LAWRENCE SUMMERS
Ideas
23
Responses
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Lawrence Summers

Lawrence Summers is an American economist and academic. Summers served as President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Prior to this he was Secretary of Treasury for the last year and a half of the Clinton administration. He is a highly regarded macroeconomist who received the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal in 1993. He is now a part-time managing director of the investment firm D.E. Shaw & Co.. Born in 1954 in New Haven, Summers is the son of two economists, and the nephew of two Nobel Laureates in economics. He was educated at MIT and Harvard. In 2005, Summers married a Harvard English professor, Dr. Elisa New. (Disclosure: Lawrence Summers is a minority investor in BigThink.com).

Ideas recorded on: 6/13/07
Interests
Most Recent Idea
The United States
11/19/2007

Description: America needs to save for its future?

Transcript:

We need to save for our future. The country’s becoming prosperous. We need to share their prosperity with their citizens and let them spend. That China, for example, consumes less than 40% of its GNP is hardly . . . is hardly appropriate. We need to find the forum that will connect, not a limited set of aging societies dominated by the Atlantic Ocean, but a much wider set of rapidly emerging societies to provide the function of being a kind of global steering committee as we address central global concerns. We need to find ways in the United States to support a more inclusive democracy and a more inclusive prosperity. If our people are going to be willing to accept the kind of international role that the United States need to take, if the world is going to remain stable, some of that goes to healthcare; some of that goes to the . . . the tax system and much, much else. We need to forge some kind of international approach to dealing with what are really the existential threats around nuclear weapons, around nuclear proliferation, around global warming – two events that have the chance to profoundly change the terms of life on earth 50 or more . . . 100 years from now.

Recorded On: 6/13/07

 

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Outlook & the Future
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History
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Business & Economics
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