So Long Summers

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/09/so-long-summers

As I noted about my former colleague Josh Gerstein: "It's hard enough accurately to report the news after it happens; the skill of predicting the news before it happens is rare indeed, and it is one of the things that makes journalistic reputations." The big story of the night is that the chairman of the National Economic Council, Lawrence Summers, will leave after the November election. David Warsh called this one cold in a May 23, 2010 column headlined "Is Summers Headed Home?"

Okay, the headline would have been better without the question mark, and with the "Is" placed after the word "Summers" rather than before. Still, the money sentence in Mr. Warsh's column — "It now seems more likely that he'll be headed home to Harvard in the winter" — turned out to be right on the money, and worth the $50 price of a subscription to Economic Principals.

I should disclose that Mr. Warsh has been a friend of nearly 20 years. The politics of his column are well to the left of FutureOfCapitalism.com, and he isn't always as right as he was in that May 23, 2010 column, as the column itself acknowledges. Still, it's rare enough for any journalist to get something so satisfactorily right so far ahead of the pack that it's worth mentioning, particularly since Mr. Warsh, like me, is an independent operator rather than someone ensconced in some major news organization. His key insight seems to have been that the dynamic of Mr. Summers' length of stay in Washington was driven in part by Harvard's two-year policy on faculty leave. Maybe the president would like his own spot back at the University of Chicago law school?

by Ira Stoll  |  Sep 21, 2010 at 11:39 pm Related Topics:  Education, Lawrence Summers, Press receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list