Brains and Common Sense Are Not the Same Thing

Thomas Sowell makes a very good point about the ostensibly brilliant advisers working for President Obama. If these smart people think that a high IQ somehow entitles them to "plan" the economy, then history shows the results will not be pretty. This is the difference between intellect and wisdom. Unfortunately, Obama's people have very little of the latter. The late Nobel Laureate, Friedrich Hayek, referred to this trait among certain intellectuals as the "fatal conceit" and it is an especially common affliction in Washington as Sowell opines:

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem. It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt's brilliant "brains trust" advisers whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it. ...Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson's administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's brilliant "whiz kids" tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results. There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs. Such people have been told all their lives how brilliant they are, until finally they feel forced to admit it, with all due modesty. But they not only tend to over-estimate their own brilliance, more fundamentally they tend to over-estimate how important brilliance itself is when dealing with real world problems. ...Argentina began that century as one of the 10 richest nations in the world-- ahead of France and Germany-- and ended it as such an economic disaster that no one would even compare it to France or Germany. Politically brilliant and charismatic leaders, promoting reckless government spending-- of whom Juan Peron was the most prominent, but by no means alone-- managed to create an economic disaster in a country with an abundance of natural resources and a country that was spared the stresses that wars inflicted on other nations in the 20th century.