Intellectual Inbreeding: Achievetrons

The latest issue of Harper's has an article called Achievetrons by Lewis H. Lapham, which describes the consequences of intellectual inbreeding when influenced by Maximum Advantage. The resultant products all thing the same: Me First.

Excerpt:

It also illustrates The recommendation deserves to be ranked with the ones until recently in vogue at the Palm Beach Country Club among the members acquainted with the achievetron Bernie Madoff. For the past sixty years the deputies assigned to engineer the domestic and foreign policies of governments newly arriving in Washington have come outfitted with similar qualifications—firstclass schools, state-of-the-art networking, apprenticeship in a legislative body or a think tank—and for sixty years they have managed to weaken rather than strengthen the American democracy, ending their terms of office as objects of ridicule if not under threat of criminal arrest. The Harvard wunderkinds (a.k.a. “the best and the brightest”) who followed President John F. Kennedy into the White House in 1961 hung around the map tables long enough to point the country in the direction of the Vietnam War. Henry Kissinger, another Harvard prodigy, imparted to American statecraft the modus operandi of a Mafia cartel. The Reagan Administration imported its book of revelation from the University of Chicago’s School of Economics (“privatization” the watchword, “unfettered free market” the Christian name for Zeus) and by so doing set in motion what lately has come to be seen as a longrunning Ponzi scheme. Take into account the Ivy League’s contributions to the Bush Administration—Attorney General John Ashcroft (Yale), Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Princeton), director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff (Harvard)—and I can imagine a doctoral thesis commissioned by the Kennedy School of Government and meant to determine which of the country’s leading institutions of higher
learning over the past fifty years has done the most damage to the health and happiness of the American people.

The higher educational system has sold itself to capitalist ideology (as opposed to ideas) and the military-industrial complex. Although the people and examples cited above hail from different academic backgrounds, the most corrupted reside in the intellectually bankrupt economics departments whose theories and models where large contributors to the looming financial disaster. As was the case with Marxists, these sort too readily believed their own B.S.* Science is not about building a model and calling it reality. Ideology has been mistaken for fact. A real science would recognize the inherent limitations in its models. Assumptions are not laws; their economics has none. Complexity has more potential for instability. Constraints almost always exist. Standing on the Earth's surface, one does not float up. Perhaps they forgot where they were? Achievetrons indeed.

As such, the "best and brightest" can be described thus:

1. In advertising law, best means as good as any other.
2. The brightest create by burning.
   

When these sort promise to "fix" something, expecting the worst is completely justified.

* (The initials are not coincidence.)

Addendum
From Hope latest victim of economy (Seattle PI):

"Right now, more than a crisis in mortgages or in housing, we have a crisis in confidence. That is the biggest problem in trying to analyze the current market," said James Stack, president of market research firm InvesTech Research in Whitefish, Mont. "You cannot analyze psychology."

The lights are on, but nobody's home...