"Leadership" Is The Answer To Everything (or maybe not)

The Atlantic posted an interesting piece about the obsessive focus on "Leadership" at colleges and universities. As a talisman, a holy grail, the one true quality sought in all applicants and sold in brochures and seminars.

My feeling about this? (Thanks for asking.)

I think colleges' obsession with "leadership" has a lot to do with the class of people colleges cultivate for cash donations. At some point the accumulated advantages enjoyed by fewer and fewer people shift respect into reverence and then worship.

Billions With the Push of a Button

I read an interesting article about the machinery the wizards of Wall Street use to make their money. There is no heavy lifting involved, but a lot of advantages in liquidity and access are leveraged to the limit. These tricks aren't something you and I can benefit from. The other question is, are these systems being used to secure markets or game them? To safeguard stability or exploit instability? I don't need to tell you which impulse I think is dominant.

It augments the argument I've already put to you that there is a Rule of Accumulated Advantage* by which each advantage leverages other advantages, and by which all advantages accrue upward unless balanced by a different power (government) operating for the broader good, the public good.

Playing fields in America have never been so tilted.

*I'd love to collect more informed and expert opinion about this Rule of Accumulated Advantage. I'd be interested in your thoughts. It's something I've been writing and thinking about for some time, but it's difficult to gain expert insight on it. Partly because insight and expertise in these matters are proprietary, even to the extent of academics belonging to sponsoring corporations. Most economists who understand this arcane field belong to the corporations who pay them. But I also have the distinct disadvantage of not being an economist myself. I'm a writer and illustrator of complex ideas.

Not All Bootstraps Are Created Equal

The sting is in the tail of this short piece:

"One of the most remarkable findings from the Pew Charitable Trusts' Economic Mobility Project is that a child from a family in the top income quintile who does not get a college degree is more likely to wind up in the top income quintile himself than a child from a family in the bottom income quintile who does get a college degree." (There's a link to the data.) Money flows from advantage more than from hard work or ability. Especially in our new and very unequal economy.

Lane Kenworthy writes a blog from Arizona that questions many of the conservative talking points. Worth visiting. Conservative mantras serve their masters by addressing the simpler minded with simple nostrums, often misleading ones. Here is one that unravels given a little scrutiny. Short but hard to squeeze into a soundbite.

Often the "evidence" offered for giving greater and greater reward and advantage to the people at the top is bad evidence, or distorted evidence. Which causes a person to wonder: who pays the sifters of evidence? Is this just another advantage owned by the people at the top? The thinkers and sifters, the judges and lawmakers, the lenders and credit raters, the newspapers and other media that inform us, all belong to them.

I wish the New York Review of Books spent more time on books and less on policy, but what the MSM won't tackle, they must. And they do it intelligently.

I dislike it when the very advantaged and comfortable, many of whom succeeded with a leg up from their families or connections, wonder aloud why the poor and the less fortunate aren't trying harder. It's hard work being poor, with none of the rewards. They should try it.