Larry Summers: belief

Transcript context

…Or the poorer parts of Boston, if you prefer. I was trying to temporize a bit while I thought. [laughter] But that’s not this question. I would tell the philanthropist a few general things. One is, I would say your temptation is going to be to spread the butter uniformly across the bread and to try to do everything, and that your $100 million is a lot of money, but the budget of the city of St. Louis is measured in the low billions of dollars. You can’t do everything. If you try to do a little bit of everything, you won’t see anything you did. So you should look for a targeted couple of interventions that will be most effective. That’s the first thing I’d say. The second thing I’d say is, you need to be very careful to make sure that whatever you think you’re buying is what you’re actually buying. If you give more money to the health budget of the city and the city responds by reallocating its own money from healthcare to other things then you’ll have demonstrated fungibility; you won’t have spurred healthcare. So have a strategy for addressing fungibility. I would probably say that if you can do something meaningful in education to create positive examples in education, which can then be emulated . . . And this is K–12.…

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