Are We All Bozos On This Bus II

We believe ourselves to be a meritocracy. We have for the most part made merit, as measured by test scores and academic performance, the key to every career-making decision at every level. In theory, our government and our universities and our corporations are be led by the best and the brightest. So why are we beset by incompetence? Would we expect that the smartest guys in the room would fail to notice that Bernie Madeoff was bilking thousands of investors out of billions of dollars with a scheme as old as…. Ponzi? What kind of moron would conclude that the appropriate response to a terrorist attack by a small band of radical Islamists was to invade the only non-religious country in the Middle East? Why, when alternative technologies have existed for decades, would we continue to design our lives around a carbon-based energy economy? And finally, how is it that no one in the universe could have foreseen that if you are drilling for oil a mile below the ocean's surface you might one day have a blow out? Wouldn't some smart guy at least have done some research to figure out how to fix the problem before the problem actually happened? However the world ends, whether by fire or ice or oxygen deprivation or famine, it will have been caused by incompetent smart guys.