Larry Summers on Stanley Fischer

Stan Fischer was the most influential macroeconomist of his generation—not only to me, but to the world.

He was, in turn, my teacher, my colleague, my friend, my predecessor, and my counterpart. But more than any of those roles, he was the person who best exemplified how economics could be used—at the highest level—to make the world more stable, more just, and more prosperous.

I first encountered Stan in the fall of 1977. I was 22, an eager graduate student taking the T from Harvard to MIT to sit in on 14.462, Graduate Monetary Economics. It was there that Stan, with his characteristically understated brilliance, demonstrated what I had not yet fully appreciated: the power of a clear and disciplined mathematical framework to guide economic understanding—and, more importantly, economic policy.

Marty Feldstein had shown me that a regression could change the way the world thinks. Stan showed me how thought itself—structured, honest, and clear—could shape institutions and societies.

The textbook he wrote with Rudi Dornbusch—his brilliant and, let’s be honest, slightly odd-couple coauthor—was foundational. Their work did for macroeconomic teaching what Newton’s Principia did for physics instruction: it brought coherence where there had been confusion, and relevance where there had been abstraction. That book is aging—but like Stan always was, it remains full wisdom.

When I joined the MIT faculty two years later, I saw Stan not just as a teacher, but as a model of what it meant to be in the prime of academic life. He was 35 but already had a towering intellect. MIT, at the time, was the epicenter of macroeconomics, and Stan—with Rudi—was its gravitational core.

And what was so rare about Stan is that he combined that intellectual magnetism with something even rarer in the academy: generosity. He was generous with ideas, with his time, and above all, with his loyalty. He mentored the brilliant and the merely competent with equal patience.

I remember once asking Stan and Paul Joskow if I could honestly write in a letter that a student was in the top third of the class. They told me yes. And Paul added, with that dry MIT smile, “All of our students are in the top half.” That was the ethos Stan cultivated—rigor, yes, but also encouragement and belief.

When I left MIT for Harvard, I became Stan’s neighbor in Newton. Our homes were 250 yards apart. I’d see the Fischer boys playing touch football across from our house, and it was there that I came to know Stan not as a professor, but as a husband and father. I have never seen a more devoted, supportive, or loving marital team than Stan and Rhoda’s.  Nor better parents. I hope their sons know how lucky they are.

And it wasn’t just his family who received that care. When life was hard—and for me, there were plenty of those moments—Stan was there. Quietly, consistently. The kind of friend who didn’t need to ask what to do, because he just knew.

In 1988, Stan went on leave from MIT to become chief economist of the World Bank. And in what was perhaps the most improbably generous act of his long career, he recommended that I—a stunningly disorganized, disheveled version of myself—succeed him. That was classic Stan, always more focused on potential than polish.

Everyone who worked with Stan at the Bank tells the same stories: of marginal comments on page 59 of arcane reports; of political tensions resolved not with force, but with patient clarity; of careers launched with a quiet word of encouragement. There hasn’t been another chief economist at the Bank like him, before or since.

When the chance came in 1993 for the U.S. to influence the selection of a new Deputy Managing Director at the IMF, I knew there was only one name to put forward. Stan.

And yes, Michel Camdessus was skeptical at first. Stan was close to me, and maybe Camdessus thought he was too strong a personality. But he came around. And years later, he told me: it was the best decision he ever made at the Fund because those were the most tumultuous years in postwar international finance: Mexico. Argentina, Brazil. Korea. Thailand. Indonesia. Russia. Much of Africa. It was crisis after crisis– and in each of those moments, Stan was a steady hand, a calm presence and a voice of reason.

Stan didn’t bring heat. He brought light. He had what I’ve seen in almost no one else: deep seriousness without even a trace of self-seriousness. He could be funny, dry, warm—but when the stakes were high, he had an intellectual clarity that cut through the noise.

There has never been before or since a wealthy-country financial official so universally respected, admired—or more trusted—in the developing world. And I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say: hundreds of millions of people live in more stable, more secure economies because of Stan Fischer.

After the Fund, Stan dabbled in the private sector. A mutual friend once quipped that Stan was brilliant there—but his heart was still with the debtor countries, not the shareholders. That friend had it exactly right.

Then came the Bank of Israel. Under Stan’s leadership, Israel navigated the global financial crisis better than almost any advanced economy. But what struck me more was how ordinary Israelis treated him: with a kind of quiet reverence. You don’t usually see that for economists. But Stan wasn’t just any economist.

He had the firepower. But more importantly, he had the character.

The real measure of a person’s legacy isn’t just how many citations they have, or how many papers bear their name—it’s how they showed up when it mattered. In classrooms. In crises. In conversations with students who didn’t yet know what they could become.

Stan always showed up. With clarity, with kindness, and with purpose.

I don’t think we’ll see another like him. I’m certain I won’t.

Rest in peace, my teacher, my friend, my hero.