Common Sense/Bari Weiss/8-18-2022
“The secret sauce of economics is arithmetic. After I did the arithmetic, it looked to me like the amount of water we were putting in the bathtub was far bigger than the capacity of the bathtub. But I didn’t know exactly what the capacity of the bathtub would be. I thought there might be various kinds of bottlenecks. But even if everything went well, I thought we were overstimulating the economy. So I forecasted that we’d have excessive inflation.”
USAGOLD note: Summers spends considerable time explaining his thought processes and influences in this interview. When asked if he could have dinner with any historical figure who would it be, he answers John Maynard Keynes. The new McCarthyism has to do with free speech on university campuses, but Summers takes the discussion a crucial step further by emphasizing the affect on future national leadership.
