This one came from the U.S. House of Representatives, for some reason:
I’m not sure who’s this “jeffrey E.” person is . . . they seem to be talking about a plumber named Mnuchin–maybe there are some home renovations being done somewhere. But I have heard of Larry Summers! He’s a renowned economist who used to run a well-known East Coast educational institution.
I’m not sure why he was “slathering to saudis” . . . maybe he needed the money?
Here’s a funny thing, though. Summers says he “observed that half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”
Interesting observation, Larry! But I was curious–are women really more than 51 percent of the population of the world? I looked it up and found this:
The number of men and women in the world is roughly equal, though men hold a slight lead with 102 men for 100 women (in 2020). More precisely, out of 1,000 people, 504 are men (50.4%) and 496 are women (49.6%).
OK, this in’t the first time that a celebrated economist has got tangled with demographic data.
And, to be fair, 49.6% isn’t that far from 51%. It’s just funny . . . it would’ve been so easy for him to say that the two sexes have approximately the same numbers, but he had to open his big mouth and get it wrong.
In the United States there are more women than men–Wikipedia points to a U.S. Census document saying that in 2020 there were 164,218,174 men and 167,308,759–that’s 50.5% women. Not quite “more than 51%” but closer.
It’s kind of funny that Summers would confuse U.S. and global demographics, but I guess it makes sense. It’s not like he was ever the chief economist of any worldwide financial organization, right?
Also this bit:
I dunno, maybe this woman just couldn’t respect a guy who was so overconfident about global demographics. The story is kind of funny because Summers had earlier tapped the financier for $500,000 for a project for his wife.
I don’t think it helped Summers that he would get plaudits for a talking about commonplace idea in macroeconomics. Summers and the other people involved in these emails seem to have been living in a rarefied world in which banal and often inaccurate observations were being treated like pearls of wisdom. And they were close enough to the guys with money that they could be paid for these pearls in cold hard cash.
I can forgive a lot of things. But getting the statistics wrong, that really bothers me.
P.S. In the email above, Summers gives a twitter handle. I was curious so I went to check and, yeah, he’s still tweeting. He has a blue check mark and 375.4K followers! Here’s his most recent post:
A few interesting things here:
1. He’s suggesting to use alumni pressure to intimidate an independent school newspaper. That doesn’t sound so cool to me, whatever your political issues are with how the news is being presented.
2. I could see how Summers would want to attack the Crimson, given that they’ve run news articles about his close relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
3. Given everything else going on here, it’s interesting to see where Summers draws the line at “moral bankruptcy.” I guess that Epstein was OK because he didn’t support the BDS movement?
I thought the notable thing about the demographic statement is the slur on women (half the IQ but more than half the people). Another glowing remark from Summers. Then the comment on admission to Harvard vs employment subsequent to abuse or denigration of women – another feather for his cap. I have never cared much about the Epstein files vis a vis Trump, but I now want to see them all. I think the entire brotherhood surrounding Epstein displays some of the worst male traits around. For the record, the Trump bombshells seem taken out of context to me – I fully believe that he was upset with Epstein “stealing” his girls, so while it might mean he was not involved with the Epstein crimes (at least from that snippet), it is hardly a glowing personality recommendation.
Dale:
Yeah, my first reaction to the Summers thing, before noticing that he got the proportion of women wrong, was that he was trying to cleverly say that he thought women were less intelligent than men on average.
This was jarring, given that his whole shtick was that supposedly he’d been unfairly maligned–the claim was that he’d never said that women were less intelligent than men on average; rather, he’d said only that men had higher variance than women.
It would be tempting here to simply label Summers as a sexist, but I don’t know. I’m skeptical that Summers really thinks that women are less intelligent than men on average. Yes, he said that to his buddy Epstein, but I’m thinking that he only said that because he thought that’s what Epstein wanted to hear, because he wanted to butter up Epstein and get more money from him. After all, in that very email, Summers boasts that he told the Saudis things he didn’t really believe, presumably to get money from them.
Summers is a big fan of telling hard truths to feminists and to the left wing of the Democratic party, which makes sense because feminists and the left wing of the Democratic party aren’t about to give him any money. Epstein and the Saudis, though, they were paying real money, and, for them, Summers was willing to flatter and tell them what they wanted to hear.
Paradoxically, it seems that the best way to get sincere opinions from Summers is to not pay him. That’s an interesting economics example, actually!
“I’m skeptical that Summers really thinks that women are less intelligent than men on average. ”
Well, that’s the official right-wing apologia for his 2005 foot-in-mouth travesty. In 2005 he definately thought that there were fewer _very smart_ women than _very smart_ men.
https://www.swarthmore.edu/bulletin/archive/wp/january-2009_what-larry-summers-said-and-didnt-say.html
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript-president-summers-remarks-at/
(Aside: a favorite rant of mine is that “average” is often the wrong thing (and often used to lie, or at least sleaze)). In Japan, the _average_ income has been going up steadily, despite the early 1990s economic collapse. See, everythings fine here, right? Wrong. The _median_ income has been falling steadily for the last 30 or more years. Most of the population is worse off now than that the corresponding group was in 1995.)
I was hoping Biden would release all the Epstein files/data, and we’d see what sleazes are actually out there. But I guess Biden wasn’t willing to throw Summers and Clinton under the bus.
David:
See the second paragraph of my above comment, which directly addresses this point. The official apologia for Summers’s 2005 statement was that Summers was talking about the variance of the distributions of IQ for men, compared to women, but that he was not making any claim about the mean.
But, yeah, there was lots of stupid flying around after that speech. For example, your first link has this quote: “‘The national debate on the issue … has so far missed the central point: scientists are made, not born,’ wrote economists Michael Cox and Richard Alm in The New York Times, at the height of the Summers brouhaha.” So stupid! I guess it was too complicated for these economists to accept the idea that scientists are both “born” and “made.” Why does it have to be one or the other?? For a statistical perspective on stupid dichotomization, see page 962 of this article.
Unfortunate typo here (“more” is backwards):
> In the United States there are more men than women–Wikipedia points to a U.S. Census document saying that in 2020 there were 164,218,174 men and 167,308,759–that’s 50.5% women
Fixed; thanks.
I wonder if Larry’s wife has seen these emails.
Wondering:
I guess Larry could tell her that he was only commenting about women’s IQ on average, not in her particular case! Or maybe he hopes that alumni trustees will investigate and take any necessary steps lest a problematic situation deteriorate further.
I was referring to the email in the second screenshot, where he appears to be sharing his dating woes with Epstein.
I have no idea what their marriage is like! But it’s funny in the email when Summers writes, “I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.”
That’s such a stereotypically “economist” way of thinking:
1. He’s so tight about giving a gift. The guy’s filthy rich–what’s he so worried about!
2. He’s framing it as a competition. He’s having an affair, right? That’s supposed to be fun. Leave it to an economist to take an activity that’s supposed to be about mutual pleasure and turn it into a competition.
3. He only wants to give a gift if it brings him “benefits.” Dude. If you only give a gift if it gives you benefits, it’s not a gift, it’s a payment.
Do those statistics for “women” include nonadult girls?
Norm;
Believe it or not, I’d thought about this issue when writing the above post. If you look up how many men and women are in the world, or in the U.S., then you get the statistics for the entire population. Given that IQ is regularly measured for children as well as adults, I thought it made sense to include the entire population.
On the other hand, given that this is a conversation with Jeffrey Epstein, it’s possible that, by “women,” Summers was referring exclusively to women between the ages of 14 and 22.
Once you put age into the equation everything gets more complicated. For example, the very old are much more likely to be women and much more likely to have dementia, so that will affect the relative average IQs of men and women. But I doubt that’s what Summers was referring to when he was talking about average IQ.
If you want to know the percentage of men and women at any age, the U.N. has estimates here.
Some numbers are here. I clicked through to get the file, “Sex Ratio by Select Age Groups.” Scroll down to 2020, and the sex ratio for the population is given at 101.3 (thus, the percentage of women in the entire population is 100/201.3 = 49.7%) and if you just look at ages 16 and up, it’s 99.5, which corresponds to a female percentage of 100/199.5 = 50.1%).
To provide some context: I am European, early forties, and a non-native English speaker but I read (and write) a lot in English.
I found these snippets really surprising:
(1) Is it normal to write emails (or other types of messages) that way? These are borderline unreadable (I am pretty sure I am missing a lot). Even my teenage daughter text messages to friends are easier to read.
– The sentences aren’t really sentences.
– Is it normal to use i instead of I? We got reprimanded by our teacher when would do this.
– These sentences seem to have nearly no connection to eachother. Not even a stream of consciousness, rather disparate recordings of consciousness.
– It seems like there is an intent to be obscure.
(2) I also mail friends unpolished emails with some completely mundane observations, but these seems to be borderline retarded. Wasn’t Summers some kind of prodigy?
(3) My youngest, when telling a story, also tells it by stating who said what. She is in elementary school. But these folks are on the top of their profession ?
I am not intending to be pendantic. I am sure I write plenty of typo’s to my friends (or here) and I am also sure my writing is mundane. But even memes and stuff written online by teenagers seem more meaningful and better written. If you would’ve posted this on April 1, I would have assumed you’re trying to trick your audience.
Louis:
1. Lower-case email was a big thing in the early 2000s, when people started spending a lot more time on email and didn’t want to stress their hands. I was doing lower-case emails back then too, and Summers is not far from my age. So I think that’s a generational thing. Similarly for the stream-of-consciousness thing: I’m guessing that Epstein and Summers just got into the habit of writing email in that sort of way and never stopped.
Regarding the intent to be obscure, sure: these guys knew they were breaking the law and violating ethical rules in various ways, and I guess it amused them to play these sorts of spy games where they would write things indirectly.
2. Summers was supposed to be some sort of prodigy, but, from the stuff I’ve read, he doesn’t seem to be so impressive to me. I think he was just working in an academic field with low standards. Also I expect he was a very good student back in the day, and that got him this reputation for brilliance. Once you have that reputation, it doesn’t take much to maintain it. Even the most trivial observations are taken to be pearls of wisdom.
3. I guess that Summers was at the tops of his profession, whatever it was, but he’d reached the pleasant stage of his career where he was being paid big bucks for doing nothing. In any case, his public writings were more coherent than his emails, which is fine. Not everybody thinks in coherent sentences all the time.
> it would’ve been so easy for him to say that the two sexes have approximately the same numbers
That wouldn’t work as a punchline, maybe it would’ve been easy but it wouldn’t have made any sense.
> In the United States there are more women than men […]
The UN (World Population Prospects 2024) says there are more men than women in the US. I have no idea if they use different definitions or if counting people is really so difficult. In any case, it was more than 51% women from the sixties to the eighties.
> It’s kind of funny that Summers would confuse U.S. and global demographics
It doesn’t need to be a confusion involving the US – there are more women than men in the majority of developed countries. From the UN data it seems that if we consider the OECD ex-US population the share of women has remained in the 50.85% – 50.90% range for decades.
Carlos:
It’s some confusion, because he explicitly wrote, “In world.” My guess is that Summers vaguely remembered that there were more women than men in the United States and then didn’t think it through beyond that. As is so often the case, the real problem is not “not knowing,” it’s “not knowing that you don’t know.” And it’s very much on-point for Summers to just think he knows everything.
I didn’t suggest that it was not a confusion. I said that it doesn’t need to be a confusion ___involving___the___US___. (It’s enough to exclude “just” China and India, for example, and in the rest of the world there are more women than men.) Maybe he was thinking of the US, maybe he was thinking of developed countries. And maybe if he knew that the exchange would be public he would have been more careful with the statistical facts he presented when making jokes.