Government 4.0

File this one under "aimless musings."

Having recently read an op-ed by David Brooks extolling the academic credentials of President-Elect Obama's metastasizing administration got me to thinking of something a good (and fellow-libertarian) friend of mine observed not too long ago about the Republican Party with George Bush at the helm. In essence, he noted that one of the most troubling aspects of Bush-style Republicanism is a certain repudiation of all things intellectual, in favor of governance by determination alone. I don't recall the exact circumstances, but didn't Bush famously sneer at a reporter as an "egghead" when he worked some passable French into a question he posed at a presidential press conference a while back?

Even if apocryphal, the image makes for good symbolism. The hallmark of Bush's tenure has been the attitude that government policy, especially foreign policy, ought to be forceful, direct and unwavering. Decisive action is a virtue, whereas long-winded theorizing and analysis, replete with all those annoying "What if" questions, is a hindrance to getting things done.

So not surprisingly, the largely liberal intellectual establishment is cheering Barack Obama for all the smart, academically polished people with whom he is populating his cabinet and administration. As Brooks notes with approval, virtually all of his supporting cast hails from hallowed Ivy League universities, with even an Oxford grad thrown in for good measure. As Brooks says, "This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs."

So why can't my inner geek get excited, after eight years of get-er-done governance?

It's not because I doubt that Obama, his advisers and his future cabinet members are intelligent people (how intelligent is a different story). Much as I believe that degrees from Yale, Harvard and their ilk can be overrated and overblown, I still harbor ample respect for a collection of people who could hack it at institutions where my application would have been used for scratch paper by admissions officers.

So I guess my unease has more to do with the limits of intelligence itself, and the difference between intelligence and wisdom. Because these days especially, with the economy in a worsening recession, there are calls from all sides for the new administration to "do something" to make it all better. As I noted in an earlier post, liberal columnist Bob Herbert wants a "tough" and "very, very smart" plan to save the Detroit Big Three automakers. Twit though he is, at least Herbert has the humility not to try to write that plan himself. Instead, he wants the smart kids to do it. And therein lies my worry.

I believe there are essentially two ways to view what's happening in our present economy. There is the enlightened liberal position that government must take certain actions to bring us out of this recession; and there is the competing position, that try though it might, the government can't save the day, and that we as a country are best off simply weathering the storm. The first view is predicated on the notion that if you get enough "very, very smart" people together in a room and tell them to solve a problem, they'll drink a lot of caffeine, stay up very late, and eventually find the solution. The second position is rooted in a much more pragmatic world-view, in which bad things sometimes happen and there's nothing anyone can do to change that.

Consider the implications of the "we can fix it" position: If it's possible for a government of very smart, very earnest people to design and implement policies that can end a recession, doesn't that imply that bad economic times can actually be warded off before they arrive? More simply, if it's possible to fix something that's broken, shouldn't it logically follow that the damage can be averted in the first place? If so, that would imply that, in theory, recessions are all avoidable.

I'm sorry, but I'm just too much of an empiricist to buy this Utopian vision. If life has taught me nothing else, it's that bad things sometimes happen. And just because there are comprehensible causes of those bad things, this does not mean we can head them off at the pass. After this recession, a lot of economists will no doubt study the factors that gave birth to it and get the postmortem right; however, this does not in any way imply that anybody can solve the problem in the present tense.

But do Barack Obama and his advisers know this? After all, we are talking about a group of people who are accustomed to succeeding at mental challenges, and the mindset that engenders does not lend itself to intellectual humility. Years spent integrating Taylor series and receiving high marks on term papers at the most prestigious universities in the world can go a long way toward convincing an intelligent person that there's nothing he doesn't know or can't figure out. And with the pro-Obama press clamoring for his administration to get to work "fixing" the economy, we are already hearing assurances that they have all the answers.

Such confidence frightens me. Consider: In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt took office and appointed "whiz kid" technocrats to combat the Great Depression. His administration was nothing if not energetic and well-intentioned, but six years later, the country was still mired in depression. Can Obama's Ivy Leaguers succeed where they failed? Or will they approach today's crisis with the humility that comes from recognizing their limitations as imperfect human beings?

Or more abstractly, have they considered the possibility that this is not a test, and there are no right answers?