Semafor’s Ben Smith was wondering about Larry Summers’ thoughts on inflation the other day. Apparently Smith forgot the confident aloofness it takes to call for millions of people to lose their jobs from one’s beach vacation, as Summers did a few years ago. Summers has been keeping a low profile since what Smith describes as his “defenestrat[ion] from Harvard over Jeffrey Epstein emails.” Smith apparently considers the content of those emails—where Larry sought out advice from his convicted sex criminal “wing man” about how to use professional mentorship as a means to extort a young colleague into sex—immaterial. But Summers did make an interesting chart this one time about inflation, so Smith had to give him a call!
This is a particularly egregious example of journalists doing a terrible job of updating the economists in their rolodexes. (See, for example, Ken Rogoff still getting quoted.) Surprisingly, Semafor made it through the entire piece without mentioning that Summers was wrong, actually, about inflation. He said that inflation would require millions more job losses. It subsided without a major increase in unemployment. And it’s not like his track record was otherwise spotless, either. Granted, any interrogation of Summers’ actual record would contradict you if you’re trying to claim that he isn’t a major deficit hawk, as Smith does.
Image credit: “Lawrence H. Summers – World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2010” by World Economic Forum is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.