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<DIV class=timestamp>November 5, 2011</DIV>
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<H1><NYT_HEADLINE version="1.0" type=" ">Our Reckless
Meritocracy</NYT_HEADLINE></H1><NYT_BYLINE>
<H6 class=byline>By <A class=meta-per title="More Articles by Ross Douthat"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/rossdouthat/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
rel=author>ROSS DOUTHAT</A></H6></NYT_BYLINE><NYT_TEXT>
<DIV id=articleBody><NYT_CORRECTION_TOP></NYT_CORRECTION_TOP>
<P>HERE is a story about the promise of America. A boy grows up in rural
Illinois, the grandson of a farmer who lost everything in the Great Depression.
He goes to his small-town high school and then attends his state university,
where he walks onto the basketball team and graduates Phi Beta Kappa. He does a
stint in the Marine Corps Reserves, gets his M.B.A. and then goes to work for
one of the Midwest’s regional banks. </P>
<P>In a different era, he might have stayed there for the rest of his career.
But he’s lucky enough to be coming up in the 1960s and ’70s, just as the WASP
elite is fading and the big East Coast institutions are opening their doors to
strivers from all over. So our Illinois farm boy climbs and keeps on climbing.
</P>
<P>He moves to New Jersey and goes to work for Goldman Sachs. He rises to become
the company’s C.E.O., and a millionaire many times over. He goes into politics,
winning a term in the United States Senate and then getting elected governor of
New Jersey. When Barack Obama wins the White House, he’s discussed as a
candidate for Treasury secretary. And when he loses his re-election bid, he
returns to Wall Street as the head of a financial services company. </P>
<P>By now you may have guessed that I’m talking about Jon Corzine. If so, you
probably know that his inspiring story has an unhappy ending — for New Jersey,
which faced an enormous budgetary mess when Corzine left office; for his latest
Wall Street firm, MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy last week after somehow
mislaying some $600 million in customer money; and for the former farm boy
himself, who resigned on Friday in disgrace. </P>
<P>But this sudden fall from grace doesn’t make Corzine’s life story any less
emblematic of our meritocratic era. Indeed, his rise, recklessness and ruin are
all of a piece. For decades, the United States has been opening paths to
privilege for its brightest and most determined young people, culling the best
and the brightest from Illinois and Mississippi and Montana and placing them in
positions of power in Manhattan and Washington. By elevating the children of
farmers and janitors as well as lawyers and stockbrokers, we’ve created what
seems like the most capable, hardworking, high-I.Q. elite in all of human
history. </P>
<P>And for the last 10 years, we’ve watched this same elite lead us off a cliff
— mostly by being too smart for its own good. </P>
<P>In hereditary aristocracies, debacles tend to flow from stupidity and
pigheadedness: think of the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the
Somme. In one-party states, they tend to flow from ideological mania: think of
China’s Great Leap Forward, or Stalin’s experiment with “Lysenkoist”
agriculture. </P>
<P>In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that
creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any
task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never
even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with
statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and
frictionless world. (Or as Calvin Trillin <A title="Op-Ed article."
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/opinion/14trillin.html">put it</A> in
these pages, quoting a tweedy WASP waxing nostalgic for the days when Wall
Street was dominated by his fellow bluebloods: “Do you think <EM>our </EM>guys
could have invented, say, credit default swaps? Give me a break! They couldn’t
have done the math.”) </P>
<P>Inevitably, pride goeth before a fall. Robert McNamara and the Vietnam-era
whiz kids thought they had reduced war to an exact science. Alan Greenspan and
Robert Rubin thought that they had done the same to global economics. The
architects of the Iraq war thought that the American military could liberate the
Middle East from the toils of history; the architects of the European Union
thought that a common currency could do the same for Europe. And Jon Corzine
thought that his investment acumen equipped him to turn a second-tier brokerage
firm into the next Goldman Sachs, by leveraging big, betting big and waiting for
the payoff. </P>
<P>What you see in today’s Republican primary campaign is a reaction to exactly
these kinds of follies — a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy
has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner résumés but better
instincts. </P>
<P>But from Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain, the outsiders haven’t risen to the
challenge. It will do America no good to replace the arrogant with the ignorant,
the overconfident with the incompetent. </P>
<P>In place of reckless meritocrats, we don’t need feckless know-nothings. We
need intelligent leaders with a sense of their own limits, experienced people
whose lives have taught them caution. We still need the best and brightest, but
we need them to have somehow learned humility along the way.
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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Verdana>__________________________________</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Verdana>Wayne A. Fox<BR><A
href="mailto:wayne.a.fox@gmail.com">wayne.a.fox@gmail.com</A><BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>