Lawrence Summers, director of the National Economic Council, just finished his interview with Maria Bartiromo of CNBC. A full write-up will have to wait until later today; I am preparing now for my own interview with Eric Schmidt of Google at 2pm. But as a place-holder, the interesting-to-me theme on which Summers ended:

Bartiromo conducted most of the interview as a breaking-news exercise, on Washington policy affairs of the day's news cycle (reactions to the latest unemployment figures, when and whether there would be further stimulus packages, etc). Summers -- on message, but also with some edge -- kept steering his answers to the longer view and the bigger perspective, of which more shortly.

At the end, he responded to Graham Allison, of Harvard, who asked a question from the floor consistent with one asked in many other sessions: How this period of politics, economics, and society would be viewed from a historical perspective, what developments are we overlooking that will matter in the long run, etc.

In response Summers gave a little set-piece about when his twin daughters were studying AP US history. They didn't spend much time on the serious economic recession of 1982, he said. And they didn't really pay attention to the economic problems of 1975. But they really had to dig into the story of the Great Depression. So one of his goals (and I hope we'll have the clip of this answer) was to make sure that when high school kids in 2040 study for their AP history, "they don't [have to] learn the economic history of this period."

Then he turned the riff in a more positive direction, saying that when today's students study the turn of the previous century, they learn about the first anti-trust laws, the creation of the national parks, and so on -- with parallel institution-building in the 1930s and the 1950s. So his second wish is that they would look back on this period when long term investments were made.

More later.