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Let's not forget that time he advocated for dumping toxic waste in poor countries. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowe
by squillion 10mo ago
Let's not forget that time he advocated for dumping toxic waste in poor countries.
"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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
- hyperman1 10mo agoWow. That text is wild! Another excerpt: 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.
- recursive 10mo agoThe /s was supposed to be implied.
- datatrashfire 10mo agoWould you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.
- estimator7292 10mo agoHey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil. And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
- Dracophoenix 10mo ago"Bad" people can still have good ideas or well-thought arguments. It happens often enough to have become became a clichéd meme. https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/ https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
- JuniperMesos 10mo ago> Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil. > And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds. This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
- datatrashfire 10mo agoNo sympathy for Larry here! Just the point that development is going to coincide with some level of increased pollution. Even an electrified economy with 0 carbon emissions is going to be ecologically devastating after all the mountain top removal mining has gathered the materials to make it possible.
- ben_w 10mo agoThat's the great thing about "invention", there are other ways to 0 pollution besides historic ones. Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire. Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
- datatrashfire 10mo agoElectrifying the economy is not a path to 0 pollution.
- ben_w 10mo agoElectrification is a necessary but not sufficient step to zero pollution. Necessary, because using any other way to cook is polluting, and no matter what else you eliminate you can't eliminate cooking. (And good luck convincing everyone to not live where heating is needed). Even wood fires for cooking is a way to get all the lung damage of heavy smoking for all the same reasons, just without the nicotine addiction. Not sufficient, because while renewables can be made in non-polluting ways, those might not be the cheapest, and people vote with their wallets. That, plus all the chemical processes that just pollute directly, like cement and steel currently do.
- defrost 10mo agoA good many people I know and have known for 60+ years would, do, and yearn for civilisation as you know it to back the f off and get its foot from their neck. Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport. Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
- Gud 10mo agoThey have not lived without society not using u those things though, unless they live in Siberia or something.
- defrost 10mo agoContrary to your thoughts on the matter the Pintupi Nine and their relatives the Richter family spring to mind as the most extreme examples. Both groups from my neck of the woods, both groups I've spoken to, both groups with significant time spent sans modern society. Both groups with members that turned back to isolation and non western lifestyle after a few years exposure. Many more similar people have been exposed to society with electricty, phones, etc and happy to live as far apart from that as they can still manage - it's hard to escape such things - Starlink has polluted the skys once untouched in the Murchison.
- BurningFrog 10mo agoBeing familiar with economist jargon, this looks like a joke.
- Loughla 10mo agoSo it's okay for people who have the power and connections to actually impact the world in the horrible ways they're "joking"about to make jokes about doing just that? I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
- MrDarcy 10mo agoThe joke is that it looks like a joke but isn’t in the same way a sociopath will explain in detail exactly how they’re going to fuck you before they do knowing you won’t believe them because it’s all a joke in a joke that isn’t real.
- cindyllm 10mo ago[dead]
- llbbdd 10mo agoI'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.
- sapphicsnail 10mo agoHe was literally part of a ring of rich and powerful pedophiles who trafficked underage women.
- llbbdd 10mo agoEvil people can make jokes too, and mimicking the formal tone of an official document is a bit as old as time.
- sapphicsnail 10mo agoIt's certainly a possibility but I also wouldn't put it past him to advocate for something that evil.
- llbbdd 10mo agoSure 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 10mo agoMy 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.
- rhcom2 10mo agoAnd Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.
- palmotea 10mo ago> And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children. If you're going to engage in satire, its best the satire be obvious. I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically.
- rhcom2 10mo agoAlso known as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
- mwcremer 10mo agoSorry, did you mean "Summers unironically wrote" or "capitalist economist types unironically believe" ?
- quuxplusone 10mo agoOr, for that matter, "I unironically believe"? ;) From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote." The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms. > Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
- _yb2s 10mo ago> there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically And Summers himself is one of them- he spent most of his career making things analogous to that essay actually happen
- shkkmo 10mo agoTo me that memo is pretty clearly a sacarstic version of reductio ad absurdum.
- burkaman 10mo agoHe also famously gave a speech declaring that one of the reasons women were underrepresented in science and engineering faculty positions was "issues of intrinsic aptitude". - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/science-jan-june05-summersremarks_2-22 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/science-jan-june05-summ... It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
- watwut 10mo agoI remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking. Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader. Surely he could not possibly be sexist, nah.
- tptacek 10mo agoMost notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.
- ben_w 10mo agoI remember hearing about the variance thing ages ago. Back when I was young enough and naïve enough to trust statements said in official voices without critically assessing them. With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
- tptacek 10mo agoI'm not touching the variability thing with a 10 foot pole except to say that the further out on each extreme of the IQ "scale" you go the less reliable the scores are. The whole idea of using IQ as a ranking of ability rather than a diagnostic tools is bogus. I do think it's clear now though that Summers was simply being a misogynist (you lose the presumption of good faith when you disclose that you'd been lying all along.)
- abigail95 10mo agoThis is dumber than "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke.
- 29athrowaway 10mo agoThat memo redefines himself as toxic waste.