Here’s a longish discussion from Persuasion between Yascha Mounk and Larry Summers. Mounk is a political scientist and author whom you’ll encounter frequently in the liberal media, while Summer was, of course. . . . . well, let’s let Wikipedia summarize it:
[Summers is] an American economist who served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and as director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He also served as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, where he is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School. In November 2023, Summers joined the board of directors of artificial general intelligence company OpenAI.
In my estimation, Summers was a very good President, though he did attract controversy. The most infamous incident during his tenure at Harvard was his claim, during a closed conference on diversity in science and engineering, that underrepresentation of women in STEM was due to a difference between men and women in the variance in ability in these fields. Although the means (average abilities) were about the same, the variance in ability means that there are more men than women at both tails of the distribution: the “low ability” tail and the “high ability” tail. Since academics and other scientists are drawn from the upper tail, Summers posited that this difference in variation (but not in means) explained the difference in sex representation in STEM. (I would also suggest that there may be a sex difference in preferences.)
The evidence is, in fact, in favor of this theory for at least a partial cause of sex inequities, so Summers may have been right. But his mere suggestion that the inequities in sex representation may not have been due to bias was enough to ignite a conflagration among the Harvard faculty, and ultimately resulted in Summers being forced to resign. And this simply for noting that while on average men and women have about the same average ability in STEM, it is the difference in the variance of that distribution—a sex difference in variance seen in several other traits—that led to the outrage. In my view, firing Summers for this was a mistake, and was a loss for Harvard.
At any rate, in this interview Summers talks about the problems with Harvard, with elite universities in general, and then goes on to discuss AI, finishing with a brief suggestion about how Biden could be reelected. I am not a big maven or student of AI, though I will of course use it when it’s useful, but I’ll skip that part and just quote the discussion about universities. Bits from the discussion are indented, and any comments of mine are flush left. As always, Summers doesn’t pull any punches.
The ruination of universities by “identity essentialism”.
Yascha Mounk: The last few months have been rather eventful at Harvard University. Tell us your view of what has happened and why it matters.
Larry Summers: It’s been a very difficult time. I think what universities do is as important as the work of any other institution in our society, in terms of training young people and preparing them for careers of leadership, and in terms of developing new ideas that set the tone for the cultural, the political, the policy debates that go forward.
Paul Samuelson famously said that if he would be allowed to write the economics textbooks, he didn’t care who would get to perform as the finance ministers going forward. So I think what happens in universities is immensely important. And I think there is a widespread sense—and it is, I think, unfortunately, with considerable validity—that many of our leading universities have lost their way; that values that one associated as central to universities—excellence, truth, integrity, opportunity—have come to seem like secondary values relative to the pursuit of certain concepts of social justice, the veneration of certain concepts of identity, the primacy of feeling over analysis, and the elevation of subjective perspective. And that has led to clashes within universities and, more importantly, an enormous estrangement between universities and the broader society.
This, of course, refers to the eternal struggle among academics involving identity (or “diversity”) versus merit.
It goes on:
Mounk: Tell us a little bit more about the nature of the conflict here. What is the conception of the university that has historically guided it, and how is it that those values have changed over the last ten years?
Summers: I think the values that animated me to spend my life in universities were values of excellence in thought, in pursuit of truth. We’re never going to find some ultimate perfect truth, but through argument, analysis, discussion, and study we can get closer to truth. And a world that is better understood is a world that is made better. And I think, increasingly, all you have to do is read the rhetoric of commencement speeches. It’s no longer what we talk about. We talk about how we should have analysis, we should have discussion, but the result of that is that we will each have more respect for each other’s point of view, as if all points of view are equally good and there’s a kind of arbitrariness to a conception of truth. That’s a kind of return to pre-Enlightenment values and I think very much a step backward. I thought of the goal of the way universities manage themselves as being the creation of an ever larger circle of opportunity in support of as much merit and as much excellence as possible.
I spoke in my inaugural address about how, a century before, Harvard had been a place where New England gentlemen taught other New England gentlemen. And today it was so much better because it reached to every corner of the nation, every subgroup within the population, every part of the world. It did that as a vehicle for providing opportunity and excellence for those who could make the greatest contribution. But again, we’ve moved away from that to an idea of identity essentialism, the supposition that somehow the conditions of your birth determine your views on intellectual questions, whether it’s interpretations of quantum theory or Shakespeare. And so that, instead, our purpose is not to bring together the greatest minds, but is back to some idea around multiplicity of perspective with perspective being identified with identity. We used to venerate and celebrate excellence. Now, at Harvard, and Harvard is not atypical of leading universities, 70 to 75% of the grades are in A-range. Why should the institutions that are most celebrating of excellence have only one grade for everyone in the top half of the class, but nine different grades that are applied to students in the lower half of the class? That is a step away from celebrating and venerating excellence.
Summers expatiates on the debacle of the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn testifying before a House committee, and notes, as I’ve emphasized, that what brought the Presidents down was not the hectoring of Elis Stefaniks or outrage about people being allowed to call for mass killing of Jews, but the arrant hypocrisy of these schools in their attitudes toward free speech (see below). In the end, it looked as if demonizing Jews was the only form of free speech acceptable at Harvard, while other and more trivial issues were censored and censured. Summers notes this below, and the commitment of elite schools to Social Justice and identity politics, led him to say that “. . . the fact that the ways in which great universities have acted have so enabled the Elise Stefaniks, the Bill Ackmans, and the Christopher Rufos, speaks to the danger with which they have been governed.”
Summers on free speech and Harvard’s double standard:
Summers: I think you and I are very much in agreement. I don’t think any reasonable person can fail to recognize a massive double standard between the response to other forms of prejudice and the response to anti-Semitism. And yes, you could have debates about when anti-Zionism or the demonization of Israel is and is not anti-Semitism. But on any reasonable conception of what’s going on, there has been a double standard. And I think those of us who are concerned about the double standard come to a view about how we want it remedied. And I think for the most part, the right way of remedying it is with a de-emphasis rather than a re-emphasis on identity.
Everyone needs to be enabled to feel safe. That doesn’t mean that they have a right to avoid being triggered by speech they don’t like, or to be spared exposure to ideas they find noxious. That doesn’t mean they have a right to bean-counting exercises where the share of members of their group is evaluated against a share of its population. It does mean that they’re entitled to the maintenance of an open and tolerant community where no one is allowed to shut down any set of ideas, that they have the right to be protected from discrimination, and that they have the right for there not to be indoctrination. I think in many ways what would be most problematic would be an indoctrination arms race in which a larger and larger fraction of an education is consumed by a recitation of the grievances of various groups.
In the second paragraph he’s touting equality over equity: equality of opportunity over “bean-counting exercises” (it’s this kind of metaphor that I would have avoided, as it equates university policy to “bean counting”, a phrase with bad optics (or “bad auditory”). But having equity as a goal, especially while maintaining that it’s perfectly consistent with keeping merit high, is a flawed exercise.
The stuff on AI will interest many readers, but I’ll let those folks read it themselves, and just finish with Summers’ response when asked what Biden and the Democrats could do to ensure that Trump doesn’t win in November. His answer is somewhat lame, but of course he admits he’s not a political pundit but an economist:
I tend to find political experts’ opinions on economic questions to not be very sound and thoughtful. And I’m not sure why I should suppose that my opinions on political questions will be particularly sound and thoughtful. So I answer the question with humility. But my instinct is that political parties prevail and incumbent presidents prevail by returning to a broad American center. And I am hopeful that Joe Biden, whose roots are with an American middle class, will find a broad expressive American voice in the months ahead that will place less emphasis on responding to each particular identity element in the Democratic bouillabaisse and instead speak to the hopes, the obligations, the expectations of all Americans in a universalist kind of language. I think that he has styled himself over many years as “middle class Joe,” and that’s something that goes deep within him.
My hope and my best guess is that we will see that come out and that as it comes out and as the clamor of the various activist groups within the party comes to seem less dominant, he will emerge as a unifier and as a successful candidate. But again, I answer economics questions with confidence and political questions with trepidation.
I agree that Biden has become much more woke than I envisioned when he took office, and he’s been leaning more towards “progressive” Democrats than I hope. Further, his wokeness will, I suspect, hurt him in the election, and I now think he’s got a better than even chance of losing. Given that many Americans (about 75%, I think) worry that he’s not physically or mentally fit to be President, while the same figure for Trump is about 46%, it seems that all Biden can do is get younger.
I think Phillip Greenspun’s essay on Summers’ foot-in-mouth moment is an essential complementary reading – a user here pointed it out once (thank you anonymous internet user).
P. Greenspun (bold in original):
“This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs.
Why does anyone think science is a good job?”
https://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
Post-edit deadline Follow up:
I just re-read it and forgot about the diversion into litigation – which I found weird – but the other stuff is worthwhile for thought.
Thanks TP for posting this interesting piece.
If one points out that there are many more men than women among the least capable/successful in society (homeless; imprisoned; lowest IQs; severe autism, etc) then everyone just accepts this as true (which it is). Men don’t react with an aghast “you can’t say that!”.
But if you point out that men are also over-represented in the top tail (CEOs; founders of major companies; Nobel laureates; top chess players, etc) then the only allowable explanation is sexist oppression by the “patriarchy”.
We need to take the “greater male variation” hypothesis seriously. More generally, we need to overturn the dogma that any and all differences between groups must arise solely from “oppression”.
The other possible explanation for the preponderance of homeless men is that women who can’t cope can usually find some man willing to look after her in exchange for sex, well enough to keep her off the street, or alone in the jungle or on the Arctic barrens, all of which are very dangerous places for women. Women condemned, conversely, to be alone in those environments die off from disease and predators before the census-takers come around to count them.
Men enjoy no such sexual safety net.
Well, perhaps, but since we’re speculating… My guess would be that women may be more likely than men to be taken in by friends and family members. Also, as women are more likely to be the primary (or only) care-givers to dependent children, they can take advantage of social services.
“… take advantage of social services.”
I think this is why Greenspun developed the section on litigation in his essay – perhaps in a weird theoretical way, but with some reasoning in terms of incentives.
Giving sexual services to a man in exchange for shelter provided by the state. Same thing. Having two or three children that she can’t support does generally suffice to keep a woman off the street at least. But this is just a further operation of my theory that the lowest functioning women are under-represented among the homeless only because they have more options, not because there are fewer of them. The legions of unwed mothers on welfare have no male counterpart. Except at the very bottom, women also tend to be less violent which makes them easier to house, both informally and in state re-housing efforts.
Now that I’ve ThyroidPlanet’s Greenspun article —the diversion into litigation is most engaging—I can see that these incentives operate higher up the class structure as well.
Yes, Leslie. I was thinking that today as a homeless person was sleeping outside my apartment building, rough-style. “Not an option for women” I thought.
It is rare in tony parts of Manhattan but sometimes it happens. Not an immigrant, either, by the look of him but we have a lot of them. Mainly in hotels.
D.A.
I was about to write the same thing; great minds think alike. 😀 The difference is that that has always been the explanation for why there are more men at the bottom, but historically there have been other, maybe more important, explanations for why there are more men at the top. I would argue, though, that those patriarchy advantages have largely disappeared, or even turned into disadvantages.
It sounds as if you believe that the reason men hold the most positions of power, authority, and wealth must be due to the fact males are more represented in the “high ability” distribution. You put patriarchy in scare quotes, and suggest any consideration of deeply embedded sexism must be women whining about- again, scare quotes- “oppression.”
It doesn’t take a depth of knowledge about history to see that women have been oppressed since the advent of sedentary culture. Many positive changes have been made over time and especially in recent decades in western nations. They don’t undo all of history. There just hasn’t been adequate time or adequate sizes of populations living in a more egalitarian society to conclude that CEOs are mostly men beause they are smarter.
The sex-difference variance hypotheses may be true. Sounds plausible. It needs to be proven. It should not be used an excuse to deny continued inequality that is based on cultural forces. Many excuses for shutting doors of opportunity to women historically have been claimed to be based on science, which turned out to be entirely false.
That’s certainly true about the past. I don’t think it’s true today. If anything, today there is bias in favour of women in many areas of life (in my field of science there has been clear pro-women bias in hiring for 2 or more decades now).
Yes, I do think that the evidence points to “ability” having a wider distribution in males (more at both the top and bottom tails). But it’s not only about ability, it’s also about drive, ambition, single-minded focus and similar traits that are also not equally distributed among men and women.
Thus the fact that there is no woman in the world’s top 100 chess players is partly about the innate differences in ability in the very top tail of the distribution, when it comes to the very esoteric skills of playing chess and the ability to visualise 6 or 7 moves ahead, but it’s also about drive and single-mindedness. To be a top chess player you not only need the innate ability, you also need the desire to study chess for 8 hours a day, memorising chess openings and chess endings and all the games all the other top players play. Most women would not even have the desire to do that (and you could say that that is very sensible).
I do think that there real on-average differences between women’s and men’s psychology, and that these things are not purely cultural or just from denying women opportunities.
You have repeated your position without responding to mine, except to state that my position is not true because of what you have observed about hiring in your field
You are correct that “most” women would not be willing to study chess 8 hours a day. Neither would “most” men. You have no evidence that extremely driven women with high aptitude don’t devote themselves single mindedly to their passions. Of course they do.
The suggestion is not that there are no such women. The suggestion is that such attitudes are more common among men, such that we should not expect 50:50 sex ratios.
You’re right that we can’t and shouldn’t dismiss the possibility that cultural attitudes are hampering women, but nor should we discount the possibility of innate (on averge) differences. Instead, we should allow both suggestions to be proposed and evaluated on the evidence.
I see your point, Emily. What do you want us to do? I’ll grant it’s provisionally true that cultural forces maintain sexual inequality and the reason that most CEOs are men isn’t because they are drawn from a smarter (or more driven or more focused, whatever) tail of the distribution. Fair enough.
But what do you mean by “cultural forces”? Cultural forces are just what people in the aggregate want to do and what they want each other to do. Are they:
-That women decide they don’t aspire to be CEOs because women are the ones who have to make the hard biological choices about family during a narrow window of their lives when career paths are also being set…and they choose family? (Or between themselves and their husbands they reconcile themselves to that choice made not entirely by themselves. And why should they have sole discretion? A family is a partnership. If a woman demands that a prospective husband/father put his career second to hers, the man can walk away. But most women want to marry up. So something has to give.)
-Or that women desperately do want to be CEOs instead of having families (or outsource the children entirely and never have to miss a meeting or business dinner for them) — some surely do; they are the female CEOs — but find that Boards of Directors and the managerial structures that groom managers to be promoted still close doors to their ambitious, striving, driven, focused, successful, reliably childless selves just because they are women?
Which of those cultural forces (or any others you could cite) are fixable by society…or by anyone? And how?
You can say, “Oh, men should . . .” But what if they won’t? Men have skin in the game, too. And what if women won’t try to make them, making instead a deal they can live with?
Cultural forces are certainly at play. I just don’t see where the pressure point is to make them change direction.
I responded to a comment from someone who I thought had the viewpoint that all that patriarchy stuff is in the past and has no relevance to people today, and any remaining differences in outcomes between men and women are due to a genetically-based Greater Male Variability Hypothesis. I think that is far from the truth. You say you see my point. Just the fact that you will acknowledge that is huge for me, because it indicates you are aware and not denying it.
What do I want you to do? Raise your children without gender expectations as much as possible. Think consciously about being as fair as possible with your colleagues of both sexes. Vote for people who will support families and keep abortion and birth control legal. (I know you are Canadian, not your issue.) If you witness someone undermining or underestimating a woman based on her sex, stick up for her.
Most of us can only do our best with who and what we encounter along the way. You come across as an enlightened and decent man. Thank you for your thoughtful response.
Reading your gracious response I’m thinking of my son and his wife (and their two children) who do, I think, live their lives much as you propose.
Just for the record, I don’t think that the greater male variability hypothesis is the *sole* factor. I think there are many others. These include (these are about *averages* not all individuals):
* STEM-capable women tending to head for veterinary science, medicine, psychology (“people” topics), rather than engineering, computer science, chemistry (“thing” topics).
* Women being more social and tending to prioritise work/life balance and families, whereas men tend to be more career focused.
* STEM-capable men tending to be “nerds” who are only good at STEM; whereas STEM-capable women usually have good social skills also and so have a much wider range of options (so fewer pursue STEM).
And, my position is not that there is absolutely no sexism or cultural bias, and that everything is necessarily the above factors, my position is that we should be allowed to discuss all of these things on the evidence, and not react like Harvard did to Larry Summers and enforce taboos against such discussions.
It is significant that Larry Summers was excommunicated from the Harvard presidency for expressing a heretical thought in 2006—a full decade before Haidt and Lukianoff published “Coddling”. So, any explanation of the return of US academia to medieval dogmatism must include changes in attitudes, atmosphere, and personnel as early as the late 90s and early 21st century.
I read the Mounk’s piece the other day, and this comment from Summers jumped out at me. Doesn’t he consider anti-semitism to be racism? Frankly, I don’t buy Summers’s confusion about how this all happened. He seemed perfectly happy to champion political correctness, until someone flipped over the rock and let the light in.
Interesting interview.
Though I’m skeptical about whether AI will replace (instead of complement) human translators. Everytime a new technology comes around there is an enormous amount of hype around it, as well as fear. (Where are the flying cars, the paperless offices, the meat grown in the lab at affordable cost/prices? Where’s the artificial leather replacing animal hides?)
For those interested in AI, I recommend:
Gerd Gigerenzer: How to Remain Smart in a Smart World: Why human intelligence still beats algorithms. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2021
Gary Smith: Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science. Oxford UP, 2023
PART IV THE REAL PROMISE AND PERIL OF AI
11. Overpromising and Underdelivering. pp. 203-216
12. Artificial Unintelligence. pp. 217-231
On American politics:
Thomas B. Edsall: Does Biden Have to Cede the White Working Class to Trump?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/21/opinion/biden-trump-working-class.html
The article can probably be accessed for free at https://archive.ph/
As I remember it, Summers was simply restating the argument that Steven Pinker made in his book “The Blank Slate”, in which he laid out the possibilities about why women were less likely to be in the Harvard Math Department. Summers laid out the same possibilities, but all anyone remembers is that they think that he said that women are not as smart as men. Pinker is intelligent and likable. Summers, on the other hand, is intelligent but arrogant and people at Harvard didn’t like him. His defenestration was more likely for that reason.
As for why there are fewer women in STEM, it turns out that very intelligent women can go into either the sciences/engineering or into the humanities/social sciences. Given that choice, they often select the latter. Smart men, on the other hand, tend to do much better only in STEM and don’t have the option of going into the other fields.
Lawrence M. Krauss: Academia’s Missing Men. Quillette, Sept 11, 2023
Men are disappearing from science and academia. The public perception is, however, exactly the opposite.
https://archive.is/18k9n
Aaron Neil: Why It’s Time To Stop Worrying About First World ‘Gender Gaps.’ Quillette, July 2017
https://archive.li/JZ47s
Michael,
I don’t think I understand your claim. Are you asserting that men cannot exhibit the type of “smarts” required by the humanities and social sciences? This seems absurd on its face. But perhaps you claim that individual women can have both types of smarts, that is, excel both in STEM and the humanities, while individual men normally have one type or the other, but not both simultaneously.
After Summers stepped down from the presidency, I followed the story. I read that he was unpopular with a significant percentage of the faculty. When he made his statement about women in STEM, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back rather than one isolated remark that did him in. I pictured his enemies thinking “we’ve got him now!” If I remember correctly, the context of his comment contributed to the problem. He was asked why he was not more successful in recruiting women professors in STEM. The comment came across as making excuses for his failures and insulting women simultaneously. He sounds like a brilliant man who perhaps lacked the political skills to get the faculty support he needed.
I agree that Larry Summers was a good President for Harvard and I was deeply disappointed when he was hounded out. I was very aware that he was forced out because of his (apparently) inflammatory statement about women and men, but at the time I thought that his treatment was a one-off: a misstep by Harvard that would not be repeated. I had no idea that Summers’s resignation in 2006 was just the beginning. And Summers is quite correct that today’s erosion of Enlightenment values is a step backward.
Great talk by the ever brilliant Niall Ferguson on woke unis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5QID4HVUTY&t=1122s
(1 hr)
D.A.
NYC
I appreciate Emily’s contribution to the discussion!