I’ve been watching the internecine debate among Democrats over whom Barack Obama should appoint as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, former Treasury secretary and Obama adviser Larry Summers or current Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Janet Yellen. Some of Yellen’s backing comes from those who think it’s important to have a woman in that position, but others make an affirmative case for her as a smart economist, and I haven’t seen anyone I respect argue that she isn’t.

But I also haven’t seen anyone argue that Larry Summers is not a supersmart economist. The case against him is that he is uncollegial and arrogant and that he supposedly slandered women when he was president of Harvard when he suggested that the reason there might not be so many women science academics is that more men have the aptitude for that. (This should not be controversial, since many studies show that men are more likely than women to have both very low and very high levels of intelligence.)