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Pictured above is the Harvard-educated professor with twin reputations for brilliance and abrasiveness whose destructive rampage has shocked the nation. After a promising early career, the professor’s behavior had recently turned erratic and antisocial, including complicity in the takeover of a major manufacturing firm and conspiracy to take over an entire industry comprising approximately 15% of the economy. The professor is also suspected in the expropriation and squandering of hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars. Old friends and admirers are shocked and saddened.
The other big news story of the week was Tiger Woods’s apology, which merited a full two pages in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. I was going to blog my thoughts on this, but my friend Nathan Mehl has said exactly what I wanted to say, and said it so much more brilliantly than I could possibly have said it myself, that I’m going to send you over there instead.
Very nice. You show the picture of two Harvard grads, a man and a woman. If you ask who has most damaged society, the answer is the man. If you ask, who is going to go to prison for a long time, the answer is the woman.
Take-over of 15% of the economy? The government already controls healthcare via regulation.
Pretty funny article about Tiger Woods. Of course the same thing could be said about Wall Street execs too:
“we all spend 14 hours out of every day hanging around a very small group of people” More like 16 on Wall Street…
“So why do we? Why do I do it? First, because we are hyper-competitive obsessives. The idea of not being the best, of not enduring any amount of agony if it even slightly increased the chances of winning is almost physically unbearable.” Bring me my bonus!
“First you get the money. Then you get the power. Then you get the women.” Oh man, you don’t look so good without your wallet – said the woman to the Wall Street exec whose bonus got cut…
Nathan’s post is great. I just wish he had included politicians in his set of unfaithful “hyper-competitive obsessives”.
This one by Bill Simon’s as good:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/100219
Which picture atop is Summers?
Acutally, I worked with Summers for 7 years at Treasury under Clinton. He is indeed incredibly arrogant.
But he falls way down the list of culprits who forged the policies that brought us to this sorry place. How many of the following have you called out?
Chris Cox
Angelo Mazilo
Joe Cassano
Phil Gramm
Kathleen Corbet
Greenspan
Jim Cayne
Dick Fund
Stan O’Neal
Sandy Weill
Greenspan
GW Bush
Marty Sullivan
David Lereah
Greenspan
Hank Paulson
Lew Raneiri
Franklin Raines
Chuck Prince
Clinton
Robert Rubin
B Madoff
Jon Shea@2:23 — heh, that would be a different post. While Henry Kissinger may have been at least partially correct when he said that power was the ultimate aphrodisiac, so far as we know not even Jack Kennedy racked up anything close to the average NBA or MLB player’s lifetime, uh, score. And contrariwise, even if we take Wilt Chamberlain’s staggering self-assessment of over 20,000 partners at face value, I can’t think of any particular way in which the country as a whole was hurt by his horndogging, while the damage wrought by (for example, but hardly exhaustively) the list Philip provided above will still be felt by our great grand-children at a minimum.
Philip: yes, the list of arrogant and abrasive people in policy-making and CEO cirlces is very, very long. Of course. Nobody in his or her right mind would argue.
But that was not the point of Landsburg’s blog post. The way I understand his (Steve’s) post, is summarized very nicely by RL, the very first comment on the blog post.
Indeed, Nathan. And the costs of the malfeasance, fraud, greed, corruption and ideological blindness that led to the meltdown was a multiple of the cost of health care reform.
In contrast to the costs of health care reform, I don’t hear a lot of screaming from these quarters about the costs and abuses that led to the meltdown (in fact what I usually here is a denial that they were abuses at all).
Something of a tangential point but…
“Champion athletes are made, not born, and they’re made when little Johnny sixth-grader realizes that the high school varsity quarterback gets to date the head cheerleader”
A quick wiki search reveals Tiger Woods broke 80 when he was 8. Does anyone seriously believe he was interested enough in girls at age 8 to spend the amount of time training it would take to do that? (if we believe wiki).
Not that this means anything much but if the argument is “Athletes are motivated to train because high performance gets them laid” then it’s kind of amusing to be using a prodigy as your prime example.
“Nobody in his or her right mind would argue.”
I agree entirely with the “Nobody in his or her right mind…” but there are plenty of laissez-faire apologists who do just that. They tend to blame it all on government intervention in the economy, just as they do the Great Depression.
“But that was not the point of Landsburg’s blog post.”
True, but I’m using Steve’s blogpost as a point of departure to ask the somewhat irreverent question: Why do Larry Summers’ “offenses” rank so high as to deserve a call-out when there are so many others who are responsible for bringing on the disaster the administration is dealing with? I suppose I’m implying there’s an ideological agenda here, but I’m prepared to be proven wrong with citations of how many of my listed culprits have been called out on this site.