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A Cabinet full of Nobels T
by Zachary A. Goldfarb
he Obama administration seems to like Nobel Prizes. The president has one. So does his energy secretary. So does a recent nominee to the Federal Reserve Board. And though White House science adviser John Holdren didn’t win one himself, he led an
organization that did. So, could the president put together an all-Nobel Cabinet? Well, its members would be fairly old, for one, and probably prone to disagreements. Here’s what a Stockholm-approved “team of rivals” might look like— and what it might do.
©®THE NOBEL FOUNDATION
TREASURY Edward Prescott He was a co-winner of the 2004 economics prize for his “contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles.” Prescott would be skeptical of massive government spending to stim- ulate the economy. He’d also want to keep the Bush tax cuts in place to spur investment and boost productivity.
DEFENSE Thomas Schelling
He won the joint prize in eco- nomics in 2005 for “having en- hanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analy- sis.” In his research, Schelling masterfully sketched out Cold War nuclear strategy. He could apply his game-theory ap- proach to 21st-century threats such as terrorism and cyber- attacks.
JUSTICE Gary Becker Becker, who won the 1992 prize in economics for “having extended the domain of micro- economic analysis to a wide range of human behavior,” used economics to under- stand what motivates and de- ters crime. He found that harsher punishments can be a more effective way to enforce the law than investing huge sums of money in policing and courts.
HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES Elizabeth Blackburn A prolific cancer researcher, she shared the medicine prize in 2009 for helping discover “how chromosomes are pro- tected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.” She could ensure that science un- derpinned the nation’s health- care decisions, but her aggres- sive support of embryonic stem cell research might alien- ate some.
INTERIOR Elinor Ostrom She was a co-winner of the economics prize in 2009 for “her analysis of economic gov- ernance.” A political scientist, Ostrom studies how people share common resources such as land and advocates local autonomy.
PRESIDENT Barack Obama He received the 2009 peace prize for “his extraordinary ef- forts to strengthen interna- tional diplomacy.” Still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan a year after his surprise win, Obama has yet to show he’s the one the Swedes were counting on.
STATE Elie Wiesel
He won the peace prize in 1986; the committee said that “his message is one of peace, atonement and human digni- ty.” The Holocaust survivor could focus attention on eth- nic warfare in Sudan and else- where, but his advocacy for Is- rael could make him contro- versial when engaging the Muslim world.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2010
AGRICULTURE Richard Heck
Heck won the chemistry prize this year. He and his col- leagues have developed chem- ical processes that can create substances to protect crops from disease. He would have a keen eye for agricultural com- panies adding dangerous chemicals to the nation’s food supply.
COMMERCE Paul Krugman The New York Times columnist won the economics prize in 2008 for “his analysis of trade patterns and location of eco- nomic activity.” Krugman founded “new trade theory,” explaining why countries that make the same types of goods trade with each other anyway and benefit from it. Though he might grumble about not run- ning Treasury, he’d probably push for more aggressive poli- cies ensuring that U.S. compa- nies can easily sell to emerg- ing markets such as China.
LABOR Peter Diamond He shared the economics No- bel this year for his “analysis of markets with search fric- tions.” His research shows the need to return the unem- ployed to work soon after a fi- nancial crisis, before their job losses become permanent. He’d probably prefer a more permanent job himself — Oba- ma has nominated Diamond to the Fed, where he’d serve 14 years. Until he can clear the Senate, though, he should take what he can get.
HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT Jimmy Carter He won the 2002 peace prize for “his decades of untiring ef- fort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts.” The 39th president, a carpenter, is the most famous “Habit for Hu- manity” volunteer and could work to expand housing for millions of Americans living in low-quality homes.
TRANSPORTATION Al Gore The former vice president and 2007 peace prize winner for “efforts to build up and dis- seminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change” has called for elimi- nating the internal combustion engine. He would be keen to oversee the eco-friendly trans- formation of the nation’s trans- portation systems, but his heavy investments in green technology could pose a con- flict of interest.
PHOTOS: ASSOCIATED PRESS, GETTY IMAGES, BLOOMBERG, REUTERS, THE WASHINGTON POST
ENERGY Steven Chu A 1997 co-laureate in physics “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with la- ser light,” Chu is an engineer who advocates a clean-tech fu- ture that reduces the effects of climate change. And he al- ready has the job.
EDUCATION Toni Morrison
Morrison, “in novels character- ized by visionary force and po- etic import, gives life to an es- sential aspect of American re- ality,” according to the Nobel committee, which awarded her the literature prize in 1993. The only living American Nobel laureate for literature would ensure that students read the classics, learn to love books and are exposed to America’s diverse cultures.
VETERANS AFFAIRS Jody Williams
She won the peace prize in 1997 for her work “for the ban- ning and clearing of anti-per- sonnel mines.” Williams has spent decades working to pro- tect civilians from the long- term effects of war and might be equally passionate on be- half of new veterans who have lost limbs or suffered traumat- ic brain injury. But her peace activism could turn off security hawks.
HOMELAND SECURITY Henry Kissinger He won the 1973 peace prize for “a ceasefire agreement . . . between the United States of America and the Vietnamese Democratic Republic.” A prag- matist first, Kissinger would fa- vor strong national security policies but might be willing to talk with America’s enemies. As an immigrant himself, he might support novel approach- es to border issues.
Zachary A. Goldfarb covers financial policy for The Washington Post.
goldfarbz@washpost.com
What’s the matter with the New Elite? elite from B1
Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other elite schools in the 1950s and 1960s were not accompanied by socioeconomic democ- ratization.
On the surface, it looks as if things
have changed. Compared with 50 years ago, the proportion of students coming from old-money families and exclusive prep schools has dropped. The represen- tation of African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans has increased. Yet the student bodies of the elite colleges are still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper middle class. According to sociol- ogist Joseph Soares’s book “The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges,” about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupa-
on
washingtonpost.com/liveonline. on
washingtonpost.com
Charles Murray will discuss this article Monday at 11 a.m.
tions put them in the top quarter of American families, according to Soares’s measure of socioeconomic status. Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families. The discomfiting explanation is that despite need-blind admissions policies, the stellar applicants still hail over- whelmingly from the upper middle class and above. Students who have a parent with a college degree accounted for only 55 percent of SAT-takers this year but got 87 percent of all the verbal and math scores above 700, according to unpub- lished data provided to me by the Col- lege Board. This is not a function of SAT prep courses available to the affluent — such coaching buys only a few dozen points — but of the ability of these stu- dents to do well in a challenging aca- demic setting. Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them — which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege. Few of them grew up in the small cities, towns or ru-
ral areas where more than a third of all Americans still live. When they leave college, the New Elite remain in the bubble. Harvard sen- iors surveyed in 2007 were headed toward a small number of elite graduate schools (Harvard and Cambridge in the lead) and a small number of elite profes- sional fields (finance and consulting were tied for top choice). Jobs in busi- nesses that provide bread-and-butter goods and services to individual Amer- icans, which make up the overwhelming majority of entry-level openings for as- piring managers, attracted just 1.7 per- cent of the Harvard students who went to work right after graduation. When the New Elite get around to
marrying, they don’t marry just any- body. One of the funniest and most bit- ingly accurate parts of “Bobos in Para- dise” was Brooks’s analysis of the New York Times’s wedding announcements. Go back to 1960, and the page was filled with brides and grooms who grew up wealthy but whose educations and occu- pations did not offer much indication that they were going to set the world on fire. Look at the page today, and it is studded with the mergers of fabulous ré- sumés. Three examples lifted from last Sun-
day’s Times: a director of marketing at a biotech company (Stanford undergrad, Harvard MBA) married a consultant to the aerospace industry (Stanford un- dergrad, Harvard MPP); a vice president at Goldman Sachs (Yale) married a di- rector of retail development for a finan- cial software firm (Hofstra); and a third- year resident in cardiology (Yale un- dergrad) married a third-year resident in pathology (Columbia undergrad, summa cum laude). The New Elite marry each other, com- bining their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the benefit of both.
scribed in “The Bell Curve” back in 1994. When educational and professional op- portunities first opened up, we saw so- cial churning galore, as youngsters ben- efited from opportunities that their par- ents had been denied. But that phase lasted only a generation or two, slowed
W
e are watching the maturation of the cognitive stratification that Richard J. Herrnstein and I de-
by this inescapable paradox: The more efficiently a society identi-
fies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abili- ties and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite — the “cognitive elite” that Herrnstein and I described — becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama’s example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already mem- bers. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent (“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens. What Herrnstein and I did not fully appreciate 16 years ago was how relent- less this segregation would be. It is hard to get numbers — no survey has samples large enough to calibrate precisely what’s going on with the top percentiles of the population that I’m talking about — but the numbers we do have, com- bined with qualitative data provided by observers such as Brooks, Florida and Bill Bishop, in his book “The Big Sort,” are persuasive. We know, for one thing, that the New Elite clusters in a comparatively small number of cities and in selected neigh- borhoods in those cities. This concentra- tion isn’t limited to the elite neighbor- hoods of Washington, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Silicon Valley and San Francisco. It extends to university cities with ancillary high-tech jobs, such as Austin and the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle. With geographical clustering goes
cultural clustering. Get into a conversa- tion about television with members of the New Elite, and they can probably talk about a few trendy shows — “Mad Men” now, “The Sopranos” a few years ago. But they haven’t any idea who re- placed Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right.” They know who Oprah is, but they’ve never watched one of her shows from beginning to end. Talk to them about sports, and you
may get an animated discussion of yoga, pilates, skiing or mountain biking, but they are unlikely to know who Jimmie
Johnson is (the really famous Jimmie Johnson, not the former Dallas Cowboys coach), and the acronym MMA means nothing to them. They can talk about books endlessly,
but they’ve never read a “Left Behind” novel (65 million copies sold) or a Harle- quin romance (part of a genre with a core readership of 29 million Amer- icans). They take interesting vacations and can tell you all about a great back- packing spot in the Sierra Nevada or an exquisite B&B overlooking Boothbay Harbor, but they wouldn’t be caught dead in an RV or on a cruise ship (unless it was a small one going to the Galapa- gos). They have never heard of Branson, Mo. There so many quintessentially Amer- ican things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They prob- ably haven’t ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (col- lege doesn’t count) or in an urban neigh- borhood in which most of their neigh- bors did not have college degrees (gen- trifying neighborhoods don’t count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn’t count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a facto- ry floor, let alone worked on one. Taken individually, members of the
New Elite are isolated from mainstream America as a result of lifestyle choices that are nobody’s business but their own. But add them all up, and they mean that the New Elite lives in a world that doesn’t intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. When the tea party says the New Elite doesn’t get America, there is some truth in the accusation. Part of the isolation is political. In
that Harvard survey I mentioned, 72 percent of Harvard seniors said their be- liefs were to the left of the nation as a whole, compared with 10 percent who said theirs were to the right of it. The po- litical preferences of academics and journalists among the New Elite also conform to the suspicions of the tea par- ty.
But the politics of the New Elite are not the main point. When it comes to
the schools where they were educated, the degrees they hold, the Zip codes where they reside and the television shows they watch, I doubt if there is much to differentiate the staff of the conservative Weekly Standard from that of the liberal New Republic, or the schol- ars at the American Enterprise Institute from those of the Brookings Institution, or Republican senators from Demo- cratic ones. The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influ- ence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The mem- bers of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.
Are you part of the
new elite?
Answer key: Jimmie Johnson is a NASCAR driver who won the Sprint Cup Series championship four years in a row. MMA stands for mixed martial arts; UFC stands for Ultimate Fighting Champion- ship. About 7 million tourists travel to Bran- son, Mo., each year to visit its 50-plus country-music halls. Drew Carey replaced Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right.” Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are the authors of the “Left Behind” series.
Scoring:
If you can answer “yes” for 0-2 questions, you’re sealed in the New Elite bubble.
If you can answer “yes” for 3-7 questions, you need to get out more.
If you can answer “yes” for 8-10 ques- tions, it doesn’t matter if you went to Yale or live in Georgetown. You’re part of the American mainstream.
—Charles Murray
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