The thing to understand about Summers is that he is basically the guy that charted the course to where America is today.
Enormously influential, he provided the intellectual gravitas as well as the raw policymaking muscle for a version of the US economy that was financialized, globalized, and monopolized.
If you're broke in 2025, Larry Summers probably had something to do with it.
Anything that will knock this guy down many many pegs is worthwhile imo.
I don't think anybody knew the extent of relationships with Epstein that were revealed when 20k email messages were dumped onto the world.
I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.
Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.
All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.
MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
> It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide."
Nonsense.
"...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0]
"...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1]
etc.
> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
> Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was.
Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?
The one-time head of the most elite academic institution as well as the US Treasury is an insecure 12 year old boy at heart. Summers clearly saw Epstein as aspirational for his "success" with "women". But this isn't really new information about him. In 2005 he went in front of an audience including top women scientists at the National Bureau of Economic Research and essentially said the lack of women at the top of science was mostly about their lack of innate aptitude, not discrimination [1] (he gave multiple alternate "theories" but it was clear which one he actually believed). People immediately saw that for what it was: a powerful guy projecting his own hang-ups about women. That he's maintained his status over the last 20 years does not speak well of the US's most prestigious institutions.
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.
> how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
>It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
I think this is a side effect of having "paid law enforcement", it's not that the cops are bad, but their bosses are. The people who fund the law enforcement are ultimately at the mercy of the "rich and powerful" in some way or another, so basically people of a certain status get a pass.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
They know they above the law from the minute that reach a certain level of status, they don't care about the emails and if people see them, they know there will be next to zero repercussions for them.
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated.
The big question here is are they involved with Epstein because they are in power, or did they get power because they had Epstein pull in favors for them. From the emails he seems like the big spider in a spider web. Both parties and so many people in power referred to him for critical problems, pulling strings in critical places (Bannon on behalf of Trump was getting his advice on how to discredit Kavanaugh opponents and Epstein obliged with medical information on one of the opponents to bring up at a hearing). Beyond Clinton, Obama’s attorney is mentioned a bunch as well. I’m sure the democrats had plenty of favors in too.
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
It is reassuring that I am not the only one that sees this. These emails reveal a much bigger conspiracy than just the sex trafficking- that was just an in house blackmail material generator for him that he was using to control powerful people around the world. The emails also suggest he was selling blackmail material on US politicians to foreign adversaries.
I mean that's the point -- blackmail powerful and influential people to do his bidding.
That his madam (Ghislane) was the daughter of the guy who got Israel nukes and had some deeeeep ties to the Mossad is no surprise. FWIW said guy also had ties to UK Intelligence and the KGB, and he died mysteriously on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.
> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.
Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
That’s what he claimed it is, but I don’t buy it. I’m a big fan of satire and deadpan humor, and that’s just not what this is- the tone is serious, and he put a lot of thought in how to argue the point. Monsters exist, and this guy is one.
I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.
Summers very often does this sort of earnest "kidding on the square" and he's quite proud of it, which was revealed extensively in the Epstein emails. Summers earnestly believes that the villain has very good reasons to tear down the orphanage, and will defend them in whatever way he can in polite society.
I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.
Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.
I remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking.
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
I saw the email correspondence between him and Epstein. The sense that I got is he's pursuing some young girl half his age. And he actually thinks that she is attracted to him. Powerful, ugly men are so stupid sometimes.
Men who don't pursue women don't get laid. This is an extremely important gendered asymmetry in heterosexual dating. Most men aren't attractive to most women, and if you want to be successful at dating as a heterosexual man you have to have to display a certain amount of boldness in pursuing women. Maybe the girl in question really does find Larry Summers old and ugly and wants nothing to do with him, but in general men who assume this is the case and don't even try, or who heed the words of outsiders that it is stupid to think that a girl might be attracted to you, are putting themselves at a systematic disadvantage in dating.
Fully aware of the evolutionary forces that make men act stupid and think women more attractive than them want to jump their bones.
It doesn’t make it any less grotesque though. What I was really commenting on is the men in positions of power who think that that power is enough to get them laid. Nope. Turns out that women are attracted to... can you believe it? LOOKS!
But then you see them fumbling around like this doofus. He doesn't even know what the hell he’s doing. It’s sad.
That's a charitable take. It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship. Also the woman's dad is the founding president of some major Chinese bank (AIIB) that he was cozying up to.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
> "It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship"
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
Reading about the case, you get the sense that this is the general disposition from these abusers. They know what they're doing is wrong, and they understand the power imbalance, but they sort of excuse it and justify it by softly believing that the women actually want them. That they are actually sexy. And that they are helping the women, somehow.
It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
She was attracted to his power, which is why she spent time with him. Don't pretend she was an innocent protege. She was a nepo child playing the same game of stays climbing.
Readit News
Enormously influential, he provided the intellectual gravitas as well as the raw policymaking muscle for a version of the US economy that was financialized, globalized, and monopolized.
If you're broke in 2025, Larry Summers probably had something to do with it.
Anything that will knock this guy down many many pegs is worthwhile imo.
I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.
Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.
All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.
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It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmat...
Nicholas Tartaglione
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2019/09/23/feds-how-n...
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
Nonsense. "...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0] "...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1] etc.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/us/politics/trump-epstein... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/trump-epstein...
What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.
Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?
This doesn't accord with experience. MAGA is notorious for rationalizing anything Trump says or does.
The uniparty is a rotten, spiraling race to the bottom.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2005/2/18/full-transcript...
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/why-larry-summers-sh...
>Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons...
...I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...
...I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
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Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?
It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
I think about things like this...
Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.
And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.
In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).
I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.
so... this might be the pattern.
I think ladder climbing is its own skill only loosely correlated with intelligence.
From experience, every dumb as rocks leader eventually gets tired of hearing that they are doing the wrong thing and finds someone who agrees with them completely, ie, as dumb or dumber than they are.
Seems anecdotally true.
Deleted Comment
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.
"Funnily", if you read Epstein's contributions to a lot of his emails, he also gives off that same vibe.
I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things.
> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.
And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:
> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].
I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.
It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.
Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.
But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.
As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...
Summers is just weather vane for current economic thinking. He's not a particularly brilliant at anything.
My conclusion from information so far - this is a small subset of the files, and yet this seems like in a country where power should be divided to be balanced, a congealed network has been selecting and pulling the elites they want to the podium. The curation mechanism (may not be the only curation mechanism) has been people who are easy to manipulate by the network - too deep into perversions to ever come out of prison if they ever lost power. Thus more power and money becomes the only survival mechanism.
If you want a real constitutional democracy in the US, can you EVER have it if past presidents, or the networks underneath them, or party leaders who have no term limits, have control over who gets nominated to that power next? It’s not two parties. It’s one party that seems to be playing a show for the masses while taking Yin and Yang turns at the helm.
That his madam (Ghislane) was the daughter of the guy who got Israel nukes and had some deeeeep ties to the Mossad is no surprise. FWIW said guy also had ties to UK Intelligence and the KGB, and he died mysteriously on a boat in the middle of nowhere.
And now all their only remaining defense is "our masks don't even look like that."
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summers_memo
Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.
If you're going to engage in satire, its best the satire be obvious.
I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically.
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.
Surely he could not possibly be sexist, nah.
It was not the "fair play in bar" kind of situation at all.
It doesn’t make it any less grotesque though. What I was really commenting on is the men in positions of power who think that that power is enough to get them laid. Nope. Turns out that women are attracted to... can you believe it? LOOKS!
But then you see them fumbling around like this doofus. He doesn't even know what the hell he’s doing. It’s sad.
He has no game.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
Supporting background:
> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”
> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...
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It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.
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