The Best and The Brightest

39 thoughts on “The Best and The Brightest”

1. The (alleged) energy secretary nominee, Steven Chu, went to URochester (RaChaCha!) and UC Berkeley. Does that help? He’s also a Garden City HS grad. Long Island represent!!!

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2. There’s also the argument that those who go to the Ivies at some level already had doors opened for them, that going to an Ivy doesn’t cause your success but simply affirms it. I agree that there are plenty of bright, intellectually curious people at other schools than the Ivies–indeed, the teaching can be much better at so-called second-tier schools. (Personally the top-tier publics leave me cold as being too big, but they work for some…) I’d choose a small school with good teaching for undergrad and hope to go from there to a top-tier grad school if that’s the goal.
   I’m still, on balance, happier that we will no longer have an anti-intellectual president than dismayed at his elite choices.

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3. “I’m still, on balance, happier that we will no longer have an anti-intellectual president than dismayed at his elite choices.”
   What does the pedigree of the people involved matter if the economic approach chosen is disastrously wrong? We seem on track to recapitulate the mistakes of the British government during the 1970s, and it’s a very ugly prospect. I’d like to see a book or an article on the subject, but I’ve been googling around, and some of the major ingredients seem to have been the nationalizing and subsidizing of major industries (especially coal and auto), as well as crippling labor unrest. The crippling labor unrest seems unlikely at the moment, but the nationalization and subsidy part is looking uncomfortably familiar.

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4. Cheer up. Maybe Sarah Palin will be in office by the time Jonah’s ready for a job in government, and Bergen Community will suffice.
   But I wouldn’t panic yet anway, because also looking on at the inauguration will be Joe Biden, VP (University of Delaware; Syracuse for law school) Tom Daschle, Health and Human Services (South Dakota State), Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security (Santa Clara University), Bill Richardson, Commerce (Tufts), Robert Gibbs, Communications Director (North Carolina State)—those are just the five I thought of off the top of my head. I’d love to see a breakdown that shows the true balance.

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5. “What does the pedigree of the people involved matter if the economic approach chosen is disastrously wrong”
   We’re not talking about pedigree — we’re talking about analytical intelligence. There’s no reason to believe that the people Obama has chosen are driven by any ideology. You’re complaining ’cause they’re not driven by the unthinking ideology that any government intervention must necessarily be wrong (like Hoover).
   I’m suggesting casual parallels to Hoover; you’re suggesting casual parallels to the British economic woes of the 1970’s, Krugman is suggesting (I hope better than casual, since he’s a Nobel laureate economist) parallels to the Japanese downturn. Each probably has lessons to teach these eggheads, and I hope they think about them, learn, and do their best for us.

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6. “You’re complaining ’cause they’re not driven by the unthinking ideology that any government intervention must necessarily be wrong (like Hoover).”
   bj,
   Hoover was a mining engineer, a technocrat rather than an ideologue, and a Stanford man. Amity Shlaes says of him in “The Forgotten Man” that WWI was a formative experience for Hoover: “Hoover came to believe that life was like wartime, and that government, therefore, ought to plan more, as if in a war.” He rose to prominence for his leadership of relief efforts in Belgium and elsewhere, as well as his work on managing flooding on the Colorado River. Early in the 1920s as Secretary of Commerce for President Harding, Hoover wrote a book called “American Individualism” where Shlaes says he “rejected the old brand of absolute individualism and disdained laissez-faire economics as “theoretic and emotional.”” Struck by the inefficiency of having 66 different sizes of brick manufactured in the US for paving, Hoover called a meeting of brick-manufacturers and had them cut the number down to 11. Coolidge, not Hoover, was a laissez-faire guy. Hoover was much more hands on. He said of Coolidge, “One of his sayings was, ‘If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them.’…The trouble with this philosophy is that when the tenth trouble reached him he was totally unprepared, and it had by that time acquired such momentum that it spelled disaster.”
   Hoover’s presidency was consistent with his earlier career. Here are some more quotes from “The Forgotten Man.” “The more Hoover thought about it, the more he too liked the idea of a war against inflation.” Deflation, of course, was the curse of the Great Depression, so this was exactly the wrong approach. “Right away–in November 1929–Hoover pushed to expand an existing public buildings program by the healthy sum of $423 million on the theory that the spending would boost the economy.” On November 1929, Hoover brought together heads of industry and urged them to keep up their spending and their payrolls, believing that high wages could save the economy. “In the end, businesses had to choose between lowering wages and shutting down. Often they shut down.” The list of Hoover’s often harmful interventions goes on and on: propping up farm prices, signing the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill (at a time when the US had a huge export surplus and had an enormous amount to lose in a trade war), and pushing for rules against short selling.
   No, Hoover was not a laissez-faire guy, and the failure of his methods contain a lesson for us, too. (I would also like to know more about the Japanese government’s reaction to their long recession. They seem to have screwed up, too, since the thing lasted about a decade and a half, with only a brief pause before the current troubles. Whatever they did, let’s not.)

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7. I know nothing about Hoover (hence my “casual” cite). I’ll let other discuss the issue substantively.
   But, the problem with “Whatever they did, let’s not.”
   is that the flip side of it is “Whatever they didn’t do, let’s consider.”
   Framing the problem as not doing something defaults to not doing something. The problem is that we need to think both about what to do and what not to do (not just what not to do).

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8. Here are a few ideas:
   1. Let’s not have a trade war with the whole world.
   2. Let’s not pave over the entire country to provide public works jobs (like they did in Japan).
   http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15117373
   3. Let the Big 3 (or one or two of them) go bankrupt. By many accounts, bankruptcy protection would be very good for GM.

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9. Ok, now suggest some things we *should* do. Otherwise, the list sounds like justification for the do nothing ideology.

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10. PS: the governor of North Carolina was on NPR a few days ago, and he did suggest one thing that we could do — he wanted to reduce “unfunded mandates”, and pointed at one, RealID. Now, of course ,that’s kind of undoing something we’ve already done, so I’m not sure it counts.

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11. What if doing nothing is the right thing to do?
    The answer to what we should do depends on the nature of the problem, and I’m not sure that is really understood. A few months ago, inflation was all anybody could talk about, while right now, quite a few people think we are undergoing deflation. I hope the best and the brightest figure this one out correctly before starting the cure.

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12. “So, Steve and I always figured it was a top-tier public school for the kids. Which serves us well, because we have no college funds for the boys.”
    Too bad Rutgers wasted the last ten years gutting the academic programs and building up football. Perhaps by the time the boys are ready to enroll, Buffalo might have made the changes their president has been talking about. Or perhaps you’ll have solved a joint location problem at a midwestern financial center.

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13. My point is merely that doing nothing is one of the many options available to us. It is not the gold standard against which all options should be measured. Taking no action could lead just as surely to disaster (i.e. when a train is running headlong into another) as taking an action.

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14. I’m glad to have Suze’s list, up above; it’s helpful to put the Ivy-appointees in context. I was going to ask if anyone knows whether the %age of Ivy appointees was higher or lower in this incoming adminstration than the last several? After all GWB went to Yale and presumably networked a little while there…
    Obama’s appointees look a lot more diverse than some previous administrations. But if their educational backgrounds are similar then their diversity may be literally only skin deep. I’m withholding judgment; just curious.

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15. I’m glad to have Suze’s list, up above; it’s helpful to put the Ivy-appointees in context. I was going to ask if anyone knows whether the %age of Ivy appointees was higher or lower in this incoming adminstration than the last several? After all GWB went to Yale and presumably networked a little while there…
    Obama’s appointees look a lot more diverse than some previous administrations. But if their educational backgrounds are similar then their diversity may be literally only skin deep. I’m withholding judgment; just curious.

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16. I’m glad to have Suze’s list, up above; it’s helpful to put the Ivy-appointees in context. I was going to ask if anyone knows whether the %age of Ivy appointees was higher or lower in this incoming adminstration than the last several? After all GWB went to Yale and presumably networked a little while there…
    Obama’s appointees look a lot more diverse than some previous administrations. But if their educational backgrounds are similar then their diversity may be literally only skin deep. I’m withholding judgment; just curious.

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17. I’m a graduate both of an ivy and of another non-ivy top school. IMHO, the baseline – the average intellectual capacity of my cohort – was far higher at the ivy than at the other top school. The baseline of each school was far higher than i’ve found in the non-elite workplaces (i.e. places that are not a standard career path for post-ivy people like big law firms or the now defunct i-banks) where I’ve spent the last 20 years.
    The kids who are excellent and/or ambitious attendees of other schools will certainly rise to the top, but if you’re picking a person at random from a pool, you may be more likely to pick a smart and capable person from a pool of ivy grads. (FWIW, i got to the ivy on merit – not a wealthy family, parents didn’t go to college, etc.)

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18. No real reason to think that the big O is picking at random from the pools.
    I would certainly hate to think that the only people likely to reach the highest level of public service in America are folks who chose to attend college in a particular athletic conference thirty years ago. That’s not change I can believe in…

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19. Rutgers has the best Philosophy department in the world, and has had one of the best for a very long time.

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20. The Leiter report has Rutgers tied with Oxford for #2 in the English world. That’s amazing for a school that a lot of Americans aren’t sure what state it’s in.

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21. Good for Rutgers, but (to go back to the original topic of the post) if a president starts putting large numbers of philosophers into senior positions, I’m going to give anti-intellectualism some serious consideration.

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22. What is the pedigree of GWB’s cabinet?

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23. Don’t know about the whole cabinet, but the secretary of agriculture was Lincoln’s mayor (and a Democrat). He used to get on the alternative radio station and read promos for 90201.

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24. “you’re picking a person at random from a pool, you may be more likely to pick a smart and capable person from a pool of ivy grads”
    I’m not convinced that’s true. Half of the girls on my hall at my elite public school were admitted into Cornell, but couldn’t afford to go. I don’t think they got dumber at my elite public. There’s clearly excellent faculty there (ie Rutger’s philosophy department).
    And if you compare the SATs, GPAs and whatever between a Harvard admittee and another school like Colgate or Oberlin or Reed, there’s such a small variation. The difference in SAT scores could be chalked up to not getting enough sleep the night before the exam.
    I would love to see a cabinet made up entirely of philosophers.

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25. “I would love to see a cabinet made up entirely of philosophers.”
    No comment.

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26. I for one don’t want a cabinet made up entirely of any one type of person, be they philosophers or Ivy League grads. The greater a diversity of experience/thought you have in your pool of team members, the less likely the group is to have a large blind spot.
    And might I add that I continue to dislike the academic insistence that all pedigree stems from where you studied — not what you have accomplished in the rest of your life. How many totally empty suits have I known who constantly bring up their ivy credentials? (And if you’ve been out of school for 20 years, why are we still talking about your degree? Perhaps because you have nothing else to point to?)

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27. It’s got to be even better than a soccer team made up of philosophers.

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28. “I would love to see a cabinet made up entirely of philosophers.”
    Aside from the ego-boost of being governed by people with worse suits than my own, I can’t see any advantage. From my personal knowledge of philosophers, I’ve always found them to be good people, but the philosophers I have known are primarily employed teaching Aristotle and the like to 20 year-olds. A worthy task, but hardly better preparation for managing a large enterprise than, say, having appeared in Predator.
    Those philosophers that I know only through their writing seem worse (the only exceptions being dead).

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29. Amy P:
    “What does the pedigree of the people involved matter if the economic approach chosen is disastrously wrong?”
    That’s a very good point, Amy, and the past couple of decades has demonstrated that. The ‘Chicago School’ has unambiguously failed at everything except dominating academia, gathering Nobel prizes, and aiding in redistributing wealth upwards.
    “We seem on track to recapitulate the mistakes of the British government during the 1970s, and it’s a very ugly prospect.”
    I didn’t realize that Thatcher bailed out the City after deregulation produced massive financial collapse. Indeed, I had thought that the ‘Big Bang’ happened in the 1980’s, so ignorant am I.

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30. Amy P:
    “What does the pedigree of the people involved matter if the economic approach chosen is disastrously wrong?”
    That’s a very good point, Amy, and the past couple of decades has demonstrated that. The ‘Chicago School’ has unambiguously failed at everything except dominating academia, gathering Nobel prizes, and aiding in redistributing wealth upwards.
    “We seem on track to recapitulate the mistakes of the British government during the 1970s, and it’s a very ugly prospect.”
    I didn’t realize that Thatcher bailed out the City after deregulation produced massive financial collapse. Indeed, I had thought that the ‘Big Bang’ happened in the 1980’s, so ignorant am I.

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31. The key problem with having philosophers (or any kind of academic whose professional life is not oriented to the exercise of power) in cabinet is that they mostly lack the managerial skills and sense of urgency necessary for the job. Of course, many actual appointees have the same problem, and some philosophers don’t (I’d be happy to see Bill Galston back in the White House, personally). The only philosophers I’d be happy to see there have done other things — Amy Gutmann, Myles Brand… well, there must be others. I’d love to see some philosophers as advisors on policy (I think that Norm Daniels was on the Clinton health committee eg). I’m not offering, myself.

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32. I only recently heard about British Leyland and am interested to hear more about its history, which seems to have been very complicated and very troubled (first private, then nationalized, then sold off, eventually winding up almost entirely under foreign ownership, with almost no surviving British-owned car manufacturing left). The management style and the issues with labor sound very similar to what one hears about the Big 3. I have some links below. In the second video segment (from Jeremy Clarkson’s “Who Killed the British Car Industry?”), they say that in the bad days, Ford discovered that British Leyland was losing money on each and every Mini, despite the fact that it was one of their very best products.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Leyland

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33. “sense of urgency necessary for the job”
    This is a biggie, and it applies to academic scientists and physicians and everyone who gets the privilege of choosing not to make a decision, waiting for more evidence or more study or more research, or punting the question to someone else.

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34. “or punting the question to someone else.”
    She can read minds. Burn her.

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35. Sorry for the double post; the blog software hung up. I even checked to make sure that it had not posted before I posted again.

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36. Amy P, just so you know, Jeremy Clarkson is an entertainer whose schtick is a larger-then-life right-wing sexist oafish and ignorant persona (for all I know he is entirely delightful in real life, but his comedic character is odious — he was a very good child actor, though, in the 60s). He’s not even a light entertainment-type journalist, and my guess is that his acquaintance with the economic history of the auto-industry is highly limited.
    The story of Leyland is very complicated, and may well have lessons for the American auto-industry today, and I hope that the next administration will figure out whether there are any and what they are (I presume that the current adminstration is largely uninterested). FWIW my stepfather started out at Morris Motors aged 14, and worked for its successor companies all his working life; my high school was the one that “served” the auto industry in Cowley (England’s Detroit), so this is close to my heart.

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37. What I took away from my very brief research was that back in the day, the British automotive industry did have some excellent products (the Mini and the Landrover), but that at the same time it was producing a lot of junk.
    Interestingly, I’ve lately been hearing a lot of praise for American trucks–people seem to absolutely adore their pickups. My sister and I both have Ford Tauruses and love them, but by far the most appealing feature to both of us is how cheap they are used. My husband and I bought ours in 2004 for around $10k, managing to pay the thing off in a year. From my recent reading of Craigslist, in the one year that we’ve owned it, it has lost around $4k or $5k in value, which is pretty dire, and leads me to think that the market is trying to tell me something about the car’s future repair needs (or maybe the issue is just that the Taurus is a gas hog).
    Anyway, I’m wondering whether it wouldn’t be a better idea to specialize and just make the type of vehicles that the US is really good at, rather than hoping against hope that the indigenous US auto industry can reinvent itself, and in the meantime spotting it billions of dollars every time it hits a rough spot. I realize that this may go against the US fuel efficiency regime and would require a much smaller GM.
    Back to Laura’s original post–it may be too close to home, but I’ve been wondering about the role of “the best and the brightest” in the credit crisis. Back when my husband was teaching at an elite school in DC, it was noticeable that the most talented undergraduates from a variety of majors were drawn as if by some sort of law of nature into investment banking (and law school too, of course). I don’t know anything about the field (or what sort of resumes those most culpable for the credit disaster have), but I do wonder about the relationship between the credit bubble and “the best and the brightest.” After all, that documentary on Enron is called “The Smartest Guys in the Room.”

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38. I think it would be good to have a lot of diversity in the cabinet. And if you limit yourself to just Ivies, you cut out economic diversity.
    I worked at a consulting company where the new hires were exclusively Ivy. Don’t get me wrong, as a group we had great writers and good mathemeticians. But their worlds were insular — no one knew any working class or poor people outside the few they met doing volunteer work.
    Many thought that people who hadn’t attended college (secretaries, clerks, wait staff etc.) were somehow less human — didn’t have hopes and dreams, didn’t have any useful skills, etc.
    And I think that bias colors your view of public policy. And not for the better.

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39. Here’s Paul Graham on credentials and his belief that credentialism is declining. If he’s right (and I hope he is) we could see a better alignment of talent and jobs. http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html

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