Kieran Healy goes after Larry Summers, Harvard's president, over an email he sent back in 1991, when Summers was at the World Bank. Kieran seems to think the memo lacked moral clarity, whereas it strikes me as raising reasonable questions (there is a paper by Daniel Hausman and Michael McPherson using Summers' memo to talk about the intersection of economics and moral philosophy). Brad DeLong appears to be on vacation; I suspect he will defend Summers on his return.

My puzzle is this. Kieran (and, according to Google, swarms of left-wing outfits, some of whom believe Summers was Bush's treasury secretary) seems to be bothered by the lack of an explicit moral framework in the memo, whereas I thought it was implicit but obvious. Is this perhaps the reason that academic professions tend not to talk to one another? Let me offer an example. I have a good friend who is both an economist and a Southern Baptist. He and his wife spent several years working in Ireland. One evening, he and his wife were together with me and my wife. Our wives were talking about the theatre (they both did their undergraduate degrees in theatre), and we were talking economics. I mentioned that in Ireland, Baptists were like homosexuals. The wives' eyebrows shot up, but my economist friend took about 2-3 seconds to see where I was going with this (roughly, both groups are small minorities that value close proximity to similar people, and therefore tend to congregate in larger population centers). Non-economists often think it is just weird to think and talk that way, so we tend to speak differently with each other than around non-economists. Speaking with fellow economists tends to save a lot of time and effort making clear what already seems obvious.