Posted by koolba 11/19/2025
Enormously influential, he provided the intellectual gravitas as well as the raw policymaking muscle for a version of the US economy that was financialized, globalized, and monopolized.
If you're broke in 2025, Larry Summers probably had something to do with it.
Anything that will knock this guy down many many pegs is worthwhile imo.
I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.
Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.
All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.
Plus, there are harward people who complained about these harward people for years and claim to not be surprised.
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmat...
Nicholas Tartaglione
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2019/09/23/feds-how-n...
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
Nonsense. "...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0] "...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1] etc.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/us/politics/trump-epstein... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/trump-epstein...
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
So he's still immune the anything that's horrendous.
The real test is how people vote. With this much confusion I think it is perfectly valid to take a few opinion polls with a grain of salt.
Much like how Dems rate their party poorly but still turn it against Trump, I'm not sure MAGA discontent with have any real impact on elections.
Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?
This doesn't accord with experience. MAGA is notorious for rationalizing anything Trump says or does.
The uniparty is a rotten, spiraling race to the bottom.
They're just different bubbles.
Liberals and conservatives have methodically and deliberately avoided holding their leaders accountable for decades. The only people who can't see that, are, frankly, liberals and conservatives.
What we have now is an opportunity to sweep everyone from Trump on down out of office. Anyone who would work for Trump or Clinton should have their judgement questioned at a minimum. And they should pray we don't look any further into what they've been getting up to.
This is a golden opportunity to scrub the walls clean and put in new people en masse. But I'm not naive. I know the corruption of the incumbent power brokers and parties will undoubtedly win the day. You can bet your bottom dollar that conservatives and liberals are cooperating and they've got the courts, Homeland security, CIA, everything.. out cleaning up for them. I just wish they'd get what's coming to them for once.
Cannot count the number of times people forget how powerful algorithmic bubble making is. It isnt a “you are in a bubble so ur dumb” it is more of, “all of our information is algorithmically fed to us be aware!”
To add to this, I have a friend who has two kids. One is lefty trans and the other is becoming a christian conservative. They are Indian zoomers. Two totally different algorithms at work. One got the Charlie and the other got Hassan. Really makes one wonder what is in your own information feed.
I did say the "uniparty", right? So on what basis do you make this claim?
In case you're not familiar with the term, it refers to both the Republicans and the Democrats, viewing them as effectively one party with two factions (with the former merely trailing behind the latter, typically).
In this particular case, MAGA is showing that it's okay with hypocrisy, because, hey, didn't Democrats rationalize Clinton's misdeeds and throw his victims under the bus for the sake of the party?
So, yes, the uniparty is rotten.
Just throwing it out there, but forget Epstein, I'm sure most of us would not believe what NYT is sitting on in general. This is effectively a defacto global intelligence gathering service. I bet if we could read through a lot of that we'd all be gobsmacked and just stop believing in humanity altogether.
I understand most of what we haven't seen is uncorroborated, but it would still make for interesting reading if we didn't have to worry about falling down an elevator shaft onto some bullets.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript...
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/why-larry-summers-sh...
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?
It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
so... this might be the pattern.
I think ladder climbing is its own skill only loosely correlated with intelligence.
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
Seems anecdotally true.
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
"Public Prosecutor" wasn't a salaried job with the power to effectively pardon people by not filing charges. It was a contract job to prosecute a single case.
It's very depressing what grand juries have been turned into.
"Funnily", if you read Epstein's contributions to a lot of his emails, he also gives off that same vibe.
I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things.
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking/113...
The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance.
(Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.)
The only talents Epstein really had were in cozying up the right people at the right time with the "right" stuff (which we all know about now).
Summers is just weather vane for current economic thinking. He's not a particularly brilliant at anything.
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
That his madam (Ghislane) was the daughter of the guy who got Israel nukes and had some deeeeep ties to the Mossad is no surprise. FWIW said guy also had ties to UK Intelligence and the KGB, and he died mysteriously on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
And now all their only remaining defense is "our masks don't even look like that."
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
> The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality.
> ...
> I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
It's obvious to me that this is an argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated. It has about as much subtlety as "why don't we eat the starving Irish kids?", although its form differs from A Modest Proposal.
If he didn't also hang out with a paedophile and argue that women are biologically bad at science, he'd be a funny guy.
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 exchange to Epstein
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
Yes, it would in that context make sense as something akin to A Modest Proposal, but directed at the World Bank's liberalization policies.
The problem, of course, is that Summers was not an opponent of the World Bank's liberalization policies, he was the chief economist of the World Bank, and a supporter of those policies, and actively seeking stronger support for them, so it doesn't work that way coming from him.
No one was sexist ever, they were just joking and all feminists were stupid not understanding that, until their quite sexist messages got released by inside a pack of messages to known abuser. This is literally the case of Larry Summers.
And you want to play that game again, with literally the same person. Of course no one believes it, it is not being sophisticated, you are asking people to pretend they are stupid. Nothing in Summers career suggests he would sarcastic out of care for Africa or environment. That is not what his work was, at all.
I think it can be hard to accept that sociopaths are serious, if you aren’t one yourself. In the USA right now the federal government is committing incredible crimes and human rights violations, and people reporting them from direct observation and even video aren’t being believed, because it sounds too much like comic book supervillan stuff.
I would say this easily goes either direction, that someone capable of this level of introspection and empathy would be very good at accomplishing the various evil aims he seems to have been capable of. This is often what people are abbreviating when leveling accusations of psychopathy anyway.
Not sure how the second bit follows - one can be a serious psychopath, sociopath, cartoon villain etc and it wouldn't change that the tone of the memo I is pretty obviously farcical, despite what the contemporary media read it for.
You don’t need to. The target audience was people to whom that’s obvious in the first few lines and then who keep reading to see how far he can take it with a straight face.
If Kevin Spacey had written a private note to Woody Allen that said, "Now that we've been chased out of the film industry, let's become day care workers," then it would be a very different kind of "joke" than The Onion writing the same as a headline.
Just because he claimed to have been sarcastic about something, doesn't mean he is not also guilty of it.
And if it's a joke, what is the punchline?
DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP
'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.> what is the punchline?
It's akin to saying "This establishment's high Google/Yelp ratings indicate it's leaving money on the table. There's clearly room to raise prices, cut costs, and really degrade the customer experience."
I don't know if Summers is telling the truth about his intent. But as far as jokes go, it's decent.
Yes. See also:
“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”
> argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated.
The closest it gets to being a joke is that it is mockery and derision directed at underlings as a form of feedback on work product.
Kind of what I mean. I hadn't heard of this guy before today, and this memo openly laments that it's challenging to bring Africa into the world pollution economy because moving solid waste there is a logistical challenge. If this memo was about how cool it is to traffic and rape children, as some people in this thread and a few others today seem to be interpreting it, I'd probably be less inclined to lend it the benefit of this tone, but I'm just not sold on the premise that someone who is demonstrably evil in some dimension is incapable of making honestly benign bureaucratic jokes in a presumably private context. It kind of knocks the legs out of genuine criticism if the dude can't chew bubblegum without taking flack.
I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.
Yes, they are fully awar of what that means and they have lived without electricity, devices, and transport.
Embrace of bleeding edge tech isn't universal, hell even the embrace of the past 100 years of tech isn't for every human.
Both groups from my neck of the woods, both groups I've spoken to, both groups with significant time spent sans modern society. Both groups with members that turned back to isolation and non western lifestyle after a few years exposure.
Many more similar people have been exposed to society with electricty, phones, etc and happy to live as far apart from that as they can still manage - it's hard to escape such things - Starlink has polluted the skys once untouched in the Murchison.
Worse than that, actually: to get to 0 pollution by only deleting things, you'd also need to remove one of the main sources of pollution in third world countries: cooking with fire.
Invention has already given us renewable electricity, and using that to cook is much better than inhaling wood smoke.
Necessary, because using any other way to cook is polluting, and no matter what else you eliminate you can't eliminate cooking. (And good luck convincing everyone to not live where heating is needed).
Even wood fires for cooking is a way to get all the lung damage of heavy smoking for all the same reasons, just without the nicotine addiction.
Not sufficient, because while renewables can be made in non-polluting ways, those might not be the cheapest, and people vote with their wallets.
That, plus all the chemical processes that just pollute directly, like cement and steel currently do.
And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...
> And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.
This sounds like a theat - "hate the person we all hate too, or maybe you yourself are a threat to the group's values, and since we can't actually get to the guy we hate, we'll punish you in his stead for being a sympathizer"
If you're going to engage in satire, its best the satire be obvious.
I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically.
And Summers himself is one of them- he spent most of his career making things analogous to that essay actually happen
From context, GP's "I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically" obviously meant "I [perhaps ironically] believe there are capitalist economist types who unironically believe what Summers [perhaps ironically] wrote."
The next rhetorical question is: what does it even mean to believe something ironically? Sounds like the sort of grammatical blivetry that would have gotten 17th-century critics up in arms.
> Many times he [Shakespeare] fell into those things [which] could not escape laughter — as when he said in the person of Caesar [...] "Caesar did never wrong but with just cause."
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
With the caveat that IQ tests scores are now provably something one can learn to be good at (because LLMs do much better on public tests than private ones), was the claim about variably actually justified at the time, or was it nonsense even back then?
(I don't know why I'd like to know, thinking about it at a meta level…)
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
Surely he could not possibly be sexist, nah.
It was not the "fair play in bar" kind of situation at all.
It doesn’t make it any less grotesque though. What I was really commenting on is the men in positions of power who think that that power is enough to get them laid. Nope. Turns out that women are attracted to... can you believe it? LOOKS!
But then you see them fumbling around like this doofus. He doesn't even know what the hell he’s doing. It’s sad.
He has no game.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
In those consultations, he used a racial slur to refer to the young woman.
There are other contrary positions you can take, it doesn't have to be that this was okay.
There's a reason it's considered morally and ethically heinous to demand sexual favors with people whom you have power over, and if you can't understand why it's so heinous, then you do not deserve to have power over anybody.
You have no issue with that?
It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?
It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
> It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?
This category of malcontent (about out-of-touch elites engaging in all sorts of depraved perversions while the poor starved) at Versailles eventually caused most of the former to lose their heads during the French Revolution.
The smart ones know that they need to keep up appearances, the dumb ones behave like they will never face consequences.
Wonder how it would have turned out if the French revolution happened before the American Revolution? What could we have learned from them?
> The three freedoms that most of our ancestors enjoyed, but which most modern humans lack are:
> The freedom to leave.
> The freedom to disobey an order.
> The freedom to create new ways of relating to one another.
https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/the-three-fundamental-hu...
And example: we tend to inject too much of our modern viewpoint onto the old monarchies—that Henry VIII would not have thought himself ruler of the "state" of England although we talk about him in that regard from our modern perspective.
What does your precious Harvard and US Treasury Department have to say about that?
One metric of change would be that statutory (underage) rape wasn't a crime anywhere 200 years ago. In some countries, it still isn't. Mass rape and kidnapping is going on right now from Nigeria to Sudan. Wealthy old men can still marry 12 year olds across much of the Middle East. The fact that sex with minors has become relegated to something like a luxury designer drug for the elite hypocrites in the US and UK, and the fact that they're now being exposed for it, is in many ways an unexpected victory for humanity. The previous 5k years of recorded history, and probably the whole million years before that, were wall to wall with war, slavery and raping children. As well as the elites having such rights as prima nocta and simply executing anyone they wished. So I think we are making progress.
On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?