Harvard Rules by Richard Bradley Read Free Book Online

was your illness being treated.
    In later years Summers rarely spoke of his cancer. He and Scadden lost touch for almost two decades. Many people who know Summers casually, and some who know him moderately well, aren’t even aware that he has had cancer. But after being chosen president, Summers told Harvard Magazine that the cancer helped him to appreciate family and those less fortunate than himself. According to people who have known him since that time, it did more than that; they say that its greater impact was to leave Summers with a newfound appreciation for the brevity of life. After his cancer, they suggest, Summers possessed an urgency to work as quickly as possible, because he never knew how long—or short—his life might be. And outside of his own field, the work that most interested him was the work that had saved his life—science and medicine. After becoming president of Harvard, he would repay Scadden’s aid with a favor of his own.
    Over the next years, Summers produced a slew of top-notch papers on issues such as taxes, unemployment, and markets. “Larry was a hive of activity,” said Harvard economics professor Larry Katz, a friend of Summers’. “What was amazing was the breadth of his activity—he could work on twenty problems with twenty different people.” Politically, Summers was left of center; he was skeptical of the unfettered marketplace and believed that the federal tax code should be structured to promote progressive policy goals. Intellectually, he had a talent for bringing real-world data to problems that economists had previously dealt with theoretically. In a provocative 1986 paper on Henry Ford, for example, Summers and co-author Daniel M. G. Raff examined Ford’s 1914 decision to double his workers’ wages from $2.50 a day, the industry norm, to $5.00. Why did Ford give his employees such a huge increase? Out of altruism? A desire to burnish his reputation? Both were possible, the authors suggested. But a more powerful motivator may have been that by paying his workers more than he had to, Ford could boost worker morale, lessen labor turnover, and increase profits. The implications were clear. If paying more than the market minimum produced such positive results for Ford, how many present-day firms could—or should—do the same?
    Summers was an equally energetic professor. He was demanding and challenging. His Harvard graduate students sometimes felt pressured by him, but they also conceded that he frequently coaxed better work out of them than they had thought themselves capable of. Typical was this 1992 review of Summers from the Harvard Committee for Undergraduate Education (CUE) guide, an annual survey of courses filled out by undergraduates (but published by the college; professors can ask that their evaluation not be printed): “Respondents congratulate Professor Lawrence H. Summers on the overall excellence of his lectures,” the entry read. “However, one-fourth of those commenting on his presentations note that he occasionally speaks too quickly.” Also, a “significant number of those polled testify to the course’s formidable workload.” Summers’ numeric rating of 4.2 out of 5 was better than average, though not in the highest rank of Harvard professors.
    Nevertheless, Summers was restless; he wanted more than the life of an academic. In 1988 he signed up with the presidential campaign of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Along with economist Robert Reich, who would go on to become Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, Summers advised Dukakis on economic policy. The candidate advocated a proactive role for government in the economy, with tax breaks and government subsidies for companies that invested in high-tech or high-unemployment areas. Rather than raise taxes, Dukakis argued (and Summers agreed) that the government could ease the deficit problem simply by collecting unpaid