Of Obama's top 35 appointments so far, 22 have degrees from an Ivy League university, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, or a top British university. So is it possible his team is too smart? That’s the warning offered by Frank Rich in this morning’s Times. Noting David Halberstam's book about the Vietnam War's academic architects, The Best and the Brightest, Rich writes, "[I]t's the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past." He notes Larry Summers and his enormous ego, and Tim Geithner, whose role in the failure of Lehman Brothers is unknown. Rich seizes on Halberstam's distinction between intelligence and wisdom, and notes that there were several wise economists, like Joseph Stiglitz and Nouriel Roubini, who saw the financial crisis coming. "We have to hope," Rich writes, "that wisdom is coming to Summers and Geithner as they struggle with our financial Tet."
Read it at The New York Times
