You can apparently be stripped of the status of economist

Is this like that disaccomodation thing in that one Star Trek episode? (All LGM SciFi nerds to the courtesy phone).

On Tuesday, the American Economic Association banned Larry Summers for life from all activities. He was allowed to voluntarily resign his membership. This bars Summers from participating in any of its conferences, publications, editorial work, or refereeing of articles. It is an extraordinary rebuke, and as far as I can tell, unprecedented. The AEA statement barring Summers described his conduct as “fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity and with the trust placed in mentors within the economics profession.”

This action by the AEA almost surely foreshadows Summers’s firing from Harvard, where he is currently on leave from teaching but still holds Harvard’s most prestigious chair, a university professorship. Summers’s ultimate status at Harvard is still under review, but in his email correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein, Summers was seeking advice on how to get a graduate student whom he fancied to go to bed with him. . .

Harvard seldom revokes tenure, but did so this year when professor Francesca Gino was accused of fabricating data in academic papers. Gino has denied the allegations. It was the first time in decades that Harvard revoked a professor’s tenure. According to an investigation in 2020 by The Harvard Crimson, every tenured Harvard professor embroiled in allegations of improper sexual advances either chose to retire or remained on the faculty. None was removed.

The process that led to AEA’s decision is confidential; however, ethics complaints are referred to an ethics committee, whose members are not disclosed. The committee’s recommendations are then referred to the AEA’s executive committee and officers. The decision of the executive committee is final.

The AEA’s current president is Lawrence Katz, a fellow Harvard professor who has published with Summers. The president-elect is Katharine Abraham of the University of Maryland. The executive committee, which is elected from the membership, fittingly enough, is currently made up disproportionately of women.

It was Summers’s disparaging comments about women’s intellectual abilities that set in motion a series of events that ultimately led to his ouster as Harvard president. But the latest revelations depict a much cruder look at Summers’s adolescent id.

I almost feel sorry for Summers’s latest discontent, but a lot of people have always claimed he’s something of an empty suit, who was just preternaturally good at playing the academic status game (I know nothing of his work though).

Andrew Gelman has some interesting thoughts on this whole thing, meaning not just Summers but all the Summeresque people who sucked up so assiduously to the loathsome Jeffrey Epstein for so many years, even after his initial public disgrace:

In a recent post, Paul Campos points out that lots of people fell into Epstein’s spell. And it wasn’t just stupid people, either. I can’t speak for Larry Summers, a man I’ve never met and whose writings have never impressed me, but other members of what we might call the “Epstein community” are legitimately brilliant, and their receptiveness to Epstein puzzled me. Some hypotheses:

(a) They thought Epstein might send some money their way.
(b) They were in the habit of asking sucking up to rich people for money so they were just sucking up to Epstein out of habit.
(c) They thought they might get some sex with underage women out of the deal.
(d) They liked to hang out with Epstein because he thought Epstein was cool.
(e) They genuinely enjoyed hanging out with Epstein.

I have a horrible feeling that for a lot of these people it was a mixture of all 5 of these things! I guess another option is that they enjoyed free Caribbean vacations and didn’t look too carefully at the other people at the resort.

My only point here is that if we’re talking about Summers, we can say, yeah, Summers is a stuffed shirt, he’s an idiot, the years as university president warped his brain (“flattering rich assholes and rich evil people” is pretty much the #1 requirement for the job of university president), etc. But not everyone was involved was an idiot, and a lot of them needed the money even less than Summers did. And yet they still seemed to have enjoyed hanging out with the guy.

Besides the most obvious explanations here — money, sex — I’m most intrigued by (d), which I think has a lot of explanatory power. Many many people love the feeling that they’re part of the in crowd, and I suspect that this especially true among academics, given that 93.71% were high school losers who never made it with a lady etc.

Very tangentially, I noticed a theme linking several key figures in John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke was that they were high school misfits who were desperate to find a niche in which they could be admired/cool kids. This is particularly evident in the cases of David Duke and Rush Limbaugh, who are both profiled in the book, but it applies to a bunch of other characters in it as well.

Wanting to be part of the Inner Circle is often an extremely powerful force in not just high school, but politics, academia, and institutional and social life in general.

Now that Summers have been cast into the outer darkness, he will have plenty of time to contemplate the vagaries of this particularly empty brand of fame.