LARRY SUMMERS….Sheryl Sandberg defends Larry Summers:
At the World Bank, he was a tireless advocate for girls’ education. At Treasury, he fought for social security benefits for women working in their homes, better enforcement of child support obligations, and an expansion of child care tax credits.
….Larry has been attacked by some in the women’s community for remarks he made about women’s abilities. As he has acknowledged himself, this speech was a real mistake. What few seem to note is that it is remarkable that he was giving the speech in the first place — that he cared enough about women’s careers and their trajectory in the fields of math and science to proactively analyze the issues and talk about what was going wrong. To conclude that he communicated poorly — and even insensitively — is fair. To conclude that he is opposed to progress for women overlooks the fact that improving this progress was precisely the subject he was addressing.
On the issues I know best and over which the Treasury Secretary has sway, Summers is good. Very, very good. In the last few years, he has become a persistent critic of inequality and advocate for government action to redress it. He’s a true believer in health care reform, both as a way to alleviate economic insecurity and to address the country’s long-term fiscal crisis. He wants major action on climate change. And he has argued for aggressive action to stimulate the economy, despite high deficits.
Larry is — in Paul Krugman’s words — a “a force of nature….You can bring him up to speed on anything in fifteen minutes….If you do a piece of something for him excellently — a link in a chain, say — he will do his damnedest to make sure that all other links in that chain are done equally excellently….If he thinks you know more about something than he does, he will listen to you very patiently and then trust and act on what you have told him….Very good people want to work for Larry because he will, if he thinks you can handle it, push you forward into the limelight and give you more responsibility than you thought you could handle.
The anti-anti-Summers backlash appears to be gathering steam.
