What Summers Has To Say

Via Felix Salmon, here’s an excellent interview of Larry Summers.

Key quotes you may find interesting:

We don’t really have a problem that there aren’t enough television sets in our society.  We really don’t.  I mean we did once.  I mean it used to be that some people had television sets and some people don’t.  We don’t have that problem anymore in America.

and

When somebody writes the human history of Americans, the fact that 25 years from now we will have done most of the following:  cure Alzheimer’s, apply stem cells to prevent diabetes, develop approaches that enable most of us to be the weight we want to be, rather than the weight we are, and find a solution for dementia, the fact that 25 years from now we will have done not all of those things, but we will have done most of those things, I think that looms enormously large.

and

If you look at the price earnings ratio for technology companies relative to the price earnings ratios for all industrial companies, you take that ratio, PE technology divided by PE industrial, you can plot that ratio over the last 40 years, and it is at the lowest point that it’s ever been.

So if you look at the large tech sector, it’s very, very hard to see a bubble. […] What is true is that the Internet, the last time there was an Internet bubble, was 120 million people dialing up.

The Internet today is two billion people and two billion mobile devices, with wireless connectivity at a far more rapid pace.  Today, the businesses have cash flow, which they didn’t ten years ago.  So I think it’s a little facile to assume that just because the numbers are big, that it’s obviously a bubble.

There’s a section in which Summers talks about the different styles of the two presidents he’s worked for, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Most interesting.

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And yeah, I’m encouraged by his prediction that 25 years from now, I’ll be the weight I want to be. An exercise regime, in these circumstances, seems short-sighted.