Last month, reports surfaced that former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is among the advisors to the Joe Biden presidential campaign. Although he started his career as an academic economist, Summers’s involvement with Democratic presidential campaigns stretches back at least to 1988, when he served as chief economic adviser to the failed Dukakis campaign. Since then, he has been a chief economist of the World Bank, a member of both the Clinton and Obama administrations, and a hedge fund adviser.

Summers has been advising the Biden campaign on economic policy, particularly on a plan to revitalize the economy in the aftermath of the novel coronavirus pandemic. This announcement was met with outcry from several organizations and commentators, due to concerns over Summers’s personal and professional past. Particularly, his actions as a high-level adviser and economic decision maker have consistently put working people last and served only to push the world economic system further towards one that benefits only an elite few.

While his stint at the World Bank in the 1990s is perhaps best known for the memo Summers’s signed indicating “under-populated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted,” which he later claimed was written in jest, what’s more concerning is the aspects of the role he took seriously. As chief economist, Summers spearheaded structural adjustment programs that imposed stringent conditions on debtors. By forcing austerity and liberalizing policies that benefited US corporations, he bears some responsiblilty for the consistent decline in living standards in parts of the developing world throughout the 1990s.