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Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
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I love that guy. My only quibble with him would be his suggestion that this problem stems from greed as much or more than incompetence.
"Smart" is quite cheap. (I was in all the gifted programs, went to private high school, and was admitted to top tier universities. What did I learn there? I'm not sure. Ya think I'm elite? I've no STEM degree, so I'm inclined to view it all as nothing more than finishing school.)
I think a lot of the crowd Giridharadas targets is actually incompetent rather than malicious. They're convinced they're smart because they're part of a self-reinforcing system. Everyone around them agrees with them, and what results (which he notes in the book) is a circle jerk of self-aggrandizing "yes" people.
We all work with loads of MBAs. It seems almost half of all clients are owned by private equity these days. There was a time I'd see the bean counting MBAs as vicious deal junkies. I'd understand their obsession with efficiency and cost cutting, often damaging the company's business and long term future, as Gordon Gekko style behavior. But with more exposure to them, one realizes, they just don't know any other way to behave. They can't think beyond financials, charts, models. They're sort of autistic, armed with a higher than average bit of grey matter and assured They Know Best. (Giridharadas crushes this in the book.)
But we've told them they're smart, and they tell themselves they're smart, and since they judge themselves using their own measures of what's smart and successful, this feedback loop persists. All shall be done as the "smart" say it shall be done because They Know Best. The problem is their "intelligence" is short term, IBGYBG. As Giridharadas explains in the book, they never consider that what they're doing is creating long term harm to the businesses they're running (Giridharadas shares Nick Hanauers' view that current business management trends are robbing these businesses of their own domestic customer bases... Unfortunately he does not address the argument that these managers might not care about domestic consumers, as those can be replaced with foreign consumers).
I think Giridharadas should write another book exploring the cocooning or siloing of alleged "smart" people, and how this impacts us economically. The problems he focuses on aren't as much "elites" running things badly. It's "elites" who aren't really elite in any regard running things badly. A misapplication of the term "elite."
By dumb luck, I've been fortunate enough to mingle on a few occasions with people involved in some of the biggest policy decisions in recent history. And I think I'm a fairly solid judge of native intelligence. These people did not strike me as uniquely wise. More experienced, yes. But not scary-smart, like some research scientists or doctors one might meet. In law, in business, I've only happened across maybe a handful of people who truly fit the term "elite." Most of the people who seem to run the gears near the tops of organizations are pretty average, tenacious, and a bit lucky. (It's not genius level toil.) I think an assessment of whether the alleged "elites" are actually competent to offer suggestions on complex policies would create some scary results. Giridharadas should do that.
