Summers displayed multicolored graphs detailing how efforts to create market economies, even when not targeted at the poor, nevertheless generally increase the income of the poorest sectors.
And countries that experience economic growth are more likely to become democratic, he said.
He added that per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has a “remarkably strong” correlation with decreasing child mortality rates.
“There is no rich country in the world where children breathe lead in the capital city,” he said in reference to the environmental benefits of economic growth.
But Summers said that economic growth and development have unfortunately “come to be very much separated in the global mind.”
He cited his 12-year-old twin daughters’ social studies textbook as a prime example. The book, he said, is ambivalent in its treatment of the Industrial Revolution, giving weight to both the benefits of growth and discussions of how industrialization led to exploitation.
“There’s a view I find myself acutely uncomfortable with—that growth is a mixed virtue,” he said.
He also criticized what he called “espresso-sipping Westerners” whose positions would deny the opportunity for citizens of third-world countries to buy western goods.
Summers emphasized that his remarks represented his personal views, not those of the University, the Clinton Administration or the current White House, eliciting laughter from the audience.
At the end his speech, Summers fielded questions on a wide variety of economic issues, including hedge funds and international AIDS prevention.
Summers will also speak today at 7 p.m. and tomorrow at 4 p.m. in the Starr Auditorium.
The Godkin Lectures, in memory of former political journalist Edwin Godkin, began in 1903. Past speakers, selected by Kennedy School professors, have included Adlai Stevenson, Nelson Rockefeller and the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Paul Samuelson, a Nobel-prize winning economist and Summers’ uncle, gave the lecture in 1986.
—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.