The principle, “God is in every leaf of every tree,” doesn’t just apply to statistics. It also applies to literature. With close reading, we can find unexpected depths in almost any text. See earlier blog discussions of close reading:
Jun 2025: Dan Sinykin on close reading in literature, and me on close reading in statistics
Dec 2024: Close Reading Archive
Aug 2024: Close reading in literary criticism and statistical analysis
Close reading from snippets of the Summers archive
Consider the recent release of emails between retired economist Larry Summers and deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein. We discussed some of this yesterday; here I want to go step by step through all we can learn just from a careful reading of these short documents.
It’s stunning to me how effective this strategy of close reading can be.
First, the two emails and his most recent twitter post:
Next, the results of the close reading:
1. “Softbank deputy guy i liked.” Softbank has been involved in international financial scandals. No surprise that Summers liked someone from Softbank, given that Summers was good friends with financial fraudster Andrei Shleifer.
2. “Lots of slathering to saudis. I yipped about inclusion.” We’ll get back to this one. The relevant point here, in context, is that Summers will lay it on thick, in this case I think he’s saying that he told the Saudis empty platitudes because he thought it was what they wanted to hear. Since it was Saudis, I’m guessing he was doing it for the money.
3. The women’s IQ thing. He seems to be saying that he believes women are less intelligent than men on average, which is 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.
4. Larry doesn’t know demographics! He says that women are more than 51% of the world’s population, but they’re actually only 49.6%. Not a big difference, but it entirely changes the meaning of his IQ joke. OK, lots of people aren’t up on world demographics. What makes Larry special here is that he thinks he knows something that he doesn’t know. In short, he’s unaware of the range of his own ignorance.
5. “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:
(a) He’s so tight about giving a gift. The guy’s filthy rich–what’s he so worried about?
(b) 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.
(c) 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.
6. “The moral bankruptcy that led the Crimson to endorse BDS . . .” Revealing to see where Summers draws the line. Getting dating advice from a convicted sex offender is no big deal. But a student newspaper taking a position on foreign policy that is different from that taken by Larry Summers, that’s moral bankruptcy.
7. “I do hope alumni trustees will investigate and take any necessary steps lest a problematic situation deteriorate further.” Kind of stunning to see a former university president suggest to use alumni pressure to intimidate an independent school newspaper. Yeah, I know, I know, college administrations lean on school newspapers all the time, but usually they have the discretion to try to do it behind the scenes. What’s noteworthy here is not so much that Summers has this belief that student journalists can be bossed around in this way, but that he thinks this belief is acceptable enough that he would just tweet it out to his 375,000 followers.
OK, the above are the things we’ve learned directly from the close readings. Lots more there than the immediate observation that Larry Summers is a creep who was pals with a convicted sex offender.
But we can do more. Now that we’ve drawn all this out from the document, we can put some of the pieces together. No, not the sordid details of who-did-what on that Caribbean island. I’m thinking about the bigger picture, of relations among the rich and powerful.
Let’s get back to point 3, Larry’s fumbled attempt to cleverly say that he thought women were less intelligent than men on average.
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.
So this is getting interesting. Our close reading suggests–I want to say “reveals,” but that’s too strong, as these are merely plausible inferences, nothing more–that paradoxically, it seems that the best way to get sincere opinions from Summers is to not pay him.
This is an interesting example in the economics of information.
Think about it. Summers was friends with Epstein and friends with the Saudis. From all accounts, Epstein was an unpleasant person, and, let’s face it, the Saudis aren’t so popular either, especially after 11 Sep 2001. But Epstein and the Saudis had two positive traits:
(i) They had boatloads of money,
(ii) They were willing to pay some of this money to Summers.
Now, I don’t think Summers really needs the money–at one point he was trying to hit up Epstein for a million dollars for one of his wife’s projects, but, let’s face it, Summers has gotta have a million dollars to spare. It’s just that, hey, just about everybody likes free money. Free money to an old person is like free food for a grad student: you just can’t say no to it.
OK, fine, Epstein and the Saudis had money, Summers wanted money, so they paid him. Fair enough. Also, when people pay you, it’s natural to want to tell them what they want to hear. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, right? So speak to the Saudis with platitudes about inclusion and equality, and then speak to Epstein about how sexual harassment is no big deal. Tell ’em what they want to hear, everybody’s happy?
So, where’s the paradox?
Here’s the paradox. In that economic transaction where Epstein and the Saudis are paying Summers big bucks, what are they getting for their money?
I can’t say–like Aaron Burr, I’m never in the room where it happens; unlike Aaron, I wouldn’t want to be in that room!–but I can speculate. And my guess is that what they want from Larry is his brilliance. Larry’s supposed to be an outstandingly brilliant man. I have my doubts, but Epstein and the Saudis are nothing if not conventional, so of course they’d think that Larry Summers, along with various Ted talk luminaries, are the best that mankind has to offer. They’re paying Larry for his insights, his special insights that only he can give.
And that’s the paradox. They’re paying Summers for his unique insights, and they value these insights so much that they’re paying him a lot. They’re positively throwing money at the guy! But this motivates him to say the most boring, stupid things. The more they pay him, the more he’ll tell them what they want to hear, and the less genuine Larry Summers insight will be provided.
Meanwhile, feminists and the left wing of the Democratic party won’t give Larry a dime, and he gives him his straight-up views for free.
8. So there you have it. The more you pay, the less you get. And apparently this is the case with Larry’s dealings with women too: all those gifts with no benefits in return.
Summary
From a political perspective, the above items that interest me the most are #1 (Summers is cool with financial crime, as long as it’s done by his rich friends) and #7 (a former university president is publicly scheming to subvert the independence of the school newspaper). From an economics perspective, the most interesting items are #5 (the idea that Summers genuinely doesn’t seem to understand the concept of a “gift”) and #8 (the more you pay Summers, the less value he’ll give you). From a human standpoint, the most notable is #6 (where Summers draws the line on “moral bankruptcy”).
Another way of saying all this is that Summers is an unreflective child of privilege. As the saying goes, he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
Yes, the above post is written in a jocular tone, but I’m dead serious that you can learn a lot from close reading. Feel free to use this post in your next English literature class.
P.S. It seems that Summers is still a professor at Harvard. This makes his attempt to muzzle the school newspaper even more disturbing, kind of a baby Harvard version of the U.S. government’s attempts to intimidate dissident national news media. Maybe Summers could have a heart-to-heart with Stanford historian Niall Ferguson, who notoriously suggested “opposition research” for a student election. Just disgusting how these guys have so much power but it’s not enough, they want to control everything. So entitled.
I’m not generally a fan of this…
On 1) Who knows what he meant here without more context. Softbank is a big company that does lots of things. And just because he is friends with Andrei Schleiffer doesn’t mean he is advocating for fraud. What?
On 2 & 3) it quite clearly seems to me that he is saying that he told the Saudis that inclusion is important and that women represent half the IQ in the world. If you keep women down (as the Saudis do, although perhaps to a lesser extent now than 10 years ago), then you aren’t able to take advantage of their IQ from an economic perspective. Summers quite famously got fired from being in charge of Harvard for saying that women’s IQ has a lower standard deviation than men’s IQ. He argued that this meant that men were more represented among high IQ people (and low IQ people). I don’t recall him ever arguing that women have lower IQ on average. I think you’re totally misreading what he is trying to say on this.
And from here I kind of lost interest in the rest of the post because it goes on with stuff along the same lines.
I mean seriously your post yesterday said “they seem to be talking about a plumber named Mnuchin–maybe there are some home renovations being done somewhere” when the exact quote was “Mnuchin plumbs new depths” They were obviously talking about Steve Mcunchin who was Secretary of the Treasury at the time (a job that Larry Summers used to hold). “plumbing new depths” meaning that he has sunk to a new low. Not that there’s an actual plumber named Mnunchin. FFS.
And no one even commented on this on the last post. I mean come on, if you’re getting obvious stuff like this blatantly wrong, then maybe you shouldn’t be overanalyzing the rest of it. It’s not your comparative advantage.
And I don’t even like Larry Summers that much.
John:
1. I don’t have more context on Softbank. This is close reading of three short messages. It’s still interesting to me that Summers is cool with fraud but upset about an independent school newspaper.
2. He wrote, “Lots of slathering to saudis. I yipped about inclusion.” I take this to mean he was bullshitting (“slathering” literally means “laying it on thick”) and that the “yipping” wasn’t something he believed, just something he said to make the Saudis happy.
3. Regarding women’s IQ, read that first email more carefully. (Remember: close reading!) Summers is trying to be cute: he’s saying that women have half the IQ in the world but that they are more then 51% of the population, i.e. the average IQ of women is lower than the average IQ of men. He’s boasting that he made that politically incorrect statement in a clever, subtle way by giving the total IQ numbers but not the population numbers (which happened to be incorrect, but that’s the subject of the previous post).
As you say, earlier Summers got in trouble when he said that men have higher variance than women. And, you’r right, he hadn’t publicly argued that women have lower IQ than average. That’s what’s interesting about this newly released email, where he did say that he thought that women’s average IQ was lower than that of men.
4. Yes, I was kidding about Mnuchin. I know who he is! Our blog commenters are a pretty savvy bunch, and I assume that the reason that none of them called me out for getting the Mnuchin plumber thing “blatantly wrong” because they realized I was joking. That was in the same paragraph where I wrote, “I’m not sure who’s this ‘jeffrey E.’ person is,” and that was a joke too: I indeed knew exactly who this “jeffrey E.” person was.
5. It’s fine to like Summers or not like Summers or whatever. I’m sure that he’s a wonderful person in some settings. Whether or not you like the man, it’s still possible to learn from reading his writing carefully–as is indeed demonstrated by your comment, where you didn’t read that first email carefully enough to realize that Summers was trying to cleverly say that the average IQ of women was lower than that of men.
I don’t know. The whole thing comes across as petty.
Your argument is basically Summers said in a clever way women are less intelligent than men. But he only made that argument to Epstein, not his actual audience. Recall he’s making an argument to convince the Saudis give better rights to women. And they actually did end up giving women more rights than they used to have in the years following these conversations. He only made this argument about population share and IQ to Epstein. And as you say he was wrong in the email with his premise about the share of the population of women globally, which would imply that if you followed his argument to its conclusion with the actual numbers it implies women are smarter than men.
John:
You write that “my argument is basically . . .” No, that’s just one of 8 points that I made! Regarding Summers, yes, it’s what you’re saying: he’s telling Epstein how clever he was. But he was actually being stupid because, yes, he got the world population wrong.
The point of that item is not that Summers is evil or that you should dislike him. The point is that we can learn a lot from reading those emails carefully, in particular we can learn that on this particular item he was happy to provide liberal platitudes to his Saudi audience (you say “he’s making an argument to convince the Saudis give better rights to women,” which may be true; I guess you got that from some other source, as there’s nothing in this email about it) while making snarky sexist remarks to his human-trafficker friend. It is what it is.
John Hall (not my history prof. at Yale*) wrote:
“He only made this argument about population share and IQ to Epstein. ”
Uh. No.
My memory has it that Summers has had his foot in his mouth on this in public before. I don’t remember the details, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time it’s been noticed that he appears to be a sexist schmuck.
Ah, yes here it is. Summers wrote: “The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end,” So he’s been on this schtick since at least 2005. Again, this isn’t “women aren’t as smart as men”, it’s “There aren’t as many very smart women as very smart men”.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/science-jan-june05-summersremarks_2-22
Hmm. A breif look at that article reveals some stuff I thought I saw here recently, but isn’t in this thread. Anyway, I remember him getting flamed for that back in the day. So I’ve had negative opinions of the bloke for an age now.
*; Whose daughter managed to graduate from college despite making every decision during those years based on I Ching readings, much to said prof’s surprise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whitney_Hall
The email doesn’t indicate the Summers is “cool with fraud” (maybe you believe that’s established by other evidence), just that he likes one deputy. Columbia University has fraudulently inflated its rankings, does that mean liking anybody at Columbia means you are cool with that?
Wonks:
Yes, I am relying on other evidence here. I think that Summers being cool with fraud is established by his association with Andrei Shleifer; see for example here: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/2/10/tawdry-shleifer-affair-stokes-faculty-anger/
On your points 2 & 3: I think you are half right. Of all the cited correspondence this one seems clearest to me. Yes, he was telling the Saudi’s that they are wasting the IQ of half of their population (which seems at odds with Andrew’s interpretation that he was telling them what they wanted to hear since they were paying him – I don’t think they wanted to hear that). But the second part about not mentioning that they were more than 51% of the population seems clearly an in-joke between like minded individuals. Ha ha, women do have lower IQs (I won’t quibble about whether he means averages here or variability – the top percentiles) – but this was between him and Epstein, not for the Saudis. So, I do see this as a within-club slur on women, while at the same time telling the Saudi’s that they are wasting the talents of Saudi women.
On 2/3 I think even the most generous reading of this would essentially amount to Summers’ stating that he paid lip service to the inclusion of women. The implied joke is exactly as Andrew stated (50% of the IQ with >50% of the population = lower average IQ than men), there’s just no other way to read that. I agree on the Softbank point but frankly Summers comes off as gross and absolutely pathetic in these communications. And that’s when you ignore the context who he’s emailing and when he’s emailing them.
I’m in general in favor of being a charitable reader but this is delusional.
He’s obviously implying women have lower IQs on average in (3).
Andrew, I read some of this a bit different than you do. Disclaimer, I’m bad at politics, the following is likely completely wrong, “for amusement only”, etc.
What the Saudis are getting for their money is *connections* to the institutional US power structure. Though Summers virtually has a suffix to his name of “who said controversial things about women’s IQ”, he was up to his eyeballs in the economics of the Russian government, for example. The money involved there was mind-boggling. The Saudis want people like that on their “team”.
I read item 2 as him saying to the Saudis that the Western governments want them to reform the status of women in Saudi society. And in 3, he’s privately snarking about it, since he personally believes it’s overrated.
Item 5 is nothing many man hasn’t said, though usually more crudely. I actually found his phrasing of the sentiment to be a bit amusing.
Note, I don’t think he was telling the Saudis “what they want to hear” at all. He was telling them what he thought would be good politics for them, even if he doesn’t believe the reasoning himself. But they are paying him for politics, not science.
Seth:
Good point about Saudis wanting Summers’s connections rather than his insights. I hadn’t thought of that.
Regarding item 5, I agree that many men–and, for that matter, many women–have said this sort of thing. It still seems like a stereotypical economist’s way of thinking, framing it as a competition. Also, it’s pathetic that a guy this rich is concerned about giving a gift. If he likes this woman, why can’t he give her a gift without expecting something in return? He can afford it!
This analysis is fun to read but it’s missing one key idea. The messages were written to a specific person, and that person isn’t going to give them a close reading. Instead, they are going to read them quickly in a context shared with the writer. The real question is what would the recipient take these items to mean?
For example, perhaps Summers wants to seem smart and cynical to Epstein in a particular way. The items don’t necessarily reflect his true views, any more than they did (maybe) to the Saudis. Maybe he wants to keep their interactions going in a certain tone and this is how he’s doing it.
My point is that without knowing the context and the nature of the relationship, it’s not really possible to do this kind of analysis in a sound way. It is fun, though.
I think this is a valid point, and it is hard to take definitive meaning from any individual correspondence. One thing I think we can take away, however, is the nature of the “club” these people belong to – I say “these people” because I know I am not part of this club. Rather than a conspiracy, I think it amounts to a view inside the world these people live in. It is a different world than mine, though my correspondence with friends (and my “club”) reflect comparable familiar intra-group communications. What isn’t comparable is their elitism, biases, and hubris which come through consistently and clearly. I can feel envy of their wealth and power (I’d love to not have to worry about money or be able to be a force on the world stage), but I don’t envy them as people. This is not a club I want to belong to.
Perhaps what Andrew refers to as “close reading” needs more nuance. Rather than close reading of the details (where the context is often missing), close reading of the tone is what I find most interesting.
Tom:
I agree with you! As I wrote in my above post:
This is a challenge with close reading in general. Once you open the Pandora’s box of the unreliable narrator, you’ve entered an unending hall of mirrors of possibilities.
I have lots of complicated feelings and thoughts about all of this and its hard to articulate them. Fortunately someone else already did:
https://kolektiva.social/@HeavenlyPossum/115541200879029553
A snippet:
“…The biggest revelation from the latest Epstein documents is that our global elites are a bunch of smug, venal, barely-literate bullies who pathetically fawn over wealth and power, and what a casually sexist prick Larry Summers is.
Wait no [we already knew that]”
> No surprise that Summers liked someone from Softbank, given that Summers was good friends with financial fraudster Andrei Shleifer
it says “aware and honest re Son.” So maybe he knows softbank was involved something sketchy and was glad he met someone honest from the firm? Nitpicking emails from years ago and relating them to current events seem pedantic and petty. Softbank is a huge bank and e.g. mobile ISP in japan. Anyone with interest in the global economy can’t afford to ignore Sofbank completely and use any connection to them as evidence of malfeasance!
Anonymous:
You call it “nitpicking,” I call it “close reading.” It may be that my inference about Softbank is incorrect, maybe not; I guess some research would be needed to find out if he has any connection to the Softbank crimes. It could be that Summers wanted to stay away from financial criminals after being burned by Shleifer those many years ago. On the other hand, Summers was buddies with financial criminal Epstein (presumably because he was hoping that Epstein would keep giving money to his wife), so he wasn’t trying to stay too far away from rich criminals either. The only thing that really seems to bug the man is student newspapers who disagree with his take on foreign policy.
Close reading is something lawyers are quite good at. It’s amazin’ how two lawyers can close-read the same statute or contract and come to diametrically opposed conclusions. It is very very difficult to “judge-proof” a statute or contract–ensure that close reading leads to unique results. It’s possible, but a judge-proofed statute looks more like computer code than English. Even then, it will bear some unexpected ambiguity. If you doubt me, I dare you to wade through Uniform Commercial Code Article 4A, on wire transfers. You have nothing to lose but your sanity.
Close reading is a powerful tool, but an unreliable one.
“… it seems that the best way to get sincere opinions from Summers is to not pay him.”
This reminds me of two quotes. Stephen King :
““Only enemies speak the truth; friends and lovers lie endlessly, caught in the web of duty.”
And Hans Eysenck
“Psychotherapy is the prostitution of friendship.”
Yeah I think this is pretty wrong on a lot of these points, probably because the author hasn’t kept abreast of financial news and is inferring a lot of nonsense from a few short sentences.
On the SoftBank deputy, I read it as saying he likes that specific person and regards him as smart and insightful about masa son, the head of softbank who is known to make a lot of huge mistakes. I have no idea what you’re talking about re: financial scandals of softbank, or how this sentence makes it seem that summers is ok with it.
Lots of slathering to Saudis — this is about how SoftBank was slathering to Saudis, not summers. Softbank raised $100 billion from the Saudis for one of their funds, summers is pretty clearly saying the SoftBank guys were laying it on thick for their financial masters. The yipping about inclusion was summers’ contribution to the discussion.
The gift giving competition is about competing for this woman’s affection with another man. He is clearly talking in earlier messages about being in a competition with another guy for this woman. Pretty clear he’s saying he doesn’t want to be in an arms race for no benefit.
Sz:
I can’t speak to the Softbank thing. As noted above, Summers has a track record of being cool with corruption in other settings, but it could well be that Summers’s Softbank connection is completely legitimate. Similarly with the Saudis–I wasn’t at the meeting, and it could well be that you’re correct that Summers was saying that it was someone else doing the slathering.
The point about the gift giving competition is that Summers doesn’t seem to understand the concept of a gift, when you give something just to give it, not because you’re expecting something in return. If he’s viewing a gift as part of “an arms race,” that’s already problem. Dude is rich, if he likes this lady, why can’t he just give a gift because he’d like to make her happy? As I write in the above post, if you only give a gift if it gives you benefits, it’s not a gift, it’s a payment.
Again, the whole thing is sad. Summers is filthy rich, but instead of he and his wife taking a million of these bucks to support her poetry program, they go begging to their friendly local sex offender. And then he can’t bring himself to give a no-strings-attached gift or non-strings-attached mentorship to this young woman he’s interested in. What’s the point of amassing millions and millions of dollars if you’re not willing to spend it? Basic economic theory tells you that the utility of money comes from the spending.
Andrew: Have you considered that one becomes and remains filthy rich by getting other people to pay for various things? Also, well, if “gift” is actually euphemism for the real meaning, it’s a very common usage, so the objection seems a bit pedantic – it’s like you’re complaining he’s not being sufficiently blunt about the economic exchange going on.
Seth:
Yes, I did think about this, that you don’t get to be rich by giving things away.
But Summers is getting on in years, and at some point it’s time to stop accumulating money and to start spending it. Economists have written about this: patterns of lifetime earnings and spending.
Regarding “gift”: no, I don’t think I’m being pedantic here. There are old guys who will give gifts to young women without expecting anything in return, or maybe just having a wistful hope. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. Also Summers described himself as his mentor. As a mentor you are indeed supposed to give of yourself without expecting anything in return. I’ve never met Summers but it really seems from this episode that he didn’t really understand that it’s possible to give without it being part of a transaction.