She, a professor at the Wharton School, broke new ground in a predominantly male field by innovating fresh approaches to addressing challenging issues.
Anita A. Summers, a prominent economist affiliated with the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, known for her quantitative analysis in various areas of public policy, such as zoning, education, and tax incentives, passed away at the age of 98 at her residence in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania. Her son, Lawrence H. Summers, an economist and former Secretary of the Treasury, confirmed her demise.
While she had a substantial academic career, Mrs. Summers was not confined to an ivory tower. She emphasized the importance of infusing economic analysis into public policy and vice versa. She believed that the realms of business and finance could greatly benefit from a deeper understanding of policymaking.
Her primary role at Wharton, where she joined in 1979 after nearly a decade at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, was to establish and lead Wharton’s public policy and management department, the first of its kind at a business school, now known as the department of business economics and public policy.
During her tenure at the Philadelphia Fed and later at Wharton, Mrs. Summers was a vocal proponent of regional-level public planning, urging city and state governments to collaborate on economic matters that often transcended political boundaries.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she authored or co-authored a series of studies on the evolving postindustrial economy in southeastern Pennsylvania. Her work significantly influenced national perspectives on economic change.
Mrs. Summers displayed pragmatism in the face of disappearing industries and encouraged policymakers to redirect their efforts toward emerging sectors. When the local shipbuilding facility, once a cornerstone of the regional economy, closed in the early 1990s, she commented to The Washington Post that the pertinent question should be, “not why the Philadelphia shipyard is closing, but why it took so long.”
Her interests extended to zoning laws and their impact on economic growth, as well as education policy. She was among the early proponents of merit-based pay for teachers, using student test scores as a basis. Despite opposition from unions, she supported her case with substantial data.
Economics appeared to be a family tradition for Mrs. Summers. Her brother, Kenneth J. Arrow, was a Nobel laureate in Economic Sciences in 1972, and her brother-in-law, Paul A. Samuelson, received the same honor in 1970. Her husband, Robert, taught economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and her son, Lawrence, served as the Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton and later became the President of Harvard University.
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“During my upbringing, our dinner table discussions often centered around the government’s role in addressing poverty,” Lawrence Summers remarked.
Anita Arrow, born on September 9, 1925, in Great Neck, N.Y., Long Island, was raised in Manhattan by her parents, both of whom were Romanian Jewish immigrants—her father, Harry, worked as a banker, and her mother, Lillian (Greenberg) Arrow, was a homemaker.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Hunter College in 1945 and later obtained a master’s degree in the same field from the University of Chicago in 1947.
Anita began her career in New York as an economist at Standard Oil, where she faced challenges as one of the first women in such a role at a major corporation. She recalled that after being offered the job, the hiring manager said, “We decided we could get the same brains for less money since you’re a woman.” Although she worked on high-priority projects, she was not allowed to deliver them to the executive offices, which were off-limits to women. Instead, she had to wait by the phone for questions from her bosses.
In a 2022 interview at Wharton, she expressed feeling insulted, saying, “I felt like my brain was being insulted.” Subsequently, she left her job to pursue a Ph.D. program at Columbia University but later left to focus on raising her three children, a decision she cherished and defended.
In 1953, she married Robert Summers, who passed away in 2012. Anita is survived by her son Lawrence and two other sons, Richard and John. She also leaves behind seven grandchildren, six of whom are still living.
Once her children were in school, and her husband had moved to the University of Pennsylvania, Mrs. Summers accepted a teaching position in economics at Swarthmore College, located just outside Philadelphia. She actively engaged in local politics and policymaking and eventually became the president of her local League of Women Voters chapter.
In 1971, she joined the Philadelphia Fed, where she led its Urban Economics Group. Additionally, she served as the chairwoman of the board of Mathematica, a public-policy consulting firm.
Anita Summers took pride in being a woman who blazed a trail in a male-dominated field, paving the way for subsequent generations of women, including individuals like Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, whose first job was in Mrs. Summers’s department at Wharton.
Dr. Stevenson emphasized the significance of a department founded by Anita Summers, saying in a phone interview, “It meant a lot that it was a department founded by Anita Summers. Being a parent, being a spouse, it’s a reminder of how things have changed and the amount of grit and talent it took female economists to succeed in that generation.”
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