Better and Brighter, An indictment of the follies of Wall Street Options

[mipadi]

Over the course of the past week or so, while I was interviewing child psychiatrists about the exciting new field of developmental neuroscience, the phrase “the best and the brightest” came up twice.

As in “I hope the brightest and the best kids will be doing this” — instead of going to work on Wall Street.

The first time I heard it, I didn’t say anything. I was laboring too intensely to keep up with phrases like “single nucleotide polymorphism.” But the second time, I was able to pause in note taking long enough to grouse, “I never had the impression that the best and brightest people went to Wall Street.”

“Maybe not in your day,” came the reply. “But in recent years they have.”

[...]

When was it, exactly, that the titans of Wall Street, among their many other perks and privileges, got to be crowned with the title of “best and brightest”?

Certainly not in the early 19th century, when Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his love poem “The Invitation,” called, “Best and brightest, come away!” Nor in the early 20th century, when “The Education of Henry Adams” featured a sad, exalted tribute to the geologist Clarence King as the “best and brightest man of his generation.”

The ability to make big bucks wasn’t the chief characteristic of the “best and brightest,” “each new man more brilliant than the last,” whom David Halberstam described in the 1972 book that brought the phrase into our common parlance. His “best and brightest” were ultimately no better than ours; their “arrogance and hubris” led us into the debacle of Vietnam. But they did at least embody a different order of aspiration. They “wrote books and won prizes (even the president had won a Pulitzer prize), climbed mountains to clear their minds. Many of them read poetry and some were said to be able to quote it.”

[...]

Even back in the 1980s (“my” day), when greed ostensibly was good, there was still a sense that the best and the brightest didn’t go to Wall Street. Lots of people did want to go, of course — there was a palpable thrill in the air when the investment banks came to recruit on campus — but I never had the impression that anyone was under the illusion that what was on offer was anything other than filthy lucre. You took it or you left it. But you didn’t go to Wall Street under cover of greatness. The whole culture hadn’t yet normalized the value system of men like the reptilian antihero Gordon Gekko. Tom Wolfe’s Masters of the Universe were hardly meant to be admired.

[...]

Maybe it will be discovered that some of the best and the brightest are already teaching third grade and providing low-paying, low-glory health care services. Maybe the definition of the term will come to depend less on money and power, and more on service, ideals, even character. Perhaps there will be an honest accounting of what drives a life devoted to wealth-making.

And maybe — if things work out for this book-writing president and his coterie of brilliant advisers — people might even start to see intellectuals as good, and bright, without irony.

Source: http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12...r-and-brighter/