Here is a scene that is quintessential Larry Summers: the pedagogical forcefulness, the certitude—and the reality that the rightness of his thinking does not always match the forcefulness of his articulation.

Summers segued to an explanation for how he chose a career in economics. The field, he said, provided tools that can be used to make the world, or a basketball team, better. The key is reading data and recognizing what it tells you. Then Summers paused and asked the assembled players a rhetorical question: Did they believe a shooter could get a “hot hand” and go on a streak in which he made shot after shot after shot? All the players nodded uniformly. Summers paused again, relishing the moment. “The answer is no,” he said. “People apply patterns to random data.”

From the New York Times Magazine’s recent piece on Summers and Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard.

….some new studies that use huge, previously unavailable data sets are suggesting that, in some instances, hands can ignite, and the success of one play can indeed affect the outcome of the next.

…These new studies do not undermine the validity of the magisterial past research on hot hands, but expand and augment it, Dr. Yaari and the other authors say, adding even more human complexity. Yes, we probably imagine and desire patterns where they do not exist. But it may be that we also are capable of sensing and responding to some cues within games and activities that are almost too subtle for most collections of numbers to capture.

Today’s New York Times.

Almost too subtle for most collections of numbers to capture—I think that’s a phrase that could have been used to good effect during the Summers presidency.

Next I will prove that, in the history of the world, someone has indeed washed a rented car.