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Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist who served as United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as the director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, "Historical Facts", Harvard University, retrieved March 31, 2017 where he is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School.Summers, Lawrence H. and John A. Haigh "From the Directors," About section, Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, retrieved March 31, 2017 In November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI.
Summers became a professor of economics at Harvard University in 1983. He left Harvard in 1991, working as the Chief Economist of the World Bank from 1991 to 1993. "Former Chief Economists" , Data & Research office, The World Bank, retrieved March 31, 2017 "Lawrence H. Summers", World Bank Live, The World Bank, retrieved March 31, 2017 "Lawrence H. Summers," Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, retrieved March 31, 2017 In 1993, Summers was appointed Under Secretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton's administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury. "Lawrence Summers (1999 - 2001)," U.S. Treasury Department, Last Updated: November 20, 2010, retrieved March 31, 2017 While working for the Clinton administration, Summers played a leading role in the American response to the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 1998 Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard Institute for International Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states, and in the deregulation of the U.S. financial system, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he offered three reasons for the under-representation of women in science and engineering, including the possibility that there exists a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", in addition to patterns of discrimination and socialization.
After his departure from Harvard, Summers worked as a managing partner at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. Summers rejoined public service during the Obama administration, serving as the Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession.
At age 16,Plotz, David. "Larry Summers: How the Great Brain learned to grin and bear it.", Slate, June 29, 2001. he entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he originally intended to study physics but soon switched to economics, graduating in 1975. He was also an active member of the MIT debating team and qualified for participation in the annual National Debate Tournament three times. He attended Harvard University as a graduate student, receiving his Ph.D. in 1982. In 1983, at age 28, Summers became one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. He was a visiting academic at the London School of Economics in 1987.
According to the World Bank's Data & Research office, Summers returned to Washington, D.C., in 1991 as the World Bank's Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist. As such, Summers played a "key role" in designing strategies to aid developing countries, worked on the bank's loan committee, guided the bank's research and statistics operations, and guided external training programs. The World Bank's official site also reports that Summer's research included an "influential" report that demonstrated a very high return from investments in educating girls in developing nations.
According to The Economist, Summers was "often at the centre of heated debates" about economic policy, as he was considered a "famous contrarian". "New ideas: The World Bank hires a famous contrarian," July 18, 2016, The Economist, retrieved March 31, 2017
Much of Summers's tenure at the Treasury Department was focused on international economic issues. He was deeply involved in the Clinton administration's effort to bail out Mexico and Russia when those nations had currency crises. A New Economic Team: The Nominee; The Administration's Fiscal Closer. The New York Times. May 13, 1999. Summers set up a project through which the Harvard Institute for International Development provided advice to the Russian government between 1992 and 1997. Later there was a scandal when it emerged that some of the Harvard project members had invested in Russia and were therefore not impartial advisors.Bruno S. Sergi (2025). 9780826427724, Continuum International Publishing Group. . ISBN 9780826427724
Summers encouraged then-Russian leader Boris Yeltsin to use the same "three-'ations'" of policy he advocated in the Clinton Administration – "privatization, stabilization, and liberalization."Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine", p. 231
Summers pressured the Korean government to raise its interest rates and balance its budget in the midst of a recession, policies criticized by Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. According to the book The Chastening, by Paul Blustein, during this crisis, Summers, along with Paul Wolfowitz, pushed for regime change in Indonesia.
Summers was a leading voice within the Clinton Administration arguing against American leadership in greenhouse gas reductions and against US participation in the Kyoto Protocol, according to internal documents made public in 2009.
As Treasury Secretary, Summers led the Clinton Administration's opposition to tax cuts proposed by the Republican Congress in 1999. Aides Say Clinton Would Veto Tax Compromise. The Washington Post. July 26, 1999.
During the California energy crisis of 2000, then-Treasury Secretary Summers teamed with Alan Greenspan and Enron executive Kenneth Lay to lecture California Governor Gray Davis on the causes of the crisis, explaining that the problem was excessive government regulation. Under the advice of Kenneth Lay, Summers urged Davis to relax California's environmental standards in order to reassure the markets.
Summers hailed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act in 1999, which lifted more than six decades of restrictions against banks offering commercial banking, insurance, and investment services (by repealing key provisions in the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act): "Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century," Summers said. "This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy." Many critics, including POTUS Barack Obama, have suggested the subprime mortgage crisis was caused by the partial repeal of the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act. As a member of President Clinton's Working Group on Financial Markets, Summers, along with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Arthur Levitt, Fed Chairman Greenspan, and Secretary Rubin, torpedoed an effort to regulate the financial derivatives that many blame for bringing the financial market down in Fall 2008.
When George Stephanopoulos asked Summers about the 2008 financial crisis in an ABC interview on March 15, 2009, Summers replied that "there are a lot of terrible things that have happened in the last eighteen months, but what's happened at A.I.G. ... the way it was not regulated, the way no one was watching ... is outrageous."
In February 2009, Summers quoted John Maynard Keynes, saying "When circumstances change, I change my opinion", reflecting both on the failures of Wall Street deregulation and his new leadership role in the government bailout. On April 18, 2010, in an interview on ABC's "This Week" program, Clinton said Summers was wrong in the advice he gave him not to regulate derivatives.
A number of Summers's decisions at Harvard have attracted public controversy, either at the time or since his resignation.
Summers had prefaced his talk, saying he was adopting an "entirely positivism, rather than normative approach" and that his remarks were intended to be an "attempt at provocation".. January 14, 2005.
Summers then began by identifying three hypotheses for the higher proportion of men in high-end science and engineering positions:
The second hypothesis, the generally greater variability among men (compared to women) in tests of cognitive abilities,Hedges, L. V., & Nowell, A. (1995). "Sex differences in mental scores, variability, and numbers of high scoring individuals". Science, 269, 41–45.Lehrke, R. (1997). Sex linkage of intelligence: The X-Factor. New York: Praeger.Lubinski, D., & Benbow, C. M. (2006). "Study of mathematically precocious youth after 35 years". Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 316–345. leading to proportionally more males than females at both the lower and upper tails of the test score distributions, caused the most controversy. In his discussion of this hypothesis, Summers said that "even small differences in the standard deviation between will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out from". Summers referenced research that implied differences between the standard deviations of males and females in the top 5% of twelfth graders under various tests. He then went on to argue that, if this research were to be accepted, then "whatever the set of attributes ... that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley ... are probably different in their standard deviations as well".
Summers then concluded his discussion of the three hypotheses by saying:
So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.
Summers then went on to discuss approaches to remedying the shortage of women in high-end science and engineering positions.
This lunch-time talk drew accusations of sexism and careless scholarship, and an intense negative response followed, both nationally and at Harvard. Summers' Remarks on Women Draw Fire . The Boston Globe. January 17, 2005 Summers apologized repeatedly. Nevertheless, the controversy is speculated to have contributed to his resigning his position as president of Harvard University the following year, as well as costing Summers the job of Treasury Secretary in Obama's administration. Summers's 'sexism' costs him top Treasury job. The Independent. November 24, 2008
Summers's protégée Sheryl Sandberg has defended him, saying that "Larry has been a true advocate for women throughout his career" at the World Bank and Treasury. Referring to the lunch talk, Sandberg said, "What few seem to note is that it is remarkable that he was giving the speech in the first place – that he cared enough about women's careers and their trajectory in the fields of math and science to proactively analyze the issues and talk about what was going wrong".
In 2016, remarking upon political correctness in institutions of higher education, Summers said:
There is a great deal of absurd political correctness. Now, I'm somebody who believes very strongly in diversity, who resists racism in all of its many incarnations, who thinks that there is a great deal that's unjust in American society that needs to be combated, but it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses.
The members of the Harvard Corporation, the university's highest governing body, are in charge of the selection of the president and issued statements strongly supporting Summers.
FAS faculty were not unanimous in their comments against Summers. Psychologist Steven Pinker defended the legitimacy of Summers's January lecture. When asked if Summers's talk was "within the pale of legitimate academic discourse," Pinker responded "Good grief, shouldn't everything be within the pale of legitimate academic discourse, as long as it is presented with some degree of rigor? That's the difference between a university and a madrassa. There is certainly enough evidence for the hypothesis to be taken seriously." Psychoanalysis Q-and-A: Steven Pinker. The Harvard Crimson. January 19, 2005
Summers had stronger support among Harvard College students than among the college faculty. One poll by The Harvard Crimson indicated that students opposed his resignation by a three-to-one margin, with 57% of responding students opposing his resignation and 19% supporting it. Poll: Students Say Summers Should Stay. The Harvard Crimson. February 20, 2006
In July 2005, a board member of Harvard Corporation, Conrad K. Harper, resigned saying he was angered both by the university president's comments about women and by Summers being given a salary increase. The resignation letter to the president said, "I could not and cannot support a raise in your salary, ... I believe that Harvard's best interests require your resignation." Board Member's Letter of Resignation. The New York Times. August 2, 2005
In June 2005, Harvard and Shleifer announced that they had reached a tentative settlement with the US government. In August, Harvard, Shleifer, and the Department of Justice reached an agreement under which the university paid $26.5 million to settle the five-year-old lawsuit. Shleifer was also responsible for paying $2 million worth of damages.
Because Harvard paid almost all of the damages and allowed Shleifer to retain his faculty position, the settlement provoked allegations of favoritism by Summers. His continued support for Shleifer strengthened Summers's unpopularity with other professors, as reported in The Harvard Crimson:
In January 2009, as the Obama Administration tried to pass an economic stimulus spending bill, Representative Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon) criticized Summers, saying that he thought that President Barack Obama is "ill-advised by Larry Summers. Larry Summers hates infrastructure." DeFazio, along with liberal economists including Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, had argued that more of the stimulus should be spent on infrastructure, while Summers had supported tax cuts. "Sean Grady: Shootout at Jackson Hole: The World's Central Bankers Take Aim at Deflation." The Independent. August 14, 2010. In late 2008, Summers and economic advisors for then-President-elect Obama presented a memo with options for an economic stimulus package ranging from $550 billion to $900 billion. According to The New Republic, economic advisor Christina Romer initially recommended a $1.8-trillion package, which proposal Summers quickly rejected, believing any stimulus approaching $1 trillion would not pass through Congress. Romer revised her recommendation to $1.2 trillion, which Summers agreed to include in the memo, but Summers struck the figure at the last minute.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Summers called Senator Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) asking him to remove caps on executive pay at firms that have received stimulus money, including Citigroup.
On April 3, 2009, Summers came under renewed criticism after it was disclosed that he was paid millions of dollars the previous year by companies which he now had influence over as a public servant. He earned $5 million from the hedge fund D. E. Shaw and collected $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street companies that received government bailout money.
In April 2016, he was one of eight former Treasury secretaries who called on the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Union ahead of the June 2016 Referendum.
Summers referred to the United Kingdom's Brexit vote on June 23, 2016, in favor of leaving the European Union as the "worst self-inflicted policy wound that a country has done since the Second World War". However, Summers cautioned that the result was a "wake up call for elites everywhere" and called for "responsible nationalism" in response to simmering public sentiment.
In June 2016, Summers also wrote, "I believe the risks to the US and global economies of Mr Trump's election as president are far greater than. If he is elected, I would expect a protracted recession to begin within 18 months. The damage would be felt far beyond the United States."
During 2013, Summers had been reported as preferred candidate by the Cabinet of Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to succeed Stanley Fischer as governor of the Bank of Israel. Netanyahu personally asked him to take the post, an offer he turned down.
Summers has criticized the Harvard administration for its failure to curb what he sees as rising anti-semitism at the university since the Hamas attack. In March 2025, Summers expressed concern that the Harvard Corporation, the university's highest governing body, was inadequately addressing campus anti-semitism; specifically, he criticized current Harvard President Alan Garber for failing to issue a final report with recommendations despite Garber having convened a task force on combating anti-semitism over a year earlier, in January 2024.
In the 2010 documentary Inside Job, Summers is presented as one of the key figures behind the 2008 financial crisis. Charles Ferguson points out the economist's role in what he characterizes as the deregulation of many domains of the financial sector.
In The Simpsons episode "E My Sports" (S30 E17), first broadcast March 17, 2019, the character Principal Seymour Skinner looks at a $100 bill and remarks "$100 bill, autographed by Lawrence Summers. Such a carefree signature, before the great recession."
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