Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist. He served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001, the 27th president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006, and the eighth director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010. He was the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard Kennedy School until his resignation in February 2026. Summers became a professor of economics at Harvard University in 1983. He left Harvard in 1991, working as the chief economist of the World Bank from 1991 to 1993. In 1993, Summers was appointed Under Secretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton's administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury. While working for the Clinton administration, Summers played a leading role in the American response to the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the 1998 Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard Institute for International Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states, and in the deregulation of the U.S. financial system, including the repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act. Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he offered three reasons for the under-representation of women in science and engineering, including the possibility that there exists a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", in addition to patterns of discrimination and socialization. After his first departure from Harvard, Summers worked as a managing director at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co. Summers rejoined public service during the Obama administration, serving as the director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession. He went on leave from his teaching responsibilities at Harvard and his role as the director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government in November 2025 due to an investigation into his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Early life and education Summers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 30, 1954, into a Jewish family. He was the son of two economists, Robert Summers (who changed the family surname from Samuelson) and Anita Summers (of Romanian-Jewish ancestry), who were both professors at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the nephew of two Nobel laureates in economics: Paul Samuelson (brother of Robert Summers) and Kenneth Arrow (brother of Anita Arrow Summers). He spent most of his childhood in Penn Valley, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, where he attended Harriton High School. At age 16, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he originally intended to study mathematics but soon switched to economics, graduating in 1975. He was also an active member of the MIT debating team and qualified for participation in the annual National Debate Tournament three times. He attended Harvard University as a graduate student, receiving his Ph.D. in 1982.
Early career (1983–2001)
Harvard (1983–1987)
In 1983, at age 28, Summers became one of the youngest tenured professors in Harvard's history. He was a visiting academic at the London School of Economics in 1987. As a researcher, Summers has made important contributions in many areas of economics, primarily public finance, labor economics, financial economics, and macroeconomics. Summers has also worked in international economics, economic demography, economic history and development economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1993 from the American Economic Association. In 1987, he was the first social scientist to win the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. Summers is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Some of his popular courses, as Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard University, were American Economic Policy and The Political Economy of Globalization. Summers was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Reagan in 1982–1983. He also served as an economics adviser to the Dukakis Presidential campaign in 1988.
World Bank (1991–1993) Summers left Harvard in 1991 and served as the Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist for the World Bank until 1993. According to the World Bank's Data & Research office, Summers returned to Washington, D.C., in 1991 as the World Bank's Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist. As such, Summers played a "key role" in designing strategies to aid developing countries, worked on the bank's loan committee, guided the bank's research and statistics operations, and guided external training programs. The World Bank's official site also reports that Summers's research included an "influential" report that demonstrated a very high return from investments in educating girls in developing nations. According to The Economist, Summers was "often at the centre of heated debates" about economic policy, as he was considered a "famous contrarian".
"Dirty industries" controversy
In December 1991, while at the World Bank, Summers signed a memo that was leaked to the press. Lant Pritchett has claimed authorship of the private memo, which both he and Summers say was intended as sarcasm. The memo stated that "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 underpolluted." According to Pritchett, the memo, as leaked, was doctored to remove context and intended irony.
Clinton Administration (1993–2001)
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