Saturday, September 21, 2013

Perfect parody

Unfortunately not a lot of people will get Caitlin Kelly's brilliant parody in the New Yorker, Janet Yellen's Harvard Speech. I especially loved this part:
There may also be differences between little boys and little girls that bear on fiscal responsibility, and which aren’t just a product of socialization. While I would prefer to believe otherwise, my experience with my own son—who insisted on playing Monopoly highly leveraged and usually ended family game night by flipping the board over, screaming that the rules were stupid, and storming to his room—tells me something.
It so perfectly recalls this section of Larry Summers' 2005 Harvard Speech, given when he was President:
So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise, I guess my experience with my two and a half year old twin daughters who were not given dolls and who were given trucks, and found themselves saying to each other, look, daddy truck is carrying the baby truck, tells me something. 
And just coincidentally I was just putting a paraphrase of this bit into my play DARK MARKET about the 2008 financial meltdown, in which Larry Summers played such a prominent role.