Mainstream Pundits: Too Smart To Fail

By on March 21, 2012 in News 3

apocalypseThomas Frank on the establishment economists, bankers, journalists, and foreign policy experts who create our consensus reality, via the Baffler:

A résumé filled with grievous errors in the period 1996–2006 is not only a non-problem for further advances in the world of consensus; it is something of a prerequisite. Our intellectual powers that be not only forgive the mistakes; they require them. You must have been wrong back then in order to have a chance to be taken seriously today; only by having gotten things wrong can you demonstrate that you are trustworthy, a member of the team. (Those who got things right all along, on the other hand, might be dubbed “premature market skeptics”—people who doubted the consensus before the consensus acknowledged it was all right to doubt.)

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  • Liam_McGonagle

    On the other hand, does anybody really want these bobbleheads with their hands on the wheel?

    There is an old saying that goes to the effect, “They promote officers up to the level of their incompetence.”  I say it’s true, and that the reason they can continue doing that is they don’t actually DO anything.  They need the competent people on the ground to actually keep busy, making sure the show goes on.

    Got to admit, it’s powerful distracting, keeping all those plates spinning at the same time.  Doesn’t really leave a fellow much time for contemplating the architecture of the universe and the like.  What would happen if all that stopped?

  • http://twitter.com/alizardx A.Lizard

    The people who doubt the “conventional wisdom” tend either to be the uninformed or the well-informed. The disinformed believe the crap that comes out of their TV (FoxNews is merely the worst offender) or mainstream deadtree / websites operated by MSM. 

  • http://www.ContraControl.com/ Zenc

    This is an article that should definitely be followed back to the Baffler site and read in full.

    There’s so much good sense crammed into that article that I suspect a large portion of the people attempting to read it will be unable to do so because of cognitive dissonance.