[llbbdd]

I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.

[dragonwriter]

> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.

Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.

[throwthrowrow]

I read the memo. Maybe just me, but I don't see any indication that it was tongue in cheek.

[strken]

I burst out laughing when I read the following excerpts, one after the other:

> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.

> ...

> I've always thought that under-populated 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.

It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.

If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.

[llbbdd]

I appreciate that I'm not the only person here seeing this and I think the last part of your comment is what some people are missing here. He can be a misogynist pedophile and still make funny jokes sometimes and it's weirdly reductive to pretend otherwise.

[randycupertino]

I thought his emails to Esptein asking for dating advice about how to "get horizontal" with the "yellow peril" were particularly cringe. “Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor” ... poor guy!

https://archive.ph/hSc5Z

“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...

[llbbdd]

Probably, I don't make a habit of reading this kind of thing. In any case I'm not sure what this has to do with the rest of the thread.

[llbbdd]

You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.

[dragonwriter]

> You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.

Yes, it would in that context make sense as something akin to A Modest Proposal, but directed at the World Bank's liberalization policies.

The problem, of course, is that Summers was not an opponent of the World Bank's liberalization policies, he was the chief economist of the World Bank, and a supporter of those policies, and actively seeking stronger support for them, so it doesn't work that way coming from him.

[_yb2s]

That’s what he claimed it is, but I don’t buy it. I’m a big fan of satire and deadpan humor, and that’s just not what this is- the tone is serious, and he put a lot of thought in how to argue the point. Monsters exist, and this guy is one.

[llbbdd]

If you project the other things you know about this guy to color everything he did, sure. Reading it made the tone obvious, well before I got to his defense in the wiki article. The memo on its own is painfully obviously a joke but I'm really not surprised that the audience of HN has difficulty interpreting tone.

[watwut]

The consistent mistake people did last years, including those on HN was to pretend to themselves that odious people are "just joking" and "totally not serious". Again and again. Starting with 4chan and 8chan that were just a trolls and no one was ever nazi, until nazi became normalized, the top government and leadership of a major party.

No one was sexist ever, they were just joking and all feminists were stupid not understanding that, until their quite sexist messages got released by inside a pack of messages to known abuser. This is literally the case of Larry Summers.

And you want to play that game again, with literally the same person. Of course no one believes it, it is not being sophisticated, you are asking people to pretend they are stupid. Nothing in Summers career suggests he would sarcastic out of care for Africa or environment. That is not what his work was, at all.

[_yb2s]

We disagree about the tone, but that aside- a person capable of writing this essay as a dry satire would need to possess a level of empathy and introspection that the rest of his life personally and professionally demonstrates that he does not. He’s not Voltaire or Johnathan Swift, he’s just a sociopath that tried to play it off as a joke when he got in trouble.

I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.

[llbbdd]

> would need

I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.

Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.

[petesergeant]

> but I don’t buy it

You don’t need to. The target audience was people to whom that’s obvious in the first few lines and then who keep reading to see how far he can take it with a straight face.

[_yb2s]

Yes, he was “joking”- he is what the Internet calls a “Schrödinger's dbag,” it was only a joke if people don’t agree, but if they do it’s what he really believes- a cowardly way of communicating. In the context of his career, his actual beliefs are along the lines of the essay.

[erikpukinskis]

What’s the joke?

[llbbdd]

See elsewhere where I've quoted parts of it in this thread but if you read "Actually, I don't think Africa is polluted enough!" and take the person saying it seriously instead of reading it as a joke, then you might need to touch grass.

[zeven7]

I think you missed the joke. The thing that was funny about it to him when he said it was he knew it was a natural extension of his public position, yes an extreme version of it, but he knew it was also true and’s logical and it was funny to get away with saying it behind closed doors. An honest person would recognized the truth behind the joke and change the position that it stemmed from because they cared about making the world better. The fact that he recognized he was making the world worse AND continued in that path is what is so blatantly evil and revealing about this memo.

If Kevin Spacey had written a private note to Woody Allen that said, "Now that we've been chased out of the film industry, let's become day care workers," then it would be a very different kind of "joke" than The Onion writing the same as a headline.

[stinkbeetle]

And yet that's exactly what he and his ilk have been doing ever since western countries began to demand workers' rights and environmental protections.

[llbbdd]

I know it's boring but I always want sources to go with stuff like this. What did he do?

[stinkbeetle]

Chief Economist of the World Bank and top level bureaucrat in the Clinton administration? He and his buddies were tip of the spear doing an end-run around hard-won labor, environment, and human rights laws and permitting corporations to outsource their poisoning and exploitation. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-clintons-true-legacy_b_1...

Just because he claimed to have been sarcastic about something, doesn't mean he is not also guilty of it.

[squillion]

I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.

[_yb2s]

If it had been tongue in cheek or satire, that would suggest he also had enough capacity for introspection and empathy to see what is wrong with it. Looking at both his career and personal life suggests that he does not.

[llbbdd]

I mean this is presumably why it wasn't a publicly published memo or policy recommendation. If structural adjustment and economy management is part your job, you might have some steam to let off about it in private, and plenty of draft ideas and documents that need refinement. It does become a mistake when it's made public, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a joke originally.

[terminalshort]

Stiglitz is a worthless clown who was actually dumb enough to think Venezuela had good economic policy.

[epistasis]

Summers very often does this sort of earnest "kidding on the square" and he's quite proud of it, which was revealed extensively in the Epstein emails. Summers earnestly believes that the villain has very good reasons to tear down the orphanage, and will defend them in whatever way he can in polite society.

[DonHopkins]

It was tongue-in-cheek, but the cheek belonged to an underaged girl.

[llbbdd]

And instead this will go unappreciated for how gruesome it is if we're meant to take any of the above accusations seriously, but hey - he's been here for at least 11 years, one of ours, right?

[sapphicsnail]

He was literally part of a ring of rich and powerful pedophiles who trafficked underage women.

[llbbdd]

Evil people can make jokes too, and mimicking the formal tone of an official document is a bit as old as time.

[nextaccountic]

Does the following sounds like a joke to you? I mean, does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?

And if it's a joke, what is the punchline?

    DATE: December 12, 1991
    TO: Distribution
    FR: Lawrence H. Summers
    Subject: GEP

    'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

    1) The measurements 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 under-populated 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 get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere 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.

[triceratops]

> does passages like "I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City" seem a joke?

> what is the punchline?

It's akin to saying "This establishment's high Google/Yelp ratings indicate it's leaving money on the table. There's clearly room to raise prices, cut costs, and really degrade the customer experience."

I don't know if Summers is telling the truth about his intent. But as far as jokes go, it's decent.

[petesergeant]

> Does the following sounds like a joke to you?

Yes. See also:

“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

[llbbdd]

The whole thing is the punchline. If you're missing something, read strken's response elsewhere in this thread, because he put it in a better way than I have anywhere else here - none of it is serious, and if you read it seriously, you are the other punchline:

> argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated.

[dragonwriter]

It's not a joke. He didn't even say it was a joke. He said (as quoted on the Wikipedia page for the memo!) that it was “a comment on a research paper that was being prepared by part of my staff at the World Bank” and that it “sought to clarify the strict economic logic by using some rather inflammatory language”.

The closest it gets to being a joke is that it is mockery and derision directed at underlings as a form of feedback on work product.

[_yb2s]

It seems dead serious to me, and is consistent with everything else we know about him.

[jonny_eh]

I'm not really in a charitable mood with this guy right now.

[SequoiaHope]

I’m with you. Stuff that seems cartoonish to regular people does often seem to be serious from him.

[llbbdd]

> Does often seem to be serious

Kind of what I mean. I hadn't heard of this guy before today, and this memo openly laments that it's challenging to bring Africa into the world pollution economy because moving solid waste there is a logistical challenge. If this memo was about how cool it is to traffic and rape children, as some people in this thread and a few others today seem to be interpreting it, I'd probably be less inclined to lend it the benefit of this tone, but I'm just not sold on the premise that someone who is demonstrably evil in some dimension is incapable of making honestly benign bureaucratic jokes in a presumably private context. It kind of knocks the legs out of genuine criticism if the dude can't chew bubblegum without taking flack.

[SequoiaHope]

Yeah fair points.

[llbbdd]

I don't think it requires being charitable to acknowledge nuance.

[naIak]

"I know I'm wrong, but still I have to double down on this to save face"

[Supermancho]

That wasn't the implication.

[sapphicsnail]

It's certainly a possibility but I also wouldn't put it past him to advocate for something that evil.

[llbbdd]

Sure but in the most polite way, that's almost saying nothing at all. I just think it kneecaps any real criticism and real issues associated with this guy to go "okay that might be a joke, but it probably isn't because <legitimate evil reason>". Though I guess it encroaches on the definition of what a joke is and if it's defined by intent. If he meant it as one, but nobody took it as one, is it?

[Rzor]

My brother in Christ, you keep tumbling yourself to see nuance where there is none. The guy is a piece of shit. Why such magnanimous effort? I suggest you take some time off.

[llbbdd]

I've mostly repeated the same perspective to people on this thread who would rather virtue signal than read what I've already written, and what I'm saying is not hard to wrap your head around unless you're the type of person to believe in caricatures as I've described above. I think they may need some time off from news, the internet, etc, if anyone.