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Posted by koolba 11/19/2025

Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board(www.cnbc.com)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/technology/larry-summers-..., https://archive.ph/ASfq6
334 points | 377 comments
koolba 11/19/2025|
In related news, Harvard is also launching its own investigation into its former president Summers: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/19/harvard-opens-...
bn-l 11/20/2025||
I find it hard to believe that they’re only finding out now.
safety1st 11/20/2025|||
The thing to understand about Summers is that he is basically the guy that charted the course to where America is today.

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.

epistasis 11/20/2025||||
I don't think anybody knew the extent of relationships with Epstein that were revealed when 20k email messages were dumped onto the world.

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.

watwut 11/20/2025||
I mean, there are other harward people making very similar consultations with Epstein. It seems to be more of "influencial harward people support each other" situation.

Plus, there are harward people who complained about these harward people for years and claim to not be surprised.

FridgeSeal 11/20/2025|||
Better to be _seen_ to be doing something later, than to have it pointed out.
senderista 11/19/2025|||
OMG the correspondence described there is disgusting: Summers seeking advice from Epstein on how to turn a mentoring relationship into a romantic one.
pessimizer 11/19/2025|||
MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)

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?]

ternaryoperator 11/19/2025|||
> 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."

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...

hn_throwaway_99 11/20/2025||||
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.

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.

trts 11/20/2025|||
not sure where you are looking but Rasmussen polls have been showing Trump hemorrhaging support since June among his base. if you visit X this is where many of them converse, and they are quite openly unhappy with the admin lately
irjustin 11/20/2025||
I believe it has nothing to do with sexual offense and that the higher prices of goods is really affecting people.

So he's still immune the anything that's horrendous.

EasyMark 11/20/2025|||
I think most people are talking to the core 30-40% of his voters see him as messianic that will go down with the titanic no matter what
trts 11/20/2025|||
guess you can believe what you want but data shows the Epstein topic has been damaging his base support
shigawire 11/20/2025||
Some indicators suggest that, but we don't really know until the rubber meets the road.

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.

ipaddr 11/20/2025||||
MAGA will follow Trump off a bridge. The America First collective pushed for this and many of them have given up on Trump.
EasyMark 11/20/2025||
This is what I expect as well, the cultish members will never see him for what he is no matter what happens. I've seen similar sentiment toward dictators in other countries as well, especially if you talk to the older civilians who really bought into the system, even years after the dictator was overthrown.
t-3 11/20/2025|||
There has been a very public split between MTG and Trump in the past week or so over the Epstein issue. It has been causing a rift in the MAGA base for a while though, it seems to be coming to a head now though.
cosmicgadget 11/20/2025||||
> 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.

Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?

lo_zamoyski 11/19/2025||||
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.

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.

yahoozoo 11/19/2025|||
[flagged]
DonHopkins 11/21/2025|||
FYI: Your account has been shadow banned for repeated antisemitic posts, and you deserve it. So stop wasting your time trying to post. And don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
overfeed 11/20/2025||||
MAGA was pushing for it when they believed it was a liberal conspiracy, with the Clintons trafficking children and "harvesting their adrenochrome" (see Comet Pizza incident). Now MAGA luminaries are suggesting grown men abusing minors isn't that creepy if the victims are teenaged - so much for protecting the kids.
lo_zamoyski 11/20/2025||
"Hypocrisy is okay if we do it, because they did it first!"
DonHopkins 11/20/2025|||
Only because Trump told them to push it first. His problem is that he changed his mind.
catlover76 11/20/2025||
[dead]
mrcsharp 11/20/2025|||
Then you're in a bubble.
bilbo0s 11/20/2025||
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you both are in a bubble.

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.

shigawire 11/20/2025|||
The Dems have the progressive caucus primarying moderate candidates constantly. The GOP has Massey and Paul
rustystump 11/20/2025||||
Thank you!

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.

lo_zamoyski 11/20/2025|||
> you both are in a bubble.

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.

650REDHAIR 11/19/2025|||
Isn’t NYT complicit and sat on a lot of Epstein files before the 2016 election.
bilbo0s 11/20/2025||
Um..

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.

benzible 11/20/2025||
The one-time head of the most elite academic institution as well as the US Treasury is an insecure 12 year old boy at heart. Summers clearly saw Epstein as aspirational for his "success" with "women". But this isn't really new information about him. In 2005 he went in front of an audience including top women scientists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and essentially said the lack of women at the top of science was mostly about their lack of innate aptitude, not discrimination [1] (he gave multiple alternate "theories" but it was clear which one he actually believed). People immediately saw that for what it was: a powerful guy projecting his own hang-ups about women. That he's maintained his status over the last 20 years does not speak well of the US's most prestigious institutions.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript...

etc-hosts 11/20/2025||
A nice list of Summers' many crimes from over 10 years ago:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/why-larry-summers-sh...

addy34 11/20/2025||
Let's not forget this gem in a memo from Summers:

>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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo

snthpy 11/20/2025|||
Thank you for that tldr. Wow
7e 11/20/2025|||
What laws were broken here?
idiotsecant 11/20/2025|||
Parent post is being metaphorical. In this case you can read 'many crimes' as 'many incredibly, unbelievably stupid decisions'. Hope that helps
7e 11/20/2025||
No, the parent comment is just false and possibly libelous. Hope that helps.
etc-hosts 11/20/2025||
Any former resident of Soviet Union thinks Larry Summers is huge crime
amanaplanacanal 11/20/2025|||
Sounds more like incompetence.
alex1138 11/20/2025||
[flagged]
alex1138 11/20/2025||
[flagged]
Teever 11/19/2025||
There's an interesting list of criticisms about Larry Summers here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15320922

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?

GolfPopper 11/19/2025||
Telling people in power what they want to hear.

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.

Finnucane 11/19/2025|||
The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.
m463 11/19/2025|||
> how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?

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.

AlexandrB 11/19/2025|||
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?

I think ladder climbing is its own skill only loosely correlated with intelligence.

protocolture 11/19/2025|||
>It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?

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.

profsummergig 11/19/2025|||
Someone (maybe Charlie Munger) said that the presence of a woman he has lust for reduces a man's IQ by 20 points.

Seems anecdotally true.

lapcat 11/19/2025|||
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?

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.

octoberfranklin 11/19/2025|||
I know we're never going to fix this problem, but it's depressing how we seem to have made zero or negative progress on it.
lapcat 11/20/2025||
I wouldn't say we've made zero progress. There are always ups and downs, temporary wins and losses, but I think that over the long term, there's more skepticism and scrutiny now than in the past.
bamboozled 11/19/2025|||
I think this is a side effect of having "paid law enforcement", it's not that the cops are bad, but their bosses are. The people who fund the law enforcement are ultimately at the mercy of the "rich and powerful" in some way or another, so basically people of a certain status get a pass.

It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.

octoberfranklin 11/19/2025|||
It used to be that any citizen could approach a grand jury and allege a crime. The purpose of the grand jury was to decide if tax dollars should be spent to hire a prosecutor for that (single) case.

"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.

lupire 11/20/2025|||
Why pays cops and orders then to pick fights with innocent people
FireBeyond 11/19/2025|||
> 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?

"Funnily", if you read Epstein's contributions to a lot of his emails, he also gives off that same vibe.

jonny_eh 11/19/2025||
Don't get me started on Trump
bamboozled 11/19/2025|||
They know they above the law from the minute that reach a certain level of status, they don't care about the emails and if people see them, they know there will be next to zero repercussions for them.
JKCalhoun 11/19/2025|||
What do you mean? I assumed he was cozied up to by the likes of Epstein because he had already ascended the ladder.

I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things.

Teever 11/19/2025||
According to wikipedia:

> 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...

AlexandrB 11/20/2025|||
Reminds me of the pictures[1] of Stephen Hawking on Epsten's island. Depressing stuff.

[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking/113...

edbaskerville 11/19/2025|||
> 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?

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.)

fakedang 11/19/2025||
On what basis do you say that Epstein was pretty talented at finance? This guy was a math teacher with no actual degree. The only reason he got his gig in finance was by schmoozing up the dad of one of his students, who was CEO of Bear Stearns.

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).

turbonegrofa 11/19/2025||
[dead]
add-sub-mul-div 11/19/2025||
He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated.
benhill70 11/19/2025|||
He just supported the status quo. Look how much money he lost during the 2008 crisis.

Summers is just weather vane for current economic thinking. He's not a particularly brilliant at anything.

Finnucane 11/19/2025||||
When has he been right about economics?
antonvs 11/20/2025|||
Sounds like you might have bought into some baseless PR.
frankest 11/19/2025||
The big question here is are they involved with Epstein because they are in power, or did they get power because they had Epstein pull in favors for them. From the emails he seems like the big spider in a spider web. Both parties and so many people in power referred to him for critical problems, pulling strings in critical places (Bannon on behalf of Trump was getting his advice on how to discredit Kavanaugh opponents and Epstein obliged with medical information on one of the opponents to bring up at a hearing). Beyond Clinton, Obama’s attorney is mentioned a bunch as well. I’m sure the democrats had plenty of favors in too.

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.

sporkland 11/28/2025||
Hearing about Richard Nixon at the Bohemian Grove gave me similar vibes.
UniverseHacker 11/20/2025|||
It is reassuring that I am not the only one that sees this. These emails reveal a much bigger conspiracy than just the sex trafficking- that was just an in house blackmail material generator for him that he was using to control powerful people around the world. The emails also suggest he was selling blackmail material on US politicians to foreign adversaries.
red-iron-pine 11/20/2025||
I mean that's the point -- blackmail powerful and influential people to do his bidding.

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.

dogleash 11/20/2025||
Remember when it used to be a conspiracy theory to say that the elites and politicians were all part of one big Eyes Wide Shut cult?

And now all their only remaining defense is "our masks don't even look like that."

alex1138 11/19/2025||
"Winklevoss twins are assholes [but I have nothing substantive to say against their claim of product theft]" - LS
squillion 11/19/2025||
Let's not forget that time he advocated for dumping toxic waste in poor countries.

"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."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo

llbbdd 11/19/2025||
I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.
dragonwriter 11/20/2025|||
> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.

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.

throwthrowrow 11/19/2025||||
I read the memo. Maybe just me, but I don't see any indication that it was tongue in cheek.
strken 11/20/2025|||
I burst out laughing when I read the following excerpts, one after the other:

> 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.

llbbdd 11/20/2025||
I appreciate that I'm not the only person here seeing this and I think the last part of your comment is what some people are missing here. He can be a misogynist pedophile and still make funny jokes sometimes and it's weirdly reductive to pretend otherwise.
randycupertino 11/20/2025||
I thought his emails to Esptein asking for dating advice about how to "get horizontal" with the "yellow peril" were particularly cringe. “Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor” ... poor guy!

https://archive.ph/hSc5Z

“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...

llbbdd 11/20/2025||
Probably, I don't make a habit of reading this kind of thing. In any case I'm not sure what this has to do with the rest of the thread.
llbbdd 11/20/2025|||
You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.
dragonwriter 11/20/2025||
> You're covered in the "cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work" part of my comment. If this memo were published verbatim under an Onion header maybe it would read clearer to more people.

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.

UniverseHacker 11/20/2025||||
That’s what he claimed it is, but I don’t buy it. I’m a big fan of satire and deadpan humor, and that’s just not what this is- the tone is serious, and he put a lot of thought in how to argue the point. Monsters exist, and this guy is one.
llbbdd 11/20/2025|||
If you project the other things you know about this guy to color everything he did, sure. Reading it made the tone obvious, well before I got to his defense in the wiki article. The memo on its own is painfully obviously a joke but I'm really not surprised that the audience of HN has difficulty interpreting tone.
watwut 11/20/2025|||
The consistent mistake people did last years, including those on HN was to pretend to themselves that odious people are "just joking" and "totally not serious". Again and again. Starting with 4chan and 8chan that were just a trolls and no one was ever nazi, until nazi became normalized, the top government and leadership of a major party.

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.

UniverseHacker 11/20/2025|||
We disagree about the tone, but that aside- a person capable of writing this essay as a dry satire would need to possess a level of empathy and introspection that the rest of his life personally and professionally demonstrates that he does not. He’s not Voltaire or Johnathan Swift, he’s just a sociopath that tried to play it off as a joke when he got in trouble.

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.

llbbdd 11/20/2025||
> would need

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.

petesergeant 11/20/2025|||
> but I don’t buy it

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.

UniverseHacker 11/20/2025||
Yes, he was “joking”- he is what the Internet calls a “Schrödinger's dbag,” it was only a joke if people don’t agree, but if they do it’s what he really believes- a cowardly way of communicating. In the context of his career, his actual beliefs are along the lines of the essay.
erikpukinskis 11/19/2025||||
What’s the joke?
llbbdd 11/20/2025||
See elsewhere where I've quoted parts of it in this thread but if you read "Actually, I don't think Africa is polluted enough!" and take the person saying it seriously instead of reading it as a joke, then you might need to touch grass.
zeven7 11/20/2025||
I think you missed the joke. The thing that was funny about it to him when he said it was he knew it was a natural extension of his public position, yes an extreme version of it, but he knew it was also true and’s logical and it was funny to get away with saying it behind closed doors. An honest person would recognized the truth behind the joke and change the position that it stemmed from because they cared about making the world better. The fact that he recognized he was making the world worse AND continued in that path is what is so blatantly evil and revealing about this memo.

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.

stinkbeetle 11/20/2025||||
And yet that's exactly what he and his ilk have been doing ever since western countries began to demand workers' rights and environmental protections.
llbbdd 11/20/2025||
I know it's boring but I always want sources to go with stuff like this. What did he do?
stinkbeetle 11/20/2025||
Chief Economist of the World Bank and top level bureaucrat in the Clinton administration? He and his buddies were tip of the spear doing an end-run around hard-won labor, environment, and human rights laws and permitting corporations to outsource their poisoning and exploitation. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bill-clintons-true-legacy_b_1...

Just because he claimed to have been sarcastic about something, doesn't mean he is not also guilty of it.

squillion 11/19/2025||||
I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.
UniverseHacker 11/20/2025|||
If it had been tongue in cheek or satire, that would suggest he also had enough capacity for introspection and empathy to see what is wrong with it. Looking at both his career and personal life suggests that he does not.
llbbdd 11/20/2025||||
I mean this is presumably why it wasn't a publicly published memo or policy recommendation. If structural adjustment and economy management is part your job, you might have some steam to let off about it in private, and plenty of draft ideas and documents that need refinement. It does become a mistake when it's made public, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a joke originally.
terminalshort 11/20/2025|||
Stiglitz is a worthless clown who was actually dumb enough to think Venezuela had good economic policy.
epistasis 11/20/2025||||
Summers very often does this sort of earnest "kidding on the square" and he's quite proud of it, which was revealed extensively in the Epstein emails. Summers earnestly believes that the villain has very good reasons to tear down the orphanage, and will defend them in whatever way he can in polite society.
DonHopkins 11/20/2025||||
It was tongue-in-cheek, but the cheek belonged to an underaged girl.
llbbdd 11/20/2025||
And instead this will go unappreciated for how gruesome it is if we're meant to take any of the above accusations seriously, but hey - he's been here for at least 11 years, one of ours, right?
sapphicsnail 11/19/2025|||
He was literally part of a ring of rich and powerful pedophiles who trafficked underage women.
llbbdd 11/19/2025||
Evil people can make jokes too, and mimicking the formal tone of an official document is a bit as old as time.
nextaccountic 11/20/2025|||
Does the following sounds like a joke to you? I mean, does passages like "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" seem a joke?

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.
triceratops 11/20/2025|||
> does passages like "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" seem a joke?

> 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.

petesergeant 11/20/2025||||
> Does the following sounds like a joke to you?

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.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

llbbdd 11/20/2025||||
The whole thing is the punchline. If you're missing something, read strken's response elsewhere in this thread, because he put it in a better way than I have anywhere else here - none of it is serious, and if you read it seriously, you are the other punchline:

> argumentum ad absurdum indictment of the way the "cost" of pollution is calculated.

dragonwriter 11/20/2025||||
It's not a joke. He didn't even say it was a joke. He said (as quoted on the Wikipedia page for the memo!) that it was “a comment on a research paper that was being prepared by part of my staff at the World Bank” and that it “sought to clarify the strict economic logic by using some rather inflammatory language”.

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.

UniverseHacker 11/20/2025|||
It seems dead serious to me, and is consistent with everything else we know about him.
jonny_eh 11/19/2025||||
I'm not really in a charitable mood with this guy right now.
SequoiaHope 11/20/2025|||
I’m with you. Stuff that seems cartoonish to regular people does often seem to be serious from him.
llbbdd 11/20/2025||
> Does often seem to be serious

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.

SequoiaHope 11/21/2025||
Yeah fair points.
llbbdd 11/20/2025||||
I don't think it requires being charitable to acknowledge nuance.
naIak 11/19/2025|||
"I know I'm wrong, but still I have to double down on this to save face"
Supermancho 11/20/2025||
That wasn't the implication.
sapphicsnail 11/19/2025|||
It's certainly a possibility but I also wouldn't put it past him to advocate for something that evil.
llbbdd 11/20/2025||
Sure but in the most polite way, that's almost saying nothing at all. I just think it kneecaps any real criticism and real issues associated with this guy to go "okay that might be a joke, but it probably isn't because <legitimate evil reason>". Though I guess it encroaches on the definition of what a joke is and if it's defined by intent. If he meant it as one, but nobody took it as one, is it?
Rzor 11/20/2025||
My brother in Christ, you keep tumbling yourself to see nuance where there is none. The guy is a piece of shit. Why such magnanimous effort? I suggest you take some time off.
llbbdd 11/20/2025||
I've mostly repeated the same perspective to people on this thread who would rather virtue signal than read what I've already written, and what I'm saying is not hard to wrap your head around unless you're the type of person to believe in caricatures as I've described above. I think they may need some time off from news, the internet, etc, if anyone.
hyperman1 11/19/2025|||
Wow. That text is wild! Another excerpt:

  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.
BurningFrog 11/19/2025|||
Being familiar with economist jargon, this looks like a joke.
MrDarcy 11/20/2025|||
The joke is that it looks like a joke but isn’t in the same way a sociopath will explain in detail exactly how they’re going to fuck you before they do knowing you won’t believe them because it’s all a joke in a joke that isn’t real.
cindyllm 11/20/2025||
[dead]
Loughla 11/20/2025|||
So it's okay for people who have the power and connections to actually impact the world in the horrible ways they're "joking"about to make jokes about doing just that?

I don't think it is. What's the old saying? There's a grain of truth in every joke.

datatrashfire 11/19/2025||||
Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.
defrost 11/19/2025|||
A good many people I know and have known for 60+ years would, do, and yearn for civilisation as you know it to back the f off and get its foot from their neck.

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.

Gud 11/20/2025||
They have not lived without society not using u those things though, unless they live in Siberia or something.
defrost 11/20/2025||
Contrary to your thoughts on the matter the Pintupi Nine and their relatives the Richter family spring to mind as the most extreme examples.

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.

ben_w 11/19/2025||||
That's the great thing about "invention", there are other ways to 0 pollution besides historic ones.

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.

datatrashfire 11/20/2025||
Electrifying the economy is not a path to 0 pollution.
ben_w 11/20/2025||
Electrification is a necessary but not sufficient step to zero pollution.

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.

estimator7292 11/19/2025|||
Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.

And if you do still want to sympathize with such, maybe examine that motivation for like three seconds.

Dracophoenix 11/19/2025|||
"Bad" people can still have good ideas or well-thought arguments. It happens often enough to have become became a clichéd meme.

https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-kno...

JuniperMesos 11/20/2025||||
> Hey, you probably don't want to sympathize with a guy that everyone around you thinks is irredeemably evil.

> 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"

datatrashfire 11/20/2025|||
No sympathy for Larry here! Just the point that development is going to coincide with some level of increased pollution. Even an electrified economy with 0 carbon emissions is going to be ecologically devastating after all the mountain top removal mining has gathered the materials to make it possible.
recursive 11/19/2025|||
The /s was supposed to be implied.
rhcom2 11/19/2025|||
And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.
jonny_eh 11/19/2025|||
Jonathan Swift was a writer and known satirist with publicly known views that were opposite to the absurdist views expressed in his famous satire.
palmotea 11/19/2025|||
> And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.

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.

rhcom2 11/19/2025|||
Also known as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
UniverseHacker 11/20/2025||||
> 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

mwcremer 11/19/2025|||
Sorry, did you mean "Summers unironically wrote" or "capitalist economist types unironically believe" ?
quuxplusone 11/20/2025||
Or, for that matter, "I unironically believe"? ;)

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."

shkkmo 11/19/2025|||
To me that memo is pretty clearly a sacarstic version of reductio ad absurdum.
abigail95 11/19/2025|||
This is dumber than "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke.
29athrowaway 11/19/2025|||
That memo redefines himself as toxic waste.
burkaman 11/19/2025||
He also famously gave a speech declaring that one of the reasons women were underrepresented in science and engineering faculty positions was "issues of intrinsic aptitude". - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/science-jan-june05-summ...

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..."

tptacek 11/19/2025|||
Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.
ben_w 11/19/2025||
I remember hearing about the variance thing ages ago. Back when I was young enough and naïve enough to trust statements said in official voices without critically assessing them.

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?

tptacek 11/19/2025||
I'm not touching the variability thing with a 10 foot pole except to say that the further out on each extreme of the IQ "scale" you go the less reliable the scores are. The whole idea of using IQ as a ranking of ability rather than a diagnostic tools is bogus. I do think it's clear now though that Summers was simply being a misogynist (you lose the presumption of good faith when you disclose that you'd been lying all along.)
ben_w 11/19/2025||
Oh indeed, on all counts. I'd just like to know if it was purely his own BS, or the reproducibility crisis.

(I don't know why I'd like to know, thinking about it at a meta level…)

watwut 11/19/2025|||
I remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking.

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.

johnwheeler 11/19/2025||
I saw the email correspondence between him and Epstein. The sense that I got is he's pursuing some young girl half his age. And he actually thinks that she is attracted to him. Powerful, ugly men are so stupid sometimes.
JuniperMesos 11/20/2025||
Men who don't pursue women don't get laid. This is an extremely important gendered asymmetry in heterosexual dating. Most men aren't attractive to most women, and if you want to be successful at dating as a heterosexual man you have to have to display a certain amount of boldness in pursuing women. Maybe the girl in question really does find Larry Summers old and ugly and wants nothing to do with him, but in general men who assume this is the case and don't even try, or who heed the words of outsiders that it is stupid to think that a girl might be attracted to you, are putting themselves at a systematic disadvantage in dating.
watwut 11/20/2025|||
It was woman who was presenting her scientific work. Just to clarify the situation. I dont think these events are supposed to be about getting laid.

It was not the "fair play in bar" kind of situation at all.

johnwheeler 11/20/2025|||
Fully aware of the evolutionary forces that make men act stupid and think women more attractive than them want to jump their bones.

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.

pton_xd 11/19/2025|||
That's a charitable take. It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship. Also the woman's dad is the founding president of some major Chinese bank (AIIB) that he was cozying up to.

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.

perihelions 11/19/2025|||
> "It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship"

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...

simianwords 11/19/2025|||
[flagged]
runako 11/19/2025|||
He consulted with the most notorious child sex trafficker of modern times on his plan to use the power of his position to coerce a young woman into sex.

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.

jcranmer 11/19/2025||||
"Hi, would you like to sleep with me? If you say no, I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure you're unable to get a job in the field you want to pursue." And to be clear here, for most of these sex pests, that is not an idle threat.

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.

foobarian 11/19/2025||||
Maybe not a bad thing for another reason: assuming most powerful men are up to these kinds of shenanigans, this filters out for those who are not clever enough to keep it under wraps. Sounds like a useful job skill for the positions these kinds of people might need to handle.
KerrAvon 11/19/2025||
Powerful men/women don't have to be sexually or in other ways abusive to subordinates. They really don't. Most of them, in fact, don't. You certainly hear about the ones who do, for a reason.
foobarian 11/19/2025||
I hope so. I'm just having a particularly cynical day.
giraffe_lady 11/19/2025||||
When you got up this morning did you know that this is the fight you would be taking up today? It's not too late man just delete it and go back to bed, try a fresh start.
simianwords 11/19/2025||
What specific part of what Larry said in the emails was so egregious that he needed to resign? What’s wrong in simply asking people advice to sleep around?
piva00 11/19/2025||
Simply asking, at that point, a well known human trafficker for advice on how to leverage his power to sleep around.

You have no issue with that?

pinnochio 11/19/2025||
This dude is an AI goon. There's a lot he doesn't have an issue with!
simianwords 11/19/2025||
what do you mean?
KerrAvon 11/19/2025|||
Nope. Read the emails before discussing, please.
simianwords 11/19/2025||
I read the relevant parts. What was so bad?
delusional 11/19/2025|||
Reading about the case, you get the sense that this is the general disposition from these abusers. They know what they're doing is wrong, and they understand the power imbalance, but they sort of excuse it and justify it by softly believing that the women actually want them. That they are actually sexy. And that they are helping the women, somehow.

It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.

lupire 11/20/2025||
She was attracted to his power, which is why she spent time with him. Don't pretend she was an innocent protege. She was a nepo child playing the same game of stays climbing.
tw1984 11/20/2025||
According to nypost news that Larry Summers sought guidance on how to get "horizontal" with Keyu Jin in emails to Jeffrey Epstein.
drivingmenuts 11/19/2025|
It’s interesting that only now he is stepping back now that he’s been found out. It demonstrates that it’s not about ethics or morals, but about publicity and damage control.
zem 11/19/2025||
it's the good old eleventh commandment, "thou shalt not get caught"
tbrownaw 11/20/2025|||
How do we know that whoever asked him to step down already privately knew?
egillie 11/19/2025|||
most of what we know today we knew years ago, too
bamboozled 11/19/2025|||
The tax paying class of the world just have to watch all this horseshit go on, watch the institutions and the law enforcement agencies protect these people with our hard earned money, meanwhile if we break a single law, there are consequences for us, sometimes massive.

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?

malfist 11/20/2025|||
It's a big club, and we ain't in it.
JKCalhoun 11/20/2025||
(I know you're referencing Carlin, but) a big club it is not. You might even say it's just the "top 1%" or even less.
auggierose 11/20/2025||
Top 0.1% is still a VERY big club, just in the US > 300.000.
TylerE 11/20/2025||
This is the 0.1% of the 0.1%
vkou 11/19/2025||||
> 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?

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.

Loughla 11/20/2025|||
The smart ones are building bunkers to escape the hell that the US will become when the civil war actually starts. They're not hoping to survive the apocalypse, they're just hoping to ride out the 20 or 30 years of war and return as actual Lords for the serfs that are left after we kill each other.
nebula8804 11/20/2025||
Yes I know of someone who willingly gave up their US citizenship for tax reasons but has EU, Israeli, and a bunch of other citizenships. They get to live a good life in the Netherlands + traveling the world while the US tears itself apart and then when it is time to retire in 30-40 years, the country will be ripe of the picking..they will buy their citizenship back through one of the multiple buy your way into the US visa programs...and retire in Montana.
blendo 11/20/2025|||
And the US never revolted against our domestic aristocracy, as they never revolted against our clergy.

Wonder how it would have turned out if the French revolution happened before the American Revolution? What could we have learned from them?

standardUser 11/19/2025||||
By most metrics, it's almost always been worse. But that doesn't make the modern era suck any less.
wahnfrieden 11/20/2025|||
Not according to the metrics proposed by Graeber & Wengrow in the last chapter of Dawn of Everything

> 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...

colechristensen 11/20/2025||
Eh, there's a tremendous amount of projecting a particular modern viewpoint onto the past in that work. It's a bit nonsense.
JKCalhoun 11/20/2025||
Admittedly, I only read a brief review of the book, but it was suggesting the opposite.

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.

hnthrowaway0328 11/20/2025|||
Yeah I agree with that. And I'd argue that it is still the same nowadays. People at the top probably knows clearly which interest group they are in, and which group they can rally up, and which ones they need to fight to the death -- even if they all belong to the same nationality -- and I'm not surprised if local interest groups ally with "foreign" interest groups to fight another local interest group. It is blurred.
colechristensen 11/20/2025|||
That book is "rethinking" history but that rethinking curiously fits extremely well with a particular modern narrative. Some people eat it up. But separate a few decades in the future and it will seem like an extremely fad-driven interpretation of things.
wahnfrieden 11/20/2025||
The book makes a point of how historical analysis was already fit extremely well into particular contemporary fad narratives of the time. It does as much deconstruction of that (and of the idea that those contemporary fads were timeless elements of human nature) as it does construction of new ones. The former is a very interesting part of the book you’re not addressing. I don't know what you add to this conversation with such breezy dismissal...
stinkbeetle 11/19/2025|||
And would most of those metrics you allude to happen to have been brought to us by institutions like Harvard, or the US Treasury Department?
standardUser 11/20/2025|||
I'm talking about disease prevention, maternal mortality, infant mortality, access to clean water, anesthetic(!!) and access to things like reading glasses and hearing aids and oh, I don't know, refrigeration.

What does your precious Harvard and US Treasury Department have to say about that?

JKCalhoun 11/20/2025||
I think the topic though was corrupt abuses of power, lack of justice or accountability for the wealthy—those kinds of things.
noduerme 11/20/2025||||
Taking a longer view of history...

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.

Maxatar 11/20/2025|||
Brought to you by Steven Pinker, another one of Epstein's associates.
hermitcrab 11/19/2025|||
"The big thieves hang the little thieves"
naIak 11/19/2025||
I understand you want to highlight this, but you don’t have to begin your sentence with "It's interesting that..." because this is not interesting or novel in the slightest.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 11/19/2025|||
You are entitled to your opinion and they theirs.
JKCalhoun 11/20/2025||||
I assume that someone begining a sentence that way is implying "It is interesting to me that…" and I cut them some slack.
drivingmenuts 11/20/2025|||
It's interesting to me because how the hell did he think this was going to end? "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work in the court of public opinion. So, if one was even peripherally associated with Epstein, it would seem like that would be a hell of a liability.

On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?

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