By Sheeva Azma
Disclaimer: The opinions below are Sheeva Azma’s alone and are not representative of the Census Bureau, US government, or any official entity.
Before we get to the article, a long note about new information emerging about Larry Summers since he’s been named in the Epstein files
NOVEMBER 18, 2025 (sorry, the Epstein House vote to release the so-called Epstein files — correspondences between Jeffrey Epstein and as-of-now unnamed others — will happen after I write this note, and I am too busy to keep up with any more details emerging later this week): I wrote this article about a month before it was to be published today (and only edited it just now to fix a single typo for clarity — so the article is written before the emerging info about Summers), but earlier this week, news broke that Larry Summers, who served as a government official in various economic roles and is also former president of Harvard, stated he was “deeply ashamed” of his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, who is known for his ties to Boston-area scholars financially and in other unknown and known ways that I will not mention here. Summers has walked back high-profile public commitments, and is currently maintaining a low profile.
Here’s the part many people don’t often think about: it’s not just Summers! MIT and Harvard, known worldwide as top-tier institutions, are core to the Epstein saga, because they helped legitimize him by hobnobbing with him and allowing him to engage in philanthropy, even going so far as to list him anonymously after he was known to be a criminal. It’s the definition of “dirty money” and it should have been unacceptable.
It was not unacceptable…and is it any surprise that Epstein found a home in the local biology research community, which I only really remember for being a highly competitive hellscape with women who were outwardly ragey to me? It is starting to make sense, in retrospect. Kindness (or even following the law, in Epstein’s case) was not on the list of priorities in the research culture at the time. Reportedly, Jeffrey Epstein even had an office at Harvard in the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, which has supposedly disbanded in name, but its former director is now working on his research at the MIT/Harvard Broad Institute. In case you did not know, MIT and Harvard are both in Cambridge, MA, and researchers (not just in bio, but other disciplines, such as Summers’ field of economics — he’s an MIT grad that became president of Harvard, after all) can work at one or both places through collaborations and resource-sharing.
Just how much Epstein money did MIT and Harvard take, and were they used for funding researchers, providing snacks at research seminars, or something else…and what did Epstein get in return? I know that realistically, these questions will go unanswered, but I wish they would not be.
Of relevance here, also, is that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY-4), co-author of the House bill to release the Epstein files, H.R. 4405, is also an MIT grad who graduated prior to the Cambridge, MA Epstein era which started in the late 1990s with donations to Harvard, and later, to MIT.
Back to Summers, who is the focus of the blog I wrote below. I’m not surprised that a man who said that women can’t do math because of biological reasons (and later defended his comment!) was financed by a notorious sex trafficker at the time of his comments. I just wish someone would have just called him out on his comments back then so that he couldn’t perpetuate sexism upon sexism.
It’s not like women in science weren’t angry about Summers’ comments about women in science in 2005, while he was president of Harvard, which is when he was asking for money for the school from Epstein, according to the Wall Street Journal. Back in 2005, Nancy Hopkins, an MIT biologist and lead author of a report on sexism at MIT, told the New York Times: “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill…let’s not forget that people used to say that women couldn’t drive an automobile.”
As for me in that time, that’s actually when I was living in Cambridge, MA, having left for college at age 17, and unbeknownst to me, also living in an Epstein hotbed. While I have no evidence to this effect, I would not be surprised if it turned out that my scholarships at MIT or the many research projects I worked on or the classes I took at both MIT and Harvard, or the professors who taught me from either institution, were financed by Epstein (with donors gladly welcoming the cash inflow and turning a blind eye to his life of crime). At that time, I was choosing to believe that science (and the world!) is a meritocracy, against all odds (and despite all the evidence to the contrary).
There is a false idea that those in power got there because they deserve to be there — and day by day, reality is proving that wrong. The reality is not pretty. Anyway…on to the actual article! I am living for the speaking of truth to power in our current times, by the way!
Photo By: Kaboompics.com on Pexels.com
Ever since I heard that Larry Summers (my fellow MIT alum) said “issues of intrinsic aptitude” make women worse at STEM than men, I decided that economists are out-of-touch with reality…until I decided to learn economics myself. I feel like economics makes a lot more sense now that I know it, since it is predicting what people and societies do, but a lot of it is kind of bleak. I mean, you’re predicting both how companies and individual people make decisions, and even entire societies…and my graduate research taught me that people don’t always make the most rational decisions.
Summers, who was Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, later led finance policy at the beginning of the Obama adminstration in the Great Recession. He did a good job with that since we’re no longer in a recession…but he might never live down his pseudoscience remarks in my eyes. I am a published developmental neuroscientist and would love to know where he got that idea (besides constantly seeing women pushed out of STEM, I assume).
Anyway, not-so-casual sexism aside, I wrote an entire blog about Nobel Prize winning neuroeconomics here on the Fancy Comma blog in October 2020, and noted that I was teaching myself economics at the time.
Allow me to quote the October 12, 2020 version of myself from that blog post:
I recently watched some of the lectures at MIT OpenCourseWare for their “Principles of Microeconomics.” While I still find economics tedious, I found Prof. Gruber’s take on economics and the world to be pretty cool, actually…
Back then, in the heyday of pandemic-onomics, Kevin Paffrath, a YouTuber with a degree in economics who challenged Gavin Newsom in the 2021 gubernatorial recall election in California, was my source of economics news. He would sip coffee at the opening bell and analyze the markets, even summarizing various aspects of economic policy and the different reports coming out on inflation, unemployment, and more.
Besides my following the markets and upskilling as a freelance finance writer (it was exciting when I finally landed my first crypto gig!), there was nothing fun to do anymore. Everything I had previously enjoyed, whether going to the mall with a coffee in hand, or even just perusing the fruit section at the grocery store, had become a COVID battleground.
While I wasn’t contributing to the economy in all my usual shopaholic ways, I still felt very much connected to commerce. I had spent my freelance career post-interning in Congress, in the first couple years of the first Trump administration, analyzing China trade policy for a DC-based think tank, and also was amassing knowledge about economic theory both thanks to my own dabbling in personal finance and working on finance writing for clients. I had also studied behavioral neuroeconomics in my PhD work at Georgetown using a paradigm called delay discounting, which I talked about in my October 12, 2020 blog post.
Throughout my life, I have embraced finance in ways that align with stereotypes of women, such as in being a shopaholic (you’d be surprised how much research can go into shopping for stuff, actually!) and being an unassuming woman business owner (no raging through busy meetings or golf sessions with my buddies for me), and even working for the US Census Bureau from late 2024 to mid-2025 — but that’s not about finance, even though it generates important statistics that drive financial policy.
I have also previously shied away from economics in ways that have cost me career opportunities. One day, interning in the US House of Representatives for a member who was on the Finance Committee, my supervisor asked me if I wanted to go to a hearing on banking policy — specifically, about debit card fees. Yes, I would love to, I said, but would I understand what they were saying? I felt intimidated and that came through in my reluctant acceptance. So, because I wasn’t 100% sure I would feel right in that room, I didn’t get to go at all. Lesson learned: when I interviewed to work for Census, I mentioned that I follow the government reports for which the Census collects data for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, such as the Current Population Survey, where we get unemployment numbers; the Consumer Price Index, which measures inflation; and others, and maybe that’s what got me the job!
Almost everything I have learned about the financial world is by interacting with it in reality. Of all of the domains I have worked in, finance is by far the hardest to break into. If I had to guess, one reason would be that some people seem reluctant to entrust young women such as myself with the details of economic policy. Whatever, I say to that, as a woman named Taylor Swift saved the economy according to the Federal Reserve. Economic power to the Swifties!
I was in graduate school at the height of the Great Recession, making Depression-era cake recipes in the nice kitchen of my otherwise spartan apartment, but I still remember how much economists were hated for their long-range optimistic vision of the US economy when day-to-day, everyday people thought it was all over. I could see why as the government bailed out big banks while people lost their houses, and the news told us all to not buy large sized toothpaste to save money. I was lucky to have a stable paycheck through it all, but in the pandemic, I found myself wondering why economic theory feels so out of touch with my everyday life.
In 2020, I decided to give economists the benefit of the doubt. I had been learning about finance and economics and business for years and years, so I decided to take the leap and teach myself economics — not in any structured way besides watching and rewatching lectures while working or squirrel-watching. Yes, that was a real pandemic activity for me, and it’s one of the only things I really miss about that otherwise awful time.
As I mentioned in my earlier blog, I went to MIT OpenCourseWare and found the YouTube playlist for 14.01 – Principles of Microeconomics. I don’t know what it is about MIT, but they speak my language more clearly than professors from anywhere else. Apparently, I learned way more than I thought I did, because to make a long story very short, apparently, thanks to this, I am now an economics tutor — both macro and micro!
I think what really appealed to me about this course specifically is that in the intro, the professor mentions that he is a “monetary policy” kind of guy — and, guess what, I’m big on all types of policy, including monetary policy.
So, yes, now that I am back to my normal commercial activities, I am now the person walking through the grocery store saying things like “If the prices go up…demand goes down. So, I am one of the few people paying this much for this grocery item right now.”
The moral of the story here is that in case you were thinking that just watching YouTube videos doesn’t make you smart, I am here to tell you: regardless of what other people tell you, your hobbies and knowledge are yours, and people can’t take them away from you…and when all else fails, fake your confidence until someone recognizes your abilities. 😉
Fancy Comma, LLC 