Larry Summers, We Knew Ye Too Well
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Economy
/ March 2, 2026
Larry Summers, We Knew Ye Too Well
The former Harvard president and Treasury secretary has resigned over humiliating disclosures in the Epstein files. But will that be enough to keep an ardent neoliberal down?
Maureen Tkacik
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At the austerity pulpit: Former treasury secretary Larry Summers delivers the laudation for German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, the recipient of the 2017 Kissinger Prize, at the American Academy of Berlin.
(Chad Buchanan / Getty Images)
On the occasion of Larry Summers’s latest, and seemingly comprehensive, resignation from Harvard in disgrace, it’s instructive to look back at his first one, which he announced exactly 20 years ago last week. It was said to be a response to institutional revulsion over a thing he’d said more than a year earlier about women’s “intrinsic inaptitude” for math and science.
But the precipitating event behind his departure did not actually have much to do with his edgelord misogyny, or his decision to antagonize the celebrity professor Cornel West. The episode revolved around Andrei Shliefer, a close friend, vacation partner, and protégé Summers had sent to Russia on behalf of the World Bank in 1991 to oversee a program to rapidly privatize 225,000 state-owned enterprises. A 22,000-word magazine feature that an anonymous gadfly had mailed in manila envelopes to several senior faculty members showed how Shleifer had exploited the job and the inside information that came with it to turn himself into a mid-level oligarch while the country literally starved.
Shleifer was, like Summers, a wunderkind economics professor. By 1992, he was running a whole Moscow-based Harvard-sponsored economic Seal Team Six backed by tens of millions of dollars in congressionally appropriated USAID funding intended to help transform Russia into a sophisticated, well-oiled market economy. By 1994, Shleifer and wife, who worked for hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer, had partnered with then-unknown financier named Len Blavatnik (current estimated net worth: $30 billion) to invest in Gazprom, a Russian operator of the country’s telecom monopoly, together with a constellation of aluminum smelters and countless other former assets of the Soviet state. Shleifer was directly overseeing Gazprom’s privatizing raid on behalf of Harvard, and the merger documents for the Harvard deal were drafted pro bono by a Shleifer deputy in exchange for gaudy perks like first crack at the company’s stock offerings (in his father’s name) and special treatment for his new girlfriend’s mutual fund. The Harvard boys deputized a summer intern to analyze obscure data on oil and gas …
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Current Issue
Economy
/ March 2, 2026
Larry Summers, We Knew Ye Too Well
The former Harvard president and Treasury secretary has resigned over humiliating disclosures in the Epstein files. But will that be enough to keep an ardent neoliberal down?
Maureen Tkacik
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
At the austerity pulpit: Former treasury secretary Larry Summers delivers the laudation for German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, the recipient of the 2017 Kissinger Prize, at the American Academy of Berlin.
(Chad Buchanan / Getty Images)
On the occasion of Larry Summers’s latest, and seemingly comprehensive, resignation from Harvard in disgrace, it’s instructive to look back at his first one, which he announced exactly 20 years ago last week. It was said to be a response to institutional revulsion over a thing he’d said more than a year earlier about women’s “intrinsic inaptitude” for math and science.
But the precipitating event behind his departure did not actually have much to do with his edgelord misogyny, or his decision to antagonize the celebrity professor Cornel West. The episode revolved around Andrei Shliefer, a close friend, vacation partner, and protégé Summers had sent to Russia on behalf of the World Bank in 1991 to oversee a program to rapidly privatize 225,000 state-owned enterprises. A 22,000-word magazine feature that an anonymous gadfly had mailed in manila envelopes to several senior faculty members showed how Shleifer had exploited the job and the inside information that came with it to turn himself into a mid-level oligarch while the country literally starved.
Shleifer was, like Summers, a wunderkind economics professor. By 1992, he was running a whole Moscow-based Harvard-sponsored economic Seal Team Six backed by tens of millions of dollars in congressionally appropriated USAID funding intended to help transform Russia into a sophisticated, well-oiled market economy. By 1994, Shleifer and wife, who worked for hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer, had partnered with then-unknown financier named Len Blavatnik (current estimated net worth: $30 billion) to invest in Gazprom, a Russian operator of the country’s telecom monopoly, together with a constellation of aluminum smelters and countless other former assets of the Soviet state. Shleifer was directly overseeing Gazprom’s privatizing raid on behalf of Harvard, and the merger documents for the Harvard deal were drafted pro bono by a Shleifer deputy in exchange for gaudy perks like first crack at the company’s stock offerings (in his father’s name) and special treatment for his new girlfriend’s mutual fund. The Harvard boys deputized a summer intern to analyze obscure data on oil and gas …
Larry Summers, We Knew Ye Too Well
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Current Issue
Economy
/ March 2, 2026
Larry Summers, We Knew Ye Too Well
The former Harvard president and Treasury secretary has resigned over humiliating disclosures in the Epstein files. But will that be enough to keep an ardent neoliberal down?
Maureen Tkacik
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
At the austerity pulpit: Former treasury secretary Larry Summers delivers the laudation for German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, the recipient of the 2017 Kissinger Prize, at the American Academy of Berlin.
(Chad Buchanan / Getty Images)
On the occasion of Larry Summers’s latest, and seemingly comprehensive, resignation from Harvard in disgrace, it’s instructive to look back at his first one, which he announced exactly 20 years ago last week. It was said to be a response to institutional revulsion over a thing he’d said more than a year earlier about women’s “intrinsic inaptitude” for math and science.
But the precipitating event behind his departure did not actually have much to do with his edgelord misogyny, or his decision to antagonize the celebrity professor Cornel West. The episode revolved around Andrei Shliefer, a close friend, vacation partner, and protégé Summers had sent to Russia on behalf of the World Bank in 1991 to oversee a program to rapidly privatize 225,000 state-owned enterprises. A 22,000-word magazine feature that an anonymous gadfly had mailed in manila envelopes to several senior faculty members showed how Shleifer had exploited the job and the inside information that came with it to turn himself into a mid-level oligarch while the country literally starved.
Shleifer was, like Summers, a wunderkind economics professor. By 1992, he was running a whole Moscow-based Harvard-sponsored economic Seal Team Six backed by tens of millions of dollars in congressionally appropriated USAID funding intended to help transform Russia into a sophisticated, well-oiled market economy. By 1994, Shleifer and wife, who worked for hedge-fund billionaire Tom Steyer, had partnered with then-unknown financier named Len Blavatnik (current estimated net worth: $30 billion) to invest in Gazprom, a Russian operator of the country’s telecom monopoly, together with a constellation of aluminum smelters and countless other former assets of the Soviet state. Shleifer was directly overseeing Gazprom’s privatizing raid on behalf of Harvard, and the merger documents for the Harvard deal were drafted pro bono by a Shleifer deputy in exchange for gaudy perks like first crack at the company’s stock offerings (in his father’s name) and special treatment for his new girlfriend’s mutual fund. The Harvard boys deputized a summer intern to analyze obscure data on oil and gas …
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