SlowpokeBlog

This may be old news to some of you, but a reader at Harvard recently pointed out a memo written by Larry Summers when he was the chief economist of the World Bank in 1991.

The reader was responding to my posts and cartoon about Summers' comments on women and science -- though I hasten to add, my intention was not to criticize Summers so much as demonstrate why his ideas were problematic. I'll leave the debate over his qualifications to be a university president to the fine folks at Harvard. (My correspondent happened to think he'd actually done some good.)

Anyway, back to the memo: Summers marshaled some amazing arguments to suggest that it made economic sense for rich countries to dump their toxic waste in poor countries.

'Dirty' Industries: "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]?..." (More here)

Yes, he really thought it would be a good idea for the United States to dump its carcinogenic sludge on Zimbabwe.

Brazil's Secretary of the Environment had a perfect response:

"Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane... Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in..."

Summers later said that the memo was intended to be "ironic," and that it was actually written by someone else. As someone who deals regularly with "irony," I really don't catch even a faint whiff of it here.

I find Summers' argument fascinating, because it is a classic demonstration of one-dimensional logic. Market fundamentalists like to believe their formulas explain everything, when in fact, they are looking through only one lens -- an amoral, decontextualized, ahistorical one at that.