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Among the Intellectualoids
A Little Bit of Economics
Our president knows it all about a subject he has no use for.
The same Barack Obama who earlier declared himself “a student of history” has more recently become “a student of economics.” According to reports out of the White House, the president combines an omnivorous appetite for the most arcane financial detail, with the ability to summarize and simplify economic issues in a way that causes those around him to gasp in drop-jawed admiration.
Let us drop in on the “economics” PDB, as they call it at the White House. This is the brainchild of chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. It follows the Presidential Daily Briefing, and it typically includes Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, economic adviser Larry Summers, budget director Peter Orszag, and other brainiacs in a 40-minute jam session devoted to financial and economic matters.
Recently, for instance, some of the president’s advisers gave him a chart-filled briefing on “House Prices, Consumer Debt and Consumption.” At the end of this session, according to Emanuel, Obama rose from his chair—levitating in the lotus position—and declared, “Guys, this is a great research. But you’re telling me that people have been using their homes as ATMs. I could have told you that.”
According to this behind-the-scenes story, the president raises “questions about administration proposals to regulate certain derivatives, such as credit-default swaps,” and sharply questions his economic advisers on their methodology in calculating homeowners’ “loan-to-value” ratios.
What’s more, we are told that Mr. Obama invited Nobel laureate economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman to the White House for dinner, and may curl up at night reading their books—eschewing his normal preference for French novelists, German philosophers, and gay/black/feminist freedom fighters. “I’ve dealt with other people in that position—their eyes glaze over,” Professor Stiglitz recalls, his own eyes misting at the memory. “You can tell they’re waiting to get out of that meeting. With him, it was totally different.”
Where, one wonders, is the president’s newfound love of economics going to lead in his never-ending quest for self-fulfillment and enlightenment? I will hazard a few guesses:
1. Anything that the president “learns” will only strengthen his conviction that he already has all the answers.
2. Under the tutelage of scholars like Stiglitz and Krugman, his study of the “wishful science” (what used to be called the “dismal science”) will only reinforce his natural tendency, as an über liberal, to think of people only in the abstract…a blank canvas waiting to be painted, or a great mass of dough waiting to be shaped…as opposed to considering the possibility that they might be responsible, sentient human beings capable of thinking and acting for themselves.
3. He will remain hostile to the basic notion that free enterprise and individual choice are the primary basis for creating wealth and prosperity—in this or any other society. His belief in government as the great agent of innovation and change is rooted in a deep-seated dislike and distrust of the business world. He grew up thinking of business as a dull, soul-sapping activity with thuggish overtones.
CONSIDER THAT PORTRAIT that Mr. Obama draws of his maternal grandparents, with whom he lived as a young boy and again as a high school student in Hawaii. This is how he describes his grandfather, an unsuccessful furniture salesman, in his memoir, Dreams from My Father:
An old copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People still sits on his bookshelf. And growing up, I would hear in him the breezy, chatty style that he must have decided would help him with his customers. He would whip out pictures of the family and offer his life story to the nearest stranger; he would pump the hand of the mailman or make off-color jokes to waitresses at restaurants. Such antics used to make me cringe.
So the glad-handing grandfather was always something of an embarrassment. The grandmother, however, is a different story. Without the benefit of a college degree, she rose from secretary to become the first female vice president at the Bank of Hawaii. Surely, that was something to be proud of? Well, not really, it seems. Obama writes of “Toot,” the strict, commonsensical, and hardworking grandmother:
I came to understand that her career spanned a time when the work of a wife outside the home was nothing to brag about, for her or Gramps—that it represented only lost years, broken promises. What Toot believed kept her going were the needs of her grandchildren and the stoicism of her ancestors.
“So long as you kids do well, Bar,” she would say more than once, “that’s all that really matters.”
That’s how my grandparents had come to live…Gramps still wore Hawaiian shirts to the office, and Toot still insisted on being called Toot. Otherwise, though, the ambitions they had carried with them to Hawaii had slowly drained away, until regularity—of schedules and pastimes and the weather—became their principal consolation.
About the Author
Andrew B. Wilson, a frequent contributor to The American Spectator, writes from St. Louis.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (42) | Leave a comment
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drudge ette obama| 10.15.09 @ 7:09AM
What makes Obama any different from his glad-handing white grandfather? It sickens me to read that he was embarrassed by his grandfather's hokey attempts to get ahead. By his failures. By his grandmother being forced to work in a time when that was nothing to brag about. None of this is wrong. Hasn't he ever see "Death of A Salesman?" There is beauty in honest failure and elegance in hucksterism. Unless you are a narcissistic punk.
Obama is wired like his mother. It is evident that Obama absorbed his mother's negative attitudes towards American business, towards American whites and, frankly, typical white American culture.
His true story has not been written, it still lies hidden under the surface. And I bet it will remain there except for a few glimmers here and there when this cagey cat slips. One thing is for sure: he is not comfortable in his own skin and in his own background. He seems to look at himself from the outside in, rather than the other way around. In that respect, there is nothing honest about him. He is all smoke and mirrors.
Alan Brooks| 10.18.09 @ 9:20PM
So many are relieved that the son of Reagan's uncharismatic Veep isn't president anymore.
And you KNOW that. But then, we all have guilty consciences these days.
Alan Brooks| 10.18.09 @ 9:36PM
... if you don't have a guilty conscience in 2009, then you have no conscience at all.
Roy| 10.15.09 @ 8:45AM
Culturally, he's a white leftist who, like a lot of white leftists, wants to be black. And, due to the one in a million coincidence of his father being from Kenya - he is. Jackpot!
Squeaky Hussein Fromme| 10.15.09 @ 10:04AM
Its so pathetic that people like Bill Ayers and Van Jones really think that all you have to do is tax a few rich people (like, oh, I don't know, maybe The Kennedys?) and everything will be just super. But the wealthy have clever tax attorneys. So the burden falls to the middle class (whom these people also hate). Why didn't these wretched fools stay on their communes??!!!
Ken (Old Texican)| 10.15.09 @ 10:54AM
Ladies and gentlemen
Plug Mr. Wilson's article above into planning for your future...please.
I am going to use a phrase here that I very rarely use. It is one of the most damning in my vocabulary:
"the arrogance of ignorance"
This man, his team, and his blithely following congress critters have absolutely no clue, and no particular desire to put gas into the tank of the American engine that feeds us all.
So what does that mean to each of you?
Folks, "The Big Grab" is well underway, but when these twerps have grabbed all they can...it will melt away in their hands. What will be left?
They have put the American engine in a descending spiral of "diminishing returns". Productivity is spiraling down, the incredibly complex interactions of goods and services in our society are spiraling down......
As a pilot, I am well versed in an emergency maneuver called a "emergency descent spiral". It is the absolute fastest way to get an airplane on the ground without peeling the wings off.
There is one terrible danger inherent in the maneuver though: If the spiral is continued a mite too long without leveling the wings momentarily...the spiral will tighten and tighten, and becomes a "death spiral" from which there is NO recovery .
Each one of you now...please read carefully. Each of you and each of your loved ones has a unique situation. Nevertheless, you need to start making a check list and filling out the priorities...
food...shelter... clothing...medical supplies, barter items etc.
Please don't spend your last dollars holding on to your mortgage and stuff. Prepare to "level your wings" for a bit if the unintended consequences get too severe.
PS: there was a quiet acceptance during the cold war that "you can't take groceries to a public fallout shelter. They will be "re-distributed".
Best of luck.
Pingback| 10.15.09 @ 11:05AM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : A Little Bit of Economics [spectator links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
fundamentalist| 10.15.09 @ 1:14PM
President Obama is not so unusual. In class for my masters degree in economics, we had professors from a lot of different disciplines and each one took pains to educate us in the fact that their discipline made the world go round and if you understood theirs, you didn't need the others.
After earning a masters in economics, I had a BS engineering friend tell me that engineering students took one class in econ and thought they knew everything. After learning that high interest rates don't create inflation, he decided to learn some real economics, too.
The trouble with education in general is that it tends to make people arrogant in the sense that if they have a little, they think they know everything about everything. The Democrat party inflates that arrogance by insisting that their candidate is the smartest guy on the planet. As a result, President Obama can't appear to be less smart than anayone, let alone mere PhD economists. And he can't rely on advice; he has to have the answers himself because he has to be the smartest guy in any room.
This fettish with intellect goes back to the origins of socialism when socialists decided to get rid of all tradition and all principles because they weren't scientific and to re-create society in their own image based on scientific principles. Scientists became the new priesthood to lead us out of the wilderness, and the high priest had to be the smartest guy on the planet. It's also why Democrats always portray Republicans as dumb, no matter how smart they are. Everyone must follow the smartest guy and the Democrats must have the smartest guy.
My favorite economist, Friedrich Hayek, wrote that intellect is highly overrated, especially by intellectuals. That was in "Fatal Conceit." Smart people always think they are smarter than they really are; they think they know more than they actually do. The reason they can think that way is because they really aren't that smart and don't know how much they don't know.
Like Hayek, conservatives understand that principles are the distilled widsom of thousands of generations of trial and error. The future will be fine if we follow principles. We don't have to have the smartest guy at the helm if he has the right principles, because his principles will guide him in filtering the advice of many technical experts.
Socialists can't do that. Their leader must be god-like in his intellect and personally have the answer to every single problem.
Margie| 10.15.09 @ 5:58PM
Fabulous post, thank you!!
drudge ette obama| 10.16.09 @ 6:01AM
Nice job putting these concepts down in conserative speak (no gibblely-gob langauge.) My favorite line is second to last paragraph's "principles are the distille wisdom of thousands of generations of trial and error."
I will be looking for more of this good stuff.
Geofizz| 10.15.09 @ 1:21PM
Andrew B. Wilson is highlighting a very important relationship here. Take an "intellectual," add an over-sized ego, and you end up with "10 lb head" Know-It-Alls who don't know what they don't know.
These folks use to be called "Useful Idiots." Unfortunately, they're running/ruining our country now.
brutus6| 10.15.09 @ 2:51PM
fundamentalist, well said and worth remembering. Since Hayek and even Milton Friedman are no longer with us, can we find a principled leader to run against Obama in 2012, a leader who would choose, say, Thomas Sowell to be his Chief Economic Advisor?
John II| 10.15.09 @ 5:02PM
For the record, and as I recall, Sowell was offered a prominent spot in the Reagan administration in 1980/81 and turned it down, apparently without hesitation. He averred that he's a scholar, not a politician.
Apparently, sensible economists are difficult to find in government because they also happen to be honest.
Len| 10.16.09 @ 6:11PM
Ron Paul,..nuff said
Tom| 10.15.09 @ 3:09PM
This too shall pass. The Founding Fathers and the Constitution will relegate Obama to the dust bin of history.
aware| 10.15.09 @ 3:36PM
Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, economic adviser Larry Summers, budget director Peter Orszag.....what could possibly go wrong?
victor| 10.15.09 @ 9:39PM
That's what happens when you "elect" a faux-president. He appoints faux economists.
The man never had an honest job in his life, he just sleepwalked through it.
Perfect example of the old saying:
Jack of all Trades, Master of None.
Or:
Knows a little about a lot of things, when he needs to know a lot about a few things.
Gerald Stephens| 10.15.09 @ 5:53PM
I have really had it with all your 'smart butt' criticism of our Great Leader. I think you should all just assume the lotus position and concentrate on what Stalin... I take that back about the lotus thing; the couch is so much better for conjuring the radiant shine emanating from the GL's peaceful but arrogant countenance. I can't quite put my finger on who said it - "Arrogance is next to godliness".
By goodness it just flew into my head! It was the GL himself. It takes my breath away!
In spite of my admiration of GL, I still want him to show us his 'papers'.
Gerald Stephens
Hartford, CT
John II| 10.15.09 @ 6:23PM
Papers smapers. Pardon my beating a dead horse, but I'd be happy just to see his school records: how he got into Columbia and Harvard, what courses he took, what teachers he had, how he performed in those courses.
The school records are closed to public scrutiny. Why? Would they be THAT revealing, even to the idiots who voted for him?
Jim O'Brien| 10.15.09 @ 8:11PM
Speaking of economics, I see that Obama's pay czar dictated that Ken Lewis, outgoing CEO of Bank of America, will receive no salary or bonus for 2009. Using the same standards, the entire Obama administration and everyone in Congress should receive zero compensation.
victor| 10.15.09 @ 9:41PM
Actually they should give back the last TEN years of their salaries. And everything down to their belly button lint.
Marc Jeric| 10.16.09 @ 12:29AM
It is a mistake to call Abu Hussein from Kenya and his 36 czars (I prefer to call them komissars) as "liberals" - that is the name they themselves invented. As a former refugee from a communist hell I recognize all the necessary elements of a communist putch in the making. Combine these komissars with the local soviets of ACORN, SEIU, teacher unions, and other thugs and brownshirts, and everything is in place for such a putch. There will be a big crisis or two (say, depression, terror attacks, Iran bombing Israel, Afghanistan and Pakistan takeover by Taliban and Al Qaeda) and our revolutionary marxists will suspend elections and proclaim dictatorship. Well, perhaps one more thing needs to be done by our Community Organizer-in-Chief and that is ACORN soviets within the National Guard and the military. By the way the White House Director of Communications in a self-avowed admirer of Chairman Mao.
Roy Blake| 10.16.09 @ 9:25AM
I Must agree with Marc Jeric above: What he has said has been weighing on my heart for some time!
I truly feel a situation or a chain of events will cause a complete Government takeover of our FREE Nation and its people. People, Prepare yourselves...
Jim Anderson| 10.16.09 @ 4:36AM
I prefer another saying - a sort of folk saying from my father. My father had three valid college degrees and came up from being a poor boy working in farm fields. That, combined with his education and infantry service in the Battle of the Bulge brought him perspective.
"Jimmy," he would have said of this White House Bunch, "These are men who are clearly educated beyond their intelligence.
drudge ette obama| 10.16.09 @ 6:09AM
Too perfect. How lucky you were to have him for a father. I hope you won't mind if I use this on occasion.
Margie| 10.16.09 @ 2:17PM
"These are men who are clearly educated beyond their intelligence."
~love it too!
ruth| 10.16.09 @ 8:25PM
How I love your dad profound wisdom! Thans for sharing.
Jerry| 10.16.09 @ 11:21PM
My dad would have said, "Don't let your $2 mouth control your 10 cent ass."
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