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Mises Economics Blog

Perhaps the Silliest Comment Yet on the Summers Flap

April 6, 2005 5:22 PM by Peter G. Klein | Other posts by Peter G. Klein | Comments (7)

Though there are undoubtedly many candidates. Excerpts from a letter in today's Wall Street Journal, by Professor Luis Suarez-Villa of the School of Social Ecology at UC-Irvine:

Harvard President Larry Summers is now discovering what many economists find out to their dismay when they venture out of the old-boy network that is American economics. Musings that are considered "normal" among economists tend to be regarded as insensitive or even prejudiced in many other disciplines. At the root of his remarks is the fact that Mr. Summers's thinking is grounded in a discipline that has little sense of fairness and moral obligation, where discriminatory situations are often accepted as the result of Darwinian mechanisms that should be left untouched.

Mr. Summers could have blamed his training in economics for his insensitive remarks, based on the discipline's inability to understand fairness and shed its pseudo-scientific ways.

Comments (7)

  • Philip Spears

  • What is Social Ecology? Some primitivist regression into the status quo ex ante of Rousseauvian nature? A post-modern cult?
    I, too, read the letter in the WSJ. The letter left me wondering if I was reading a psychological projection from its author. It is a disappointing commentary on the state of academe.

  • Published: April 6, 2005 6:45 PM

  • N. Joseph Potts

  • I can't help wondering what "other disciplines" would regard Summers's remarks as insensitive or discriminatory.
    I couldn't think of any other disciplines that even entertain such values as sensitivity or discrimination, except as phenomena.
    I think the writer was mixing up disciplines with value systems, or points of view, or . . . prejudices.

  • Published: April 6, 2005 7:07 PM

  • Andy D

  • What, even more than mathmatics?? That is pretty hilliarious. I have to fight everyday to keep my discipline a discipline rather than a political science project...ugh!

  • Published: April 6, 2005 7:40 PM

  • p

  • Summers needs to point his finger at the institution that created him - Harvard. He begun life as a "good" being who was slowly perverted by instititional biases that inhabit and ultimately defomr all its graduates. Professors are both societies and the institutions henchman. Poor man is a product of social forces.

  • Published: April 6, 2005 9:00 PM

  • Andy D

  • If that comment wasn't in sarcasim, we don't live on the same planet.

  • Published: April 6, 2005 10:25 PM

  • bkMarcus

  • Philip Spears asks, "What is Social Ecology?"

    According to The Institute for Social Ecology, it is...

    Social Ecology n

    1: a coherent radical critique of current social, political, and anti-ecological trends.
    2: a reconstructive, ecological, communitarian, and ethical approach to society.


    I believe it a euphemism for anarcho-communism a la Murray Bookchin (with whom Murray Rothbard cooperated in running The Left-Right Anarchist Supper Club once upon a time) mixed with anarcho-primitivism.

    Bookchin co-founded the ISE and may have even coined the term 'social ecology'.

  • Published: April 6, 2005 11:05 PM

  • Doug

  • Schools of "social ecology" are what you get when the government indiscriminately loans money to people for post-high school tuition.

    Unfortunately, the Institute's Alumni page is still under construction. I was looking forward to tracing the career paths of its graduates.

  • Published: April 7, 2005 8:46 AM

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