An Evening With (Economic) Champions

A week after strained relations with the faculty led to his resignation, University President Lawrence H. Summers was on his academic home turf last night, moderating fellow star economists N. Gregory Mankiw and Gene Sperling in a debate on the “Challenges to American Prosperity” at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

The campus buzzed with excitement before the event, with a Harvard Democrats e-mail advertisement billing the event as an “opportunity to see the world’s greatest economists go at it.”

Both of the “heavy hitters,” as the advertisement dubbed Mankiw, the Beren professor of economics, and Sperling, the senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, were high-ranking advisers for the Bush and Clinton administrations respectively.

The three celebrated economists, however, produced less than the expected academic battle of the Titans.

“I was expecting more of a head to head debate,” said Chandler M. O’Connell ’09, who nevertheless said “I thought it was interesting.”

While the president spent much of the two-hour event staring into the audience, Summers occasionally prodded the scholars to a more aggressive debate on issues of tax policy, budget deficits, and globalization.

Summers urged the economists, who kept returning to nuanced policy discussions, to come up with more practical political advice. Referring to Flint, Mich., where workers’ jobs are being outsourced, he challenged the academics to come up with a realistic suggestion for the Buick-city mayor.

“That’s the political reality,” said Summers, pointing to former Senator Bob Graham D-Fla. in the audience who was nodding in agreement.

Graham was a fellow at the Institute of Politics (IOP) this fall and is serving as a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs this spring.

“That’s what the political class out there is facing. Maybe the answer is [to] put an economics course in every high school and we’ll be OK,” said Summers, taking a jab at Mankiw who earlier suggested that introducing economic principles to Americans in high school would help people better understand globalization.

“I don’t know about the mayor, but I know what the people should do,” Mankiw said, “The people should move.”

Summers countered, “Where do you think the people in Flint should go?”

“I think we talk too much like the way Greg was talking just now,” said Sperling, adding that politicians and economists should appreciate the difficulty of being the American worker.

“It’s easy to live in India, you know what you’re going to do tomorrow,” said Sperling. “You want to do what the US is doing.”

Sperling added that because of the US’s strong economy, its industries are forced to continually innovate. He recommended national programs to help communities diversify their work forces.

Much of the audience consisted of past and present students of Mankiw’s introductory economics course, Social Analysis 10, “Principles of Economics,” while others had been lured by the fame of the Goliath scholars taking on the great debates in modern economics.