​Larry Summers hoisted on his own petard . . .

"Larry Summers sits in traffic, has epiphany on regulation"

Welcome to Earth, Mr. Summers, enjoy your stay.

There is more.

When I was young my father told me stories about how he drove a sugar beet truck near Bay City, Michigan, as a child during the depression, and continued working hard difficult jobs, paper mill hand, right on through college. 

We were solidly upper middle class. I took his words to heart and delivered newspapers at 12, cleaned a church at 13-14, volunteered 20 hours per week at a hospital from 13-16, boxed groceries, stocked shelves at Safeway from 16-17, and worked as a paper mill hand during college, as well as moonlighted cleaning Mt. St. Helens ash from roofs and gutters, commercial construction, and painting. 

When I finished college, I realized I had a serious leg up on nearly every other worker I met. Few had even the most rudimentary level of common sense. I knew the rope nip was an existential danger, just as I knew the fan belt would eat a tie, yes, I had to keep an educated idiot from killing himself by tie in the fan belt. 

For people like Summers, highly intelligent, educated, white collar, the jobs were nearly always internships, work study aid, or some other use of academic knowledge or acumen. Like the supervisor in this story they never have the opportunity to develop common sense:

​Coyote finds Academic theories regarding minimum wage unpersuasive

As adults men like Summers spend their time honing their knowledge, and cleverness. Which allows them to fall into simple traps like the one here.

"No, this isn’t the start of a-man-walked-into-a-bar joke, although it could be. Summers’s May 26 op-ed in the Washington Post, a consolidated version of a column he wrote for the Boston Globe, details how “routine maintenance” on a bridge that took 11 months to build in 1912 turned into a five-year, budget-busting boondoggle."

Ok, it's the start of an intelligent, clever man walked into a bar joke. And it ends with the man who spent his life fighting for the kind of regulations which stymied the bridge repair wondering how that could happen. Heh!

Epiphany! Brilliant! Welcome to Earth Mr. Summers.