As President Obama chooses those with whom he will surround himself in the executive branch, one choice jumped out at me these past few weeks. That person is Larry Summers, who is famous for two reasons: his service to the Clinton administration as a high-ranking official, and his moment of intellectualism that got him forced out of the Presidency of Harvard University [1]. This one instance from his long career, which cost him publicly, is one of those moments that I worry about in academia: liberty without responsibility.
A President of a major research university, the head of a national lab, a member of the government, all have a bully pulpit. They have the ability to stand in front of a great number of people at once, own the spotlight, and air their opinions. They are one, seen to be speaking for many. Many people consider it a core principal of “academic freedom” that an academic can say what they want, when they want, whether the purpose is to inspire or to shake the establishment. Some people hide behind this liberty, saying controversial things not because they necessarily believe they are correct, but because they have casually read the evidence and want to play devil’s advocate, or force people to rethink their view of the world.
At a time like that, I always look back to Darwin for inspiration. Here was a researcher, possessed of a scattered set of observations that suggested that living things evolve. However, he recognized that if he didn’t establish himself first as a biologist (he originally was more an established geologist), nobody would take his work seriously. He spent the better part of decade studying barnacles – yes, barnacles – published a work of discovery on them, and established himself as a serious biologist. Then he spent another better part of a decade studying breeding of pigeons, studying observations of human population and growth, studying his specimens from the Galapagos, and undertaking many other activities, all to establish a clear line of evidence and argument to find the mechanism of evolution which could explain his observations of evolutionary behavior in nature.
Darwin didn’t use his bully pulpit as a scientists to publish an ill-conceived book and state that evolution must be right because of a few pieces of evidence. Instead, he worked tirelessly in the field to pull together disparate observations, to understand breeding, and in the end constructed a work that to this day stands as a testament to the scientific method. Did Darwin understand everything? No. He didn’t understand genetics, he didn’t know the age of the earth. There was much that evolution relied upon to which Darwin had no access, and it wouldn’t be until after his death that the missing pieces would be established.
Getting back to Mr. Summers, in 2005 he gave a speech at a conference [2] on diversifying the science and engineering workforce and made a series of public speculations on why women are not as well represented in science as men. He complained afterward that his remarks were taken out of context. Let’s look at the context, and then some of the remarks.
He clearly states at the outset of the speech that his purpose is not to lay out policies, but to be provocative (at the encouragement of his host). ” . . . I was willing to [attempt to be provocative] and didn’t feel like [talking about Harvard’s policies]. And so we have agreed that I am speaking unofficially and not using this as an occasion to lay out the many things we’re doing at Harvard to promote the crucial objective of diversity.”
He established right away that he was speaking unofficially, which is a standard way of going off the record as an official and on the record as an academic executing free thought. He shortly thereafter lays out his programme, saying, “There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the . . . high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.”
The one that, I think, really caught the public attention and got him in a different spotlight, are the first two. They’re also the ones he claims are most important. He laid out two questions about this issue. The first was ” . . . who wants to do high-powered intense work?” This he defined as a job which demanded an 80 hour work-week, or for the mind to continue to work on problems outside the office. He states that, ” . . . it is a fact about our society that that is a level of commitment that a much higher fraction of married men have been historically prepared to make than of married women.” He raises what seem, for a moment, like larger questions about society than about the individual, suggesting he’s going to make an argument that nurture, not nature, is the problem. He asks, ” . . . is our society right to expect that level of effort from people who hold the most prominent jobs? Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men? Is our society right to ask of anybody to have a prominent job at this level of intensity, and I think those are all questions that I want to come back to.”
Then he goes on to the second question, which is why the gap in representation is bigger in science and engineering than in other professions. He says of this question, ” . . . here, you can get a fair distance, it seems to me, looking at a relatively simple hypothesis.” What is his simple hypothesis? “It does appear that on many, many different human attributes-height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability . . . there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and a female population. And that is true with respect to attributes that are and are not plausibly, culturally determined . . . Even small differences in the standard deviation will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out.” He then relates a bunch of evidence which he himself notes is sketchy, or possibly limited by systematics, but then concludes (albeit with strange reluctance to be so firm), “So my sense is that the unfortunate truth . . . is that the combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances probably explains a fair amount of this problem.”
To translate all of this, Summers reads sketchy data about small differences in men and women and their ability to do math and science in top students in 12th grade and concludes that these differences translate into large variations in men and women in science and engineering at the “high-power” level of these jobs – faculty, for instance.
He goes on to cite anecdotes about his own daughters, or schoolchildren in Israel, and then after a long line of speculation he says, “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.”
What I find odd about this speech is that Summers takes a position based on what even he thinks is either scientifically shakey, or anecdotal, evidence. He then asks to be proved wrong about 2/3 of the way through the speech. He concludes the speech with something similar, “Let me just conclude by saying that I’ve given you my best guesses after a fair amount of reading the literature and a lot of talking to people. They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said. But I think we all need to be thinking very hard about how to do better on these issues and that they are too important to sentimentalize rather than to think about in as rigorous and careful ways as we can. That’s why I think conferences like this are very, very valuable. Thank you.”
Is this academic liberty without responsibility? Largely, I believe this to be the case. Liberty and responsibility together define freedom. Summers, an academic, seemed to take his role as provocateur far more seriously than his role as a free academic. He cited some papers, qualified the results, drew strange conclusions, and then asked to be proved wrong. This seems to me to be a good example of bad academics.
A provocateur with dicey facts to back them is dangerous at worst, useless at best. What got me thinking about all of this again was a short report in my latest issue of “On Wisconsin”, the UW alum magazine. “It Doesn’t Add Up” takes data collected under the “No Child Left Behind” Act and finds that there is no statistical difference between girls and boys in mathematics [3]. Seeing this article, and the level of scrutiny that it reports was put into the study (different ways of looking at the data to tease out differences). Data from 7 million – YES, 7 million – students formed the basis of the study. In all cases, men and women both performed the same at complex problem solving.
The study’s leader, a UW psychology professor, put it best. “‘Stereotypes are very, very resistant to change,’ she says, ‘but as a scientist, I have to challenge them with data.'” She really sums up my feelings on this – put your data where your mouth is. Summers got himself dismissed as Harvard’s president, not because he acted with true academic freedom but because he exercised academic liberty without responsibility and stuck to his story throughout the firestorm after the speech.
Where is Summers now? He’s serving as the head of President-Elect Obama’s team of economic advisors. As a scientist, this worries me. We need more Darwins, and fewer Summers. He’s demonstrated a capacity to form opinions on shakey data. He may have been a respected economist in the Clinton administration, and certainly he brings experience to the job, but experience and bad judgement don’t add up to a reliable advisor.
The economic crisis is an important short-term issue (<10 years) Obama will have to confront. Who will he choose as his science advisor, somebody who needs to look far forward and advocate for a vision for this country in science? Summers, in my opinion, was a bad pick for economics. Perhaps he will exercise good judgment, perhaps not. I just hope he doesn’t apply the same judgement to economic policy that he applied to 50% of our nation’s future investiment in science, engineering, and economics.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/business/economy/26leonhardt.html?em
[2] http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html
2 thoughts on “Your economic theories make no sense?”
A few comments, from the perspective of someone who was a student at Harvard early in the Summers presidency:
(1) It’s worth noting that these comments were not the only reason Summers was ousted as Harvard’s President – there was an enormous amount of friction between Summers and a good portion of the faculty long before his comments about gender. He was hired to make changes at the University (mainly the expansion into Allston, but also an increased focus on science and other quantitative disciplines), which wasn’t going to make an independent faculty happy to begin with, but his curt and abrasive style caused
unnecessary problems. He had already alienated Cornel West, a famous and popular (and very prickly) professor of African-American studies, by noting that even tenured faculty might want to publish sometimes. Many students were unhappy with Summers as well but he was probably more popular among them then among the faculty. He was a terrible stage presence at many events, to say the least – I recall his uninterested behavior at an ethnic dance/music festival in particular. He wasn’t effective at even pretending to be interested in something, a job requirement for a position like his. So things were already pretty bad, but the media circus surrounding his gender comments pushed things far enough to trigger a faculty response.
(2) I still maintain that his comments were incredibly poorly-chosen, but were not nearly as bad as some have presented them. The main thing I found slightly refreshing (if very muddled) was the recognition that there are multiple components to the phenomenon beyond plain discrimination, which often seems to be the only socially-acceptable answer in an academic setting. Intrinsic differences are possible in principle (see interesting recent data in Guiso, Science 320, pp. 1164-1165 (2008) for how these apparent differences vary among nations, as well as evidence for the intrinsic superiority of women), but can only be discussed with extreme care. Summers’ discussion of them was certainly anecdotal and his opinions very possibly wrong. The main problem is that he treated this as his personal thoughts to spark debate on a topic outside his expertise. He found that you just can’t do that as President of Harvard when it comes to a topic that controversial – he couldn’t escape his bully pulpit.
(3) Your comment that he is a poor pick for economic advisor struck me as strange, since you make almost no reference to the actual job. It seems like you’re taking a few offhand remarks on a non-economics topic as evidence that his economic opinions are untrustworthy. This would make sense if we knew nothing else about his thought processes, but he has a vast record as an economist (among the handful best-regarded in the entire field) and public servant on exactly these topics. The main question should be whether that record is good, not a few paragraphs of needling remarks on an unrelated topic.
Hi J.,
You said:
“A few comments, from the perspective of someone who was a student at Harvard early in the Summers presidency:”
I knew I was speaking about something I’d only seen the tip of, so I am quite deserving of any criticism I get on this post. Mainly, I’d see the article about the study of math abilities of girls and boys, remembered the Summers controversy, and realized that this was the same Summers that was the head of the economic team. I was interested in your perspective on all of this – thanks for responding!
You said:
“(1) It’s worth noting that these comments were not the only reason Summers was ousted as Harvard’s President – there was an enormous amount of friction between Summers and a good portion of the faculty long before his comments about gender.”
I didn’t realize that this event was the tipping point. I only knew that this made lots of headlines and then he was out.
“(2) I still maintain that his comments were incredibly poorly-chosen, but were not nearly as bad as some have presented them.”
I agree – in fact, I tried to make the clear by pointing out that even he said he was out to be provocative, but that he was happy (welcoming it, in fact) to be proven incorrect. However, I feel like (and I think Summers realized this, but was not so good at handling this in the speech) he was way out on the plank and didn’t know how to walk back by the time he got to the end of his remarks.
You said:
“The main thing I found slightly refreshing (if very muddled) was the recognition that there are multiple components to the phenomenon beyond plain discrimination, which often seems to be the only socially-acceptable answer in an academic setting.”
This problem is inherently complex. He did try to make this point, but by focusing on a ranked set of his own hypotheses I think he started out on the plank.
“(3) Your comment that he is a poor pick for economic advisor struck me as strange, since you make almost no reference to the actual job. It seems like you’re taking a few offhand remarks on a non-economics topic as evidence that his economic opinions are untrustworthy. ”
Agreed – here I deserve a slapping around. To be fair, these are my opinions and they aren’t necessarily completely thought out. I do feel that when a person brings poor judgment to new area of thought – in this case, failing to bring the same care to gender bias that they bring to monetary policy – that this suggests a mis-application of their own scientific approach. Is it fair to be careful with money but speculate off-the-cuff about why there are fewer women than men in science and engineering? Certainly, both deserve a huge amount of scrutiny and care because they affect a lot of people. I just get worried when a person who is probably quite smart – I have no doubt that Summers is a very intelligent person, given what I do know about him – uses a public forum carefully in one aspect of their intellectual life and quite carelessly in another.
Ultimately, Summers is a behind-the-scenes person who will make his approaches and opinions known behind closed doors. He’s not going to be giving speeches like this – he’s going to be far too busy working on economics. But, since judgment in economic matters has proven so important in the recent crisis, certainly the judgment of this very smart person will matter in the future economic matters of the U.S. I only want to be sure he’s got good judgment.