Larry Summers, who is still on the Harvard faculty, tries to strongarm Harvard’s administration into punishing the student newspaper for printing the truth about him

The truth being that Larry Summers is an almost unbelievably disgusting and corrupt person, who also isn’t nearly as smart as he thinks he is. (Lot of that going around in The Meritocracy these days)

Andrew Gelman has many of the details here.

While the Crimson thing is really outrageous, my favorite detail is that this Brilliant Economist ™ tried to tell a sexist joke to Jeffrey Epstein about women’s IQs, in order to get a million dollars for one of his wife’s projects, but got the most basic demographic stats wrong in the process.

Gelman speculates that Summers doesn’t really believe that women as a group have lower IQs than men, and was just pretending in order to curry favor with Epstein for the purposes of getting money — and who knows what else; as always it would be irresponsible not to speculate — from a sub-literate sex trafficking pimp of underage girls. I think the odds are pretty good that Larry Summers is a hardcore misogynist creep, who believes that women are in fact less intelligent than men on the group level, because of the whole hardcore misogynist creep thing, which is also probably related to the whole Jeffrey Epstein scandal in some deeply mysterious way.

Key insight about how selling “expertise” works:

Summers is a big fan of telling hard truths to feminists and to the left wing of the Democratic party, which makes sense because feminists and the left wing of the Democratic party aren’t about to give him any money. Epstein and the Saudis, though, they were paying real money, and, for them, Summers was willing to flatter and tell them what they wanted to hear. . . .

OK, fine, Epstein and the Saudis had money, Summers wanted money, so they paid him. Fair enough. Also, when people pay you, it’s natural to want to tell them what they want to hear. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, right? So speak to the Saudis with platitudes about inclusion and equality, and then speak to Epstein about how sexual harassment is no big deal. Tell ’em what they want to hear, everybody’s happy?

So, where’s the paradox?

Here’s the paradox. In that economic transaction where Epstein and the Saudis are paying Summers big bucks, what are they getting for their money?

I can’t say–like Aaron Burr, I’m never in the room where it happens; unlike Aaron, I wouldn’t want to be in that room!–but I can speculate. And my guess is that what they want from Larry is his brilliance. Larry’s supposed to be an outstandingly brilliant man. I have my doubts, but Epstein and the Saudis are nothing if not conventional, so of course they’d think that Larry Summers, along with various Ted talk luminaries, are the best that mankind has to offer. They’re paying Larry for his insights, his special insights that only he can give.

And that’s the paradox. They’re paying Summers for his unique insights, and they value these insights so much that they’re paying him a lot. They’re positively throwing money at the guy! But this motivates him to say the most boring, stupid things. The more they pay him, the more he’ll tell them what they want to hear, and the less genuine Larry Summers insight will be provided.

Meanwhile, feminists and the left wing of the Democratic party won’t give Larry a dime, and he gives him his straight-up views for free.

. . . and nice quote from the Crimson piece:

Government and Sociology professor Theda R. Skocpol — who frequently crossed swords with Summers during his tense presidency — declined to comment on Summers’ case, but called the web of connections between Epstein and elite spheres “sickening.”

“This kind of mutually reinforcing corruption,” Skocpol wrote, “is what one sees in failing societies and empires in decline.”