"I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University."
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov
It turns out that you can make that statement for any group of people. It takes all kinds of people to build prosperous nations.
It'a also particularly ironic that you're writing this because of a project that professors (and grad students) at some elite colleges started back in the 1970s, with some funding from the defense department. And their creation (the Internet) led to historic amounts of wealth creation in a stupendously short amount of time.
I also wonder where Britain would be without the numerous professors at elite colleges whose research in physics, mathematics, and chemistry made the Industrial Revolution possible.
There are countries where the government was heavily influenced by academic theories. Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several quite unsuccessful efforts at governance.
This is not a knock on academic elites in general. I want them sitting around and building the Internet! But I want a farmer actually running the country.
The Ivy League wasn't the "Ivy League" back then - just a bunch of fledgling colleges without much of a reputation. America was a different country. Smart, ambitious people went into planting, trading, or soldiering. What things were like 200+ years ago has no bearing on how they should be today.
> Marx was a PhD and a professor and his political philosophy was the basis for several quite unsuccessful efforts at governance.
One academic's theories led to some failed governments, therefore academics are bad at country-building? Marx wasn't even in charge of any of those countries. Other people (such as Lenin, a lawyer, and Trotsky, born to a farmer) read his work, went "this shit sounds dope", and tragedy ensued.
I can point you to any number of countries run by "farmers, lawyers, businessmen, and military officers" that weren't as successful as the US. As I already mentioned, Lenin was a lawyer. So was Fidel Castro. I hope I don't need to go through a list various military dictators.
> But I want a farmer actually running the country.
I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country. You can find people like that in every field. I couldn't care less what their background is.
The US succeeded (in part) because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity. George Washington stepped down voluntarily from the presidency after two terms. It seems normal to us but it was unthinkable back then. Everyone just assumed he'd stay in charge until he died.
No, that’s just the most egregious example. Circling back to my original point: I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes countries rich and how do you turn poor countries into rich ones. Academicians spend tons of time studying psychology, culture, politics can etc. But I can’t think of any of those theories that has ever been implemented in the real world to help a poor society develop into a rich one. When Lee Kuan Yew, who made Singapore rich in a generation, talks about development, he doesn’t talk about academic theories. He focuses on the culture of the ordinary people.
> I want smart people with good ideas, integrity, and communication skills running the country.
No. Ideas don’t make countries successful. Integrity, yes, but academics don’t have any special advantage in that regard. And the petty bureaucracies and box checking environment of academia selects against many of the other traits required for good leaders.
> I couldn't care less what their background is. The US succeeded because the early leadership was of incredibly high caliber and integrity.
The US succeeded because they were English by culture and departed little from the Anglo system of government and society, which was not created but evolved organically over centuries.
Revolutionary France is a good example of a society structured by “smart people” according to “good ideas.” It ended in disaster and bloodshed.
He (and most national leaders, elected or otherwise) works at too high a level to talk about academic theories in general conversation. You don't think he and the people working in his government studied economics, history, and politics? They just made Singapore prosperous by getting everyone to work harder and study more?
> academics don’t have any special advantage in that regard
Neither do "farmers".
> And the petty bureaucracies and box checking environment of academia selects against many of the other traits required for good leaders.
That's just broad stereotyping. We can do that for any of the professions you think should be in charge. "Military officers are rigid, hawkish, and overly inclined to action". "Businessmen are short-sighted and focus on the bottom line above all" and so on.
> Revolutionary France is a good example of a society structured by “smart people” according to “good ideas.”
Not really.
There is a difference between people with judgment governing with the advice of academics, and putting academic theories directly into action. A good example during pandemic were governors who listened to doctors but applied their own judgment after listening to other stakeholders, and those who outsourced decision making to credentialed experts.
We went from "academics can't build nations" to "academics can't lead nations". Then to "America became great because farmers, lawyers, and soldiers were in charge" (while ignoring failed nations that also had farmers, lawyers, and soldiers in charge). Finally landing upon Lee Kuan Yew and national character building (no idea how that's related).
There were no actual examples of an academic taking charge of a country and that country failing due to them being an academic (vs just being corrupt, despotic, insane, or plain incompetent). On the other hand, I provided lots of examples that showed academics have made modern society and the economy possible.
I'd argue that most academics don't have any interest in politics or leadership, which causes them to be relatively underrepresented in the arena. Regardless, I'm not biased against people due to their profession, as you appear to be.
You mean all by themselves? Well neither have plumbers, but I'm not about to disparage them over it, either.
This would set up a likely conflict, such as what we got a hint of when the masses elected Trump as a big middle finger.
Look where your governance-by-middle-finger got us. It got us an egomaniacal dotard, drunk on power, who shifted his politics when the opportunism suited him. His TV show got him just enough notoriety to move the needle among the masses. When he found that his toxic personality, based on name-calling and blustery bufoonery found a reception from Right-wing voters, there was nothing that could stop him from winning their side. But this was a man who could work with no one who wasn't willing to serve him without question, be they judges or legislators, and certainly a deal-breaker for our allies.
His world-view was an American centric one entirely, at a time when China had earned and demanded a role he couldn't conceive of or negotiate. Behind the scenes, he ruled a chaotic White House that was fortunately tested little. Still, the stories that escaped from this White House show that he was not to be contained by any legal constraints, and that he fostered an atmosphere where staff worked at cross-purposes to one another. Their singular focus was on the media, yet they couldn't even manage this successfully, despite the allegiance and sycophancy from Fox.
Finally, COVID-19 was the test they would not pass. Although Trump was due to receive some sympathy from his two impeachments, once America saw the reckless way he managed this pandemic and the huge toll it bore on us, there was little chance he could win the 2020 election. What we saw after the election was an unheard of nothing-to-lose strategy of trying to steal the election by any falsehood necessary, whether within the courts or in the streets. The books are coming out on the market now, but they show that our wildest dreams of what could have been happening in that White House paled when compared to horrid reality of what did.
We likely have to thank a mere few individuals such as Gen. Mark Milley, Mike Pence and such for holding together our country in the moments when it was the most vulnerable to those whose only concern was for power.
Your??
Second, what does it say about the desirability of what’s being sold by the technocratic elite that half the country voted for a second term for the egomaniacal dotard (for he surely was that), and most of the other half of the country got behind Joe Biden, a man from a working class background, a graduate of a second tier university known for his popular appeal rather than his intelligence?
You point to Trump, but I’d note that not even Democrats like the academic social engineers. On Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren (a Harvard professor) had an embarrassing performance. Even in NYC, home of the country’s technocratic elite, voters passed over the technocrat in favor of someone who promised to carry a gun to church as mayor.
Regardless, nobody is advocating having clergy run the country. (And no, listening to clergy as stakeholders in society and responding to voters’ whose beliefs might be rooted in religion is not the same thing as what the left seeks to do with academics. Putting a clerical “czar” in place to “nudge” people to desirable behaviors would be wild even for the Bush administration.)
Isn't this an argument for limiting the power we give to those in power? It's unrealistic to think that only people who are right will be in charge (I doubt I need to give examples). The realistic thing is strong controls on the power they wield, to that "short sighted masses" cannot take over. This idea underpins liberal democracy.
In a democracy, we have a way to limit the power of our government -- but what's the way to do that for those in power who are not in government? The traditional approach has been to use government power to check non-government power, but this seems to run counter to the whole "limiting the power we give to those in power." But if we don't use government power to check outsize private power, then we are again ceding too much power.
My own view is that the answer is less about how much power we grant than about how much accountability there is -- ie, broader and deeper democracy. But that seems to work mostly in theory; in practice this often gets circumvented by those with power and we get shallow democracy with limited accountability and thus unsatisfactory restrictions on both governmental and non-governmental power.
I agree that we need norms that limit any concentration of power. We've had anti-monopoly laws on the books for 130 years that serve a valid purpose. We may need to look at more laws to deal with recent constructs, I.e. platforms. I can see a superficial contradiction between not wanting government power, and giving government the power to break up monopolies or platforms. But if the overall goal is a restriction on how power can be concentrated, it's still in keeping with the idea of limiting what "those in power" can do.
I'm sure I've missed something. I definitely take your point.
(I mean those first two sentences non-ironically.)
An elite in practice means that we're stuck with irrational beliefs such as Lysenkoism. Democracy allows beliefs to compete and often correct ideas win. It's far from perfect but still has a better track record than self-styled rational elites.
The following quote is from Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line.
> But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
One of the problems is that we don't all get the same information.
> or we can go the other way where someone who thinks they know more than us (and you hope it's you but it doesn't have to be) gets to decide. Frankly, the latter idea is ridiculous to me.
You've bumped into the exact same problem that exists with our democracy. Do you want our future determined by a few well-informed, rational people? Or do you want it determined by an ignorant, short-sighted mass?