While most of my fellow economists had no knowledge of Carly Fiorina, the remarkable woman who performed brilliantly in the last Republican debate and shot up in consequence in the latest poll to within shouting distance of Donald Trump, I was the only one who had seen her perform with verve, logic and facts for several years. This happened because I saw her at close quarters when I was a member of the International advisory board of Zurich Insurance, as were she and the American economist Lael Brainard.
I must stress that, since I often defend corporations against ill-informed ad hominem attacks, I do not sit as a director on any corporate boards. Then again, as a defender of the Japanese government against scurrilous attacks by American competitors, I refused to accept an honorarium to write a paper for a MITI (Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry)-sponsored conference but wrote the paper anyway because Professor Komiya, a longtime friend, was organising the conference. While all the Japan-bashers at the conference took the honorarium of $2,000, I was given instead a coupon to spend on food at the posh hotel. I spent it on eating tempura (which incidentally the Portuguese brought from India, where it is called bhajia and uses chickpea flour for its batter while the Japanese use rice flour instead) at the hotel. I joked that my tempura had cost $2,000; the punch line however was that Tokyo was inordinately expensive at the time and tempura at the hotel could well have cost $2,000.
I agreed to join the Zurich International advisory board because it had as its members remarkable people like then UK prime minister Tony Blair, then Colombia president Andres Pastrana Arango, and most of all the then president of the Red Cross. Interacting with Fiorina, another member, was a real pleasure. She was astonishingly clever and always a forceful presence. So, when she became a presidential aspirant, I told my friends about her and how she would be more impressive than her rivals. And she was.
Among the conversations that I had with her, one that I recall in particular was about the charge that Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat who plays for Hillary Clinton to whom she is connected by marriage, had levelled against her in a California contest where Boxer claimed that, as chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard, she had dismissed 30,000 odd workers and even shifted some operations abroad. I asked Fiorina whether she had pushed back on this argument by saying that, if she had not, Hewlett Packard would have become uncompetitive and almost 300,000 jobs would have been lost. To my surprise, she said she had indeed used this counter-argument, showing that Boxer was guilty of the fallacy of not building the proper counter-factual. But the press, which is shallow at times, had not given play to her pushback. Well, now that she has become a likely president, they will have no choice but to pay attention to her argument.
Besides, Fiorina has built her own career, without piggybacking, like Hillary Clinton, on a spouse or cutting corners (often the whole cloth) to lie on matters such as her emails and the de facto illegal fundraising via the Clinton Foundation. I must confess that I even found Clinton's alleged mastery of the issues a fiction. Thus, when my teacher and then friend, the great economist Paul Samuelson, wrote in effect showing that (to use an illustration) if a hurricane devastated Miami, to react to this by cutting off free trade with the rest of the United States was generally foolish and would only add to Miami's loss, Hillary Clinton and her incompetent advisors kept saying that Samuelson had produced an argument in favour of protection. Then again, while she maintains now that the Republicans are wrong on illegal immigration, she forgets that she herself opposed the issuance of driving licences to illegal immigrants at one time, or that the worst excesses of building fences and trenches to keep out illegal immigrants from Mexico were undertaken by her husband and then US president Bill Clinton.
Indians will also remember how she supported Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank, who had violated the law on retirement (as confirmed by the Bangladesh Supreme Court eventually) against the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, a female leader who had been elected by a virtual landslide, even threatening allegedly to have aid to Bangladesh cut off. A strange advocate of female leaders indeed.
No wonder then that Hillary Clinton is not trusted by many today; and she has fallen in the polls while candidates such as Vice-President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders are seen increasingly as alternatives. Perhaps, Hillary Clinton will discover to her chagrin that you cannot fool people all the time.
The author is professor, economics, law and international affairs, at Columbia University and wrote in the 1970s on women in politics