Late last week I found myself wondering: What is Larry Summers thinking? Not about that ! Rather, about the topic on which the economist, former treasury secretary and former Harvard president has been so irritatingly correct in recent years: the state of the American economy. He infuriated his own party in the Biden years by predicting in early 2021 that the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would overheat the economy, and then by rejecting the Federal Reserve’s insistence that inflation would be “transitory.” Under President Donald Trump, he warned that DOGE wouldn’t actually save money, and that tariffs could push toward stagflation. One of Summers’ least-loved observations came in the summer of 2023, when he posted a chart showing that the decline in inflation exactly tracked a similar dip in the mid-1970s — just before a second spike. Critics howled that the image constituted a “chart crime,” a random coincidence passing as a correlation. After...