Larry Summers, who appears to be one of the two leading candidates to become Treasury Secretary under Barack Obama, is attracting flak from some people. But the reasons being advanced not to give him the job do not seem to me to be persuasive.
This is not to say that Mr Summers ought to be a slam-dunk for the role. Tim Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, also seems to be in the frame and would probably be a good Treasury Secretary. But Mr Summers has some unique qualities for these unusual times.
Mr Summers, who has recently been writing a column for the FT (which in itself ought to be a significant qualification for high office), was Treasury Secretary towards the end of Bill Clinton’s period as president and then a controversial and short-lived president of Harvard University.
Josh Marshall has laid out what I would call the sensible-enough reasons not to give Mr Summers the job. There are two charges: one is that he was there before and so must take some blame for the current mess and the second is that he has a habit of offending people.
On the first point, it is true that Mr Summers was an advocate of globalisation and free market economics but those remain good things. His role in supporting financial deregulation was less vital than that of Alan Greenspan and there is no particular evidence that he egged Wall Street on to make a fool of itself.
In recent FT columns, furthermore, he has come up with a stream of interesting ideas for addressing the financial crisis and reforming regulation. Although Mr Geithner is smart and measured, Mr Summers is genuinely an inventive and original thinker and there are precious few of those.
I would rather have someone with his level of intellectual curiosity, inventiveness and rationality in charge of sorting out the aftermath of the financial crisis than most of the alternatives.
The second point – Mr Summers’ record of putting his foot in his mouth in public – I think is much less important. Being a wonk who lacks the human touch is no disqualification to being a finance minister; Gordon Brown proved that in his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Furthermore, Mr Summers’ gaffes, such as raising the possibility that women are inherently less suited to sciences, suggesting that more pollutants should be sent to Africa and inquiring as to whether choirs are valuable, fall into the category of tactless intellectual inquiry rather than boneheaded ideology.
So I place myself within the union of business/economics writers such as Justin Fox and Jim Surowiecki in thinking Mr Summers could be a good choice. In times like this, I think we can forgive some weaknesses in affect in return for a fine intellect.
