economic prostitute” charge
In the September 2022 episode with Thomas DiLorenzo, Summers is the first of two named examples of what DiLorenzo calls a symbiotic relationship between economists and politicians Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022). DiLorenzo describes Summers as the former Treasury Secretary who taught economics at Harvard for many years and was president of Harvard for several years. He says Summers went on CNN and, asked what caused the inflation then being suffered, said it was the January 6th protests in Washington, D.C. DiLorenzo says Summers knows better, calls him a smart guy who taught economics at Harvard for years and had two uncles who were Nobel Prize winners in economics, and calls him “the poster boy for sort of an economic prostitute.” Paul Krugman is named as another example, for saying the economy was not in a recession when, DiLorenzo says, the Commerce Department had reported real GDP falling for six months in a row.
DiLorenzo’s broader claim is that many economists work at providing plausible rationales for bigger government, more taxes, more interventionism, and more socialism, and that beginning in the 1930s economists found more money, fun, and prestige in government agencies and advising governors and presidents than in teaching undergraduates. Bob Zadek’s framing in the episode is that economists present themselves to government as scientists who have discovered secrets of behavior, and that government selects which economists to believe—Keynesian or free-market. DiLorenzo agrees with that summary and says it is about 90% accurate as far as what he thinks.
Across episodes: the same question in different registers
The four episodes do not develop a single argument about Summers so much as use him for different purposes. In 2018 Moore cites him as a predictor whose warning about Trump did not come true; in 2019 Henderson cites him as the dissertation adviser behind a study supporting supply-side claims about the top marginal rate; in 2022 Rhoads cites him as a market-friendly economist Biden should have consulted and as the respondent to Bill Gates on a robot tax; and later in 2022 DiLorenzo cites him as an example of an economist who supplies rationales for bigger government. The treatment shifts from Summers as forecaster to Summers as adviser to Summers as emblem, but the excerpts show no exchange between the guests and no episode in which Summers’s own arguments are presented at length. What changes is the use to which his name is put; what does not change is that he is spoken about rather than heard from.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give Summers’s own account of the inflation, the Trump election, the robot tax, or the Laffer curve; every characterization comes from a guest. They do not state when Summers served as Treasury Secretary, when he was president of Harvard, or what he said on CNN beyond DiLorenzo’s paraphrase. They do not identify the January 6th events as a cause of inflation in any voice other than DiLorenzo’s report of Summers, and they do not record any reply from Summers to the “economic prostitute” charge or to Moore’s claim that his prediction failed.