The people who make your decisions

That's Lawrence Summers, President Obama's chief economic advisor. He's a powerful guy. He moves the world in ways that are hard to grasp.

He also used to be the president of Harvard, a few years back. Perhaps he still would be, had he been more reserved in expressing opinions on certain matters. That's a pretty good gig. Maybe he would have left eventually to join the Obama administration. Also seems like a good job to have, if you are of that persuasion. He used to work for Clinton, too, so he is obviously of that persuasion. President of Harvard though, man, that is a prestigious post. You would imagine that's the kind of thing you want to really hold onto and only resign when you are about to get fired. Getting fired from your post as the president of Harvard is basically the antithesis of prestige.

Summers though, I guess he's one of those people who just doesn't understand why anyone would have a problem with what he thinks or says. Cause to him, what he thinks is fact and truth. He's just telling it like it is, basically. He sees reality, and fuck the liberal softies who can't take it. Or at least fuck them until your job is on the line.

At an economic conference in January, 2005, Summers gave an address on the underrepresentation of women in various science and math professions. Some of his ideas look at this discrepancy through a biological lens:

''In the special case of science and engineering," he continued, ''there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination."

He also made it clear he knew he was bucking conventional wisdom, saying he wanted to offer hypotheses ''without seeing this through the kind of judgmental tendency that inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality."

Intrinsic aptitude. It's more a concern of "intrinsic aptitude" over the "lesser factors" of socialization and discrimination. Overall, women don't have what it takes to be good chemists or engineers or whatever.

Be sure not to miss his appeals to have a real discussion, unbound by the constraints of p.c. fascism and to look through the smokescreens that those namby pamby liberals put up about how everyone is equal. This is Harvard, not fucking Woodstock.

In his comments on the differences between the abilities of men and women, Summers offered a calculation based on research presented at the conference, arguing that if half as many women as men score in the top 5 percent of 12th-grade math and science tests, then far fewer women will rise to the highest level of math and science.

''If my reading of the data is right -- it's something people can argue about . . . then whatever the set of attributes are that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley," there will be more men than women with those attributes.

Hey man, women just don't do well in math and science, period. You can see it in high school. What do you expect? Of course they won't be able to cut it as scientists or mathematicians. Their lower scores have nothing to do with socialization as children, they have nothing to do with discrimination at the hands of teachers, they have nothing to do with discouragement from parents, and no possible connection to how tests are written and conducted. They're just not smart like that. They can do other stuff though, probably.

And no, Karl Marx, hiring discrimination is not a factor either:

As for discrimination, he was far more skeptical -- applying economic theory to make his point. "If it was really the case that everybody was discriminating, there would be very substantial opportunities for a limited number of people who were not prepared to discriminate to assemble remarkable departments of high quality people at relatively limited cost simply by the act of their not discriminating, because of what it would mean for the pool that was available. And there are certainly examples of institutions that have focused on increasing their diversity to their substantial benefit, but if there was really a pervasive pattern of discrimination that was leaving an extraordinary number of high-quality potential candidates behind, one suspects that in the highly competitive academic marketplace, there would be more examples of institutions that succeeded substantially by working to fill the gap."

Stop getting down on him, Joe McCarthy of the liberals. Give him a break! Then-president Summers is a friend of all the oppressed, seeing the pervasive discrimination people of all stripes suffer:

But during the same speech, Summers also said, "The data will, I am confident, reveal that Catholics are substantially underrepresented in investment banking ... That white men are very substantially underrepresented in the National Basketball Association; and that Jews are very substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture."

Wow.

Unfortunately, the transcript of his speech is no longer accessible, but both Inside Higher Ed and the Boston Globe have articles that reproduce the most salient points of his address.