UC-Berkeley Law School Degrades Itself Even More
No wonder Brad DeLong has had no luck persuading Christopher Edley to get rid of the malfeasant John Yoo. As Bob Somersby observes:
Christopher Edley thinks he’s one of your “betters.” It’s hard to believe, but that’s the exceptionally low-IQ framework this self-proclaimed member of the elite enunciated in Sunday’s piece. According to Edley, rubes like us should want our “betters” in important posts, like the post in which Kagan will serve:
EDLEY: The tension between elitism and populism is embedded in our national DNA because America rejected the model of a monarch ruling by divine right in favor of an iffy experiment in democratic self-governance. So now you are responsible for choosing your leader. Do you want someone like you or someone better than you?
What an astonishing framework! But so it goes when people like Edley spends decades inside institutions like Harvard, convincing themselves that they and their peers are “better” than all the rest of us rubes. [formatting in original]
Kagan, like Yoo, “has excelled in a meritocratic system, one that is selective yet far more open than in generations past.”
Bonus quote from Edley:
The gatekeeper power of such institutions is why it was so important to desegregate them (using affirmative action, among other tools) and why virtually all leaders of great universities talk about diversity and access.
Yep. Elena Kagan is All About Diversity.
At least Edley is consistent:
Dean Edley rolls embarrassingly off the tracks.
Read the whole thing.
Full disclosure: My wife’s cousin is working at Berkeley now. Fortunately, she’s not at the Law School, or I would worry for her reputation.
Funny you should mention that.
I have been reading a book about the neo-cons, and at first i was somewhat reassured to read that people like Kissinger started out in life as more or less ordinary… not members of a ruling class… and had their abilities recognized and were led up the meritocratic ladder. Okay, I said, these guys are smarter than me.
But the more I read the harder it is to discover in just what way they are smarter. They speak more languages, they read more books. But when it comes down to it they do stupid things, and they say stupid things.
I.Q., if that is what it is, is no guarantee of intelligence, if intelligence means the ability to do do useful things well.
And just for those who might think… I used to have a fairly high I.Q. and it has been the work of a lifetime to overcome it. I would point at the President’s advisors and other “non partisan experts” as pretty good proof that a high IQ will not prevent you from completely failing to understand the problem you claim to have “solved.”
Delong is pretty clear about one thing – he is one of the betters as well, although not in law.
I think we should shut down both Harvard law and Harvard MBA before the graduates do any more damage.
I think Brad has given up on his crusade against Yoo. To do otherwise would, as a practical matter, be tantamount to opposing Obama, who has embraced everything Yoo stands for and given it a big wet kiss. Brad can’t bring himself to find fault with Obama unless he does so as an apologist for Obama’s behavior.
Turning to Edley, the sad fact is that there’s a lot of history that shows that he is not the first to have that kind of attitude about who should rule. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Edward Bernays, and Walter Lippman are all examples of people who have uttered similar sentiments.
Good luck convincing the rabble on the wise meritocarcy when unemployment is 10%, underemployment much higher, and real wages are lower than 35 years ago. Even the stock market hasn’t done anything in a decade +.
No wonder De Long wrote an entire naval-gazing book on ‘The End of Influence’.
At least we can take comfort that someone has pointed out the merits of generational inbreeding of Monarchs.
Maybe Obama is just an anomaly, and we can get back to choosing between the Clinton line and Bush line?
Name recognition matters!
Coberly,
IQ has nothing to do with the issue. Unless your a nuclear physicist or some such profession one needs only to have sufficient intelligence to recognize opportunnities as they occur. Then personal morality takes over. I’m not referring to morality as so many relate it to sexuality. Social morality seems to be a much less abundent quality these days. How else does one explain the behavior of someone like Yoo in spite of his apparent ability to absorb and integrate information about the world.
The current crop of political and corporate functionaries are little better than the Soviet ear apparatchiki though that term need not in this case be limited to only lower level managers. We live in a managerial social economy with only scant evidence of what had been an entreprerneurial economy. Intelligence is not the key though it is useful. Guile and a limited form of fecklessness are more important qualities in the bureaucratic organizations that make up both government and private industry. Examples abound. Watch and listen to a debate in the Senate. Listen to the testimony of corporate managers. Self serving egotism is social capital.
Yes, there are many examples we can point to of others who do not fit that unflattering description. There are still people who serve the needs of the public and their own neighbors. There are industrious individuals who excel at business by creating new and more effective products. They are few and far between and fewer still appear in public for our observation. We hear of them and see the results of their work in some cases. But we recognize those instances as out of the ordinary. In the stormy seas the shark survives, but it feeds on every thing around it.
Jack
thanks. it reassures me that someone else notices this. i have a particular brief against the bright boys who have no interest in the truth or in doing good. just in appearing clever to the people who can help them rise in the world.
I think that the situation is worse than some gofers trying to “appear clever.” It is more a matter of those who will being willing to lie and obfuscate in regards to any issue or circumstance in order to move ahead. Many “professionals” get ahead not by having bright ideas, but by having ideas that suit the interests of people in positions of power.
At some level, the “like you or better than you?” is legitimate, but the answer is by no means obvious. What is more important to you, technical competence or shared interest? Because people are rightly suspicious that the main interest of elites is perpetuating themselves. Certainly people at the top are pre-disposed to think the system that put them ther as a meritocracy, just as those at the bottom tend to think that success is essentially random. Certinly the truth is usually somewhere between the extreemes.
People love “rags to riches” stories for their politicians. They can claim both the competence to get to the top, and a shared interest in a system that allows people to rise to the top. And since a majority of people think that they are “above average,” they have an interest in promoting a meritocracy.
Jim
yeah, we’d like to think Our Leaders are competent. just like we like our butchers and bakers to be competent. but what we are seeing here is the self-declared competence of a mutual admiration society. remember the folks who want an “economics literacy test” before they will let you vote. these people are so dumb that they think that what they “know” is “the truth” or The Truth. What helps them maintain their illusion is their cleverness at irrelevant idiot-savant-like games.
I would have to be the last to claim there are not important differences in “something like intelligence,” but the test is in what they do, not how clever they sound.
Coberly,
I suggest that you are giving the political class too much credit for at least acting on their genuine beliefs and ideologies. Not so, my friend. Certainly some of the class seems to be below average intellect, but more significant is the venal contempt they hold in their hearts (maybe just their pocket books) for the well being of the public that they supposedly represent. They are carrying out their assigned tasks, but that assignment is like the hidden agenda. The political class represents, and shares the values and ideologies of, the the highest levels of the monied class. That job they do quite well.
Jack
yeah. and if what i am reading about these guys is true, what they are really really smart about is double dealing and infighting. i don’t know if they start out with something like good intentions… after all an “ideology” makes some claim to be for the good of all the people who matter… but from the first they let the ends justify the means and enmesh themselves in a web of their own lies that takes more intelligence than even they have to manage, and of course leaves them no time to ever again think about any reality but their own personal political struggle.
i don’t know that keeping the rich on top is such a hard problem, but i imagine that with all of them fighting for their own advantage, there is a kind of law of mass action that assures the class as a whole takes care of itself.
I may not know exactly who will make a good leader, but I sure as hell know who shouldn’t be one.