Harvard's 'Fitting Choice'

On July 1 Larry Summers--the Wunderkind economist who ran the Treasury Department under President Clinton--takes over as president of Harvard University. "A fitting choice," editorialized the New York Times. But fitting in what way?

So far, Summers has maintained an eloquent silence on the activists who seized his future office for three weeks to demand a living wage for Harvard service personnel. Harvard may have an endowment of billions at its disposal, but Summers, who failed to respond to my requests for an interview, is unlikely to embrace the living-wage drive.

After all, if everyone were paid a living wage, where would we store hazardous waste? A decade ago, while chief economist of the World Bank, Summers put forward arguments for a "world-welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste" in an internal bank memo that expressed the value of a human life as the sum of its future earnings. "The costs of health-impairing pollution depend on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality," Summers wrote. So if pollution takes five years off the life of the average, well-paid American, that is more significant than the same pollution prematurely killing off the average someone in Mexico or some other lower-wage country. Wrote Summers, "The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to it."

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