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If you ever visited the killing fields in Cambodia, you'd never make a statement like that. A sub-optimal economic policy isn't even on the same measurement scale as the raw, senseless, brutal cruelty and violence of that regime.

I spent a week in Phnom Penh around 20 years ago and the experience of walking through Tuol Sleng prison is one of the most affecting and enduring memories I have.

Nothing I am saying diminishes that as an expression of profound evil. The question I've got though is why you're here minimizing the raw, senseless, brutal cruelty of 1990s neoliberal economic policies.

Just because you can't see pictures at the visitors center doesn't mean the misery is any less profound.

No, I didn’t. The Khmer Rouge killed 2 million people in 4 years, fully 1/4 of the population. The preferred weapon of execution for much of that time was the pickax. It’s a disgusting comparison to make, and I don’t like Larry Summers at all.

Pop quiz, if you had to go would you pick a pick axe or starvation?

There are two major things wrong with this line of argument. It is a bad way to judge moral actions. It is in arguable that ordering the murder of 2 million people is a worse moral action than arguing for bad economic policy. The second is that I don't think there's a very good line from Summers' policies to any mass starvation/famine. Every famine since 1990 except in North Korea has been the result of a war.

>Had to think about it for a second didn't you.

No, no reasonable person had to think about it for a second..

Michael: My father’s no different from any other powerful man. Any man who’s responsible for other people. Like a senator or president.

Kay: You know how naïve you sound? Senators and presidents don’t have men killed.

Michael: Oh. Who’s being naïve, Kay?

Oh my-- I wish there were a button here called "flag if no follow up"

In other words-- you have got to make your case for Larry Summers causing more human suffering, or at least link to someone who has written that polemic.

Perhaps to improve UX there should be a 10 minute countdown to the flag being triggered. :)

Well where should we start. How about right here in the present where he's responsible for the current war in Ukraine.

First Google result: https://cepr.net/can-we-blame-larry-summers-for-the-collapse...

There's more. Lots more. It's so much worse than you think.

Why is this like pulling teeth? I'm genuinely interested in learning more, and I don't want to search for random results by writers in a field I'm not familiar with.

You're the expert. Could you give me, say, the top three articles on the subject by reputable authors? I know you say not to trust the field, but there must be an intersection between at least a few reputable writers and the subject.

Even if one conceded (and it's conceding a lot) that Summers was involved in bad things, one needs to consider the counterfactual. In a world where Summers had died in childhood, are we imagining that the USSR would not have collapsed? Where this collapse would've lead to some sort of social democratic paradise? Or what? I mean, people aren't seriously arguing this, are they?

People are arguing that our post-Soviet policy was fucking insane and that Summers was a chief architect of it. It was wholesale looting that set world stability back for generations and it was justified on principles of mainstream neoliberal economics and implemented by that community's (at the time) golden child.

It was one of several fundamentally catastrophic decisions of economic policy made in the 1990's that have their roots very firmly in academic economic orthodoxy.

If anything I'm understating how bad it was and how much needless human misery was unleashed from this community of sociopaths.

You're dodging the question. If Summers weren't around, how do you think events would have played out instead?

If you'd conflate between Summers' influence and the overall influence of neoliberal ideology, that's really not fair. (And full disclosure, I think this goes both ways - everything bad that happened in Cambodia cannot be ascribed to Pol Pot, but I think there's a much better argument for his having a very personalized impact on these events than there is for Summers and the collapse of the USSR.)

> You're dodging the question. If Summers weren't around, how do you think events would have played out instead?

Dunno. Will some other neoliberal fuckhead be in charge or not?

Probably. I'd hope it's someone who understands causality and counterfactuals and opportunity costs and constrained optimization, at least..

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