Best and the Brightest?

David Mamet's movie "The Edge"

The recent hullabaloo over AIG performance/retention bonuses funded by taxpayer dollars has revolved around AIG’s contention that they needed to pay out millions to retain “the best and the brightest” who created disastrous derivatives contracts too complex for mere mortals to unwind. Who are these “best and the brightest”?

We all know that people vary in many ways. Some are taller. Some are shorter. Some are good at math. Some are better communicators. On the whole though, all people fall into a class of beings who resemble one another in the most important ways. We could represent these common traits by plotting them on a chart and then calculating the three-sigma limits for various quantifiable characteristics. By definition, some very few would fall outside those limits by some few measures, but should they fall too far outside those limits, we might rightly ask if they are human at all. Maybe these extreme cases belong to some other species!

Should our society be engineered by such extremes? Should we build our houses with doorways for people who stand 8-feet tall? Should we build our electronic gadgets in a way that requires the mathematical skills of first-in-class MIT graduates? Should we engineer our financial services in ways that only extreme savants can understand?

Even if we could indeed identify “the best and brightest”, wouldn’t ceding the design and operation of our social institutions to these extreme beings amount to enslaving ourselves to a tyranny of their exceptional qualities?

Dr. W. E. Deming was fond of saying that best efforts were a road to ruin. His message was that we must avoid maximization in all its forms. Our aim must be to optimize the system.

I am inclined to agree with the protagonist (Anthony Hopkins) in David Mamet’s movie, “The Edge”. Lost in the wilderness, the business-tycoon hero repeatedly calls upon his imperfect knowledge to extricate himself and his companions from dire circumstances. His words of encouragement? “What one man can do, another man can do.”

Download The Edge – What one man can do, another man can do

There is no “best and the brightest”. There are people who vary in some ways but who are in the final analysis, still people. Knowledge of methods is accessible to all and if you can’t understand what is being proffered—if the professor is unable to make his machinations sensible to you—turn away. You are being conned.

An interesting side-note

When my son Joel was in his teens, he demonstrated an uncanny ability to spot my con when we got into an argument. He would say, “Dad, dad, you’re using big words again.” Smart boy!