JULY/AUGUST 1999 · VOLUME 20· NUMBER 7 & 8
The July/August 1999 Lawrence Summers Memorial Award* goes to Tom Anderson, a Philadelphia bartender and newlywed.
"It will be subtle," Anderson told the Philadelphia Inquirer, commenting on his corporate-sponsored wedding. Anderson talked 24 businesses into donating products or services in exchange for advertising at his wedding to Sabrina Root, a Philadelphia hairstylist.
Root refused to accept advertising banners draped across the aisle.
The couple gained an estimated $26,000 in donations, including a limo
donated by the National Inquirer.
(Dianna Marder, "Some, er, Everything Borrowed?" Philadelphia Inquirer, August 15, 1999; thanks to Ben Manski for forwarding the story)
*In a 1991 internal memorandum, then-World Bank economist and current Deputy Secretary of Treasury Lawrence Summers argued for the transfer of waste and dirty industries from industrialized to developing countries. "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?" Summers wrote. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. ... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under polluted; their air quality is vastly inefficiently low [sic] compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City." Summers later said the memo was meant to be ironic.