Deep thought
I would rather be governed by the first five hundred people in the telephone book than by the CEOs of the Fortune 500.
February 25, 2011 11:52 am
Posted in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute, Fuck The Middle-Class
68 Comments
68 Responses
Hunter Gathers - February 25, 2011 | 11:54 am · Link
You just made Free Market Baby Jesus cry.
Kryptik - February 25, 2011 | 11:55 am · Link
Yeah, Doug? That’s because you’re a Communist. Don’t you know that the CEOs know infinitely better than some poor prole on the street? You want proof? They’re RICH. If they weren’t smart and better than everyone else, they wouldn’t be rich. It’s just common Calvinistic sense.
cleek - February 25, 2011 | 11:57 am · Link
too bad democracy doesn’t allow such outcomes
jeffreyw - February 25, 2011 | 11:57 am · Link
Gotta keep yer strength up, man.
MikeJ - February 25, 2011 | 11:58 am · Link
The first 500 people in the phone book all still have landlines. Some, but not all, of the Fortune 500 CEOs aren’t idiots. The google guys are ok, but they aren’t the CEO, are they?
On balance, having Steve Jobs in charge would be really bad.
Morbo - February 25, 2011 | 11:59 am · Link
See also: Senate, U.S.
jwb - February 25, 2011 | 11:59 am · Link
Actually, I’ve sometimes wondered if drawing lots wouldn’t work better than elections—especially now when so much of an election is determined by money.
McWaffle - February 25, 2011 | 12:00 pm · Link
Psh, but after a few weeks you’d be saying, “Damn you, President Aaron A. Aardvark!”
Kryptik - February 25, 2011 | 12:01 pm · Link
@McWaffle:
And you think Zebediah Y. Zubrowka would do a better job? Pshaw.
schrodinger's cat - February 25, 2011 | 12:02 pm · Link
Even the liberal NYT is praising Chris Christie and Bobo has a slobbery op-ed about Mitch Daniels.
me - February 25, 2011 | 12:02 pm · Link
@MikeJ:
Come April one of them will be.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods - February 25, 2011 | 12:04 pm · Link
I’m Abraham A. Aaronson and I approve this message.
MattR - February 25, 2011 | 12:04 pm · Link
@jwb: I prefer Lewis Black’s monkey.
Chyron HR - February 25, 2011 | 12:04 pm · Link
Arthur Abacab is worse than Obama—he sold us out!
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods - February 25, 2011 | 12:05 pm · Link
@McWaffle: Crap. Shoulda read all the way down. Damn iPad (shakes fist).
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q) - February 25, 2011 | 12:08 pm · Link
Step away from the caffeine please, Doug Hill, son of Doug Hill®—I can’t keep up.
schrodinger's cat - February 25, 2011 | 12:08 pm · Link
I thought Balloon Juice already has an overlord, Tunch.
Citizen_X - February 25, 2011 | 12:09 pm · Link
Open thread? I’m gonna pretend it is, because you have to listen to the radio show posted here. Some drive-time mooks interview Donald Rumsfeld, but they happen to have Louis C.K. in the studio (whom they keep referring to as “just a local comedian”). Louis keeps on Rumsfeld about whether or not he’s an alien human-eating lizard. (Rumsfeld never answers!) Doesn’t really get more topical, and I think it may be stronger for that. The exception is when Louis asks Rumsfeld, “So what was it like when you shook hands with Saddam Hussein?”
My first impression is that it might go down as an historical bit of political improv comedy. You will end up listening to this at some point, so you might as well go and do it now. (Note: it is 17 minutes, but worth it.)
Poopyman - February 25, 2011 | 12:12 pm · Link
You want to be ruled by the Aardvark Family? Wouldn’t that be a monarchy?
Violet - February 25, 2011 | 12:16 pm · Link
The first 500 people in the phone book would be bought off by the CEOs of the Fortune 500, so we’d be back to where we are now. We need a better system.
Folderol & Ephemera - February 25, 2011 | 12:18 pm · Link
What’s a “telephone book”?
fraught - February 25, 2011 | 12:18 pm · Link
So Bill Buckley is now a front-pager at BJ. Nice!
Joey Maloney - February 25, 2011 | 12:19 pm · Link
Better the first 500 than the last 500.
Cuz I luvs me some John Varley.
Elizabelle - February 25, 2011 | 12:24 pm · Link
Would go with a random 500.
Naive, but I think you’d find more ethics and less greed with a random sample.
Probably an Alvin Greene or two.
Whatever the Harvard Business School teaches, it does not seem to be good for sustainability.
Sly - February 25, 2011 | 12:29 pm · Link
@Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods:
Abraham A. Aaronson thinks he knows best how to fix our economy, but he’s nothing but a tax and spend liberal who wants to give your money to welfare queens and public employees.
(Paid For By the Friends of Aaron A. Aaronson)
Berial - February 25, 2011 | 12:31 pm · Link
If that’s the way it worked all CEO’s would be named A A. A, with the lower tier being named AA A. AA. You can’t win as long as money can buy power and they start with 100,000x as much money as everyone else.
loretta - February 25, 2011 | 12:31 pm · Link
Top 500 CEOs – the world’s biggest idiots, cheats & thieves. An immediate story comes to mind – a top CEO recently rewarded himself (via the board that showed a stock increase of 38% in 2010 after laying ofg 40% of the workforce and scaling down the marketing budget) a million dollar CASH bonus, along with 4 other principals getting slightly less, even after the company showed a loss in its revenue.
In real life, if you lose money you cannot give yourself a raise.
jwb - February 25, 2011 | 12:44 pm · Link
@loretta: They really do make their own reality.
The ones I really hate are the guys who buy up some successful business that makes good products; they come in and find ways to cut corners resulting in shitty products but the firm increases profits temporarily on the basis of brand reputation, so the stock price goes up, the execs cash out before the company comes crashing and burning to the ground, taking the workers and shareholders down with it. I don’t really feel that bad for the shareholders, who should have been paying attention, but the workers really don’t deserve it.
Morbo - February 25, 2011 | 12:46 pm · Link
I’m really lucky that it’s lunch time because I was sitting here laughing my ass off at Louis CK on the Opie and Anthony Show participating in an interview with Donald Rumsfeld. It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
WereBear - February 25, 2011 | 12:47 pm · Link
No no no, if you want a benign dictatorship, you gotta go with the last 500 names.
These aren’t spoiled brat Abrams and “I never waited in line” Aaronsons, nossir!
Your X’s and Y’s and Z’s are people who understand patience. They’ve spelled their names for people a thousand times. They’ve learned to keep their temper when people constantly mispronounce their name. And they all know each other from grammar school; waiting in the back of the line for something to happen.
Your X’s and Y’s and Z’s are people who know how to fly under the radar, too. Always in the back of the room, able to work together, unlike the goody-two-shoes Andersons who are stuck in the second row.
If we are going to take our country back, we need Edward “Woody” Woodrow and Susan “Sparky” Zelnick!
ppcli - February 25, 2011 | 12:49 pm · Link
@Violet: Naw. Cheaper to just buy the phone book company and list their names first.
MikeJ - February 25, 2011 | 12:49 pm · Link
@WereBear: Elmo Zumwalt thanks you.
Benz - February 25, 2011 | 12:52 pm · Link
Doug, you’ve hit it out of the park.
Someone in Wisconsin should make this deep thought into a poster. Better yet, the Democrats should all be using this as their message, verbatim and saying this line over and over.
Benz - February 25, 2011 | 12:54 pm · Link
Seriously Doug, someone MUST send this clever line to the Democratic party.
I’m not f*cking joking. This is just too clever than what the Democrats could ever come up with.
Corner Stone - February 25, 2011 | 12:56 pm · Link
Which telephone book?
Because if you choose the one from my hood you’re gonna be praying for the Galtian Overlords of yesteryear compared to what these ignorant sonsabitches decide.
Davis X. Machina - February 25, 2011 | 12:57 pm · Link
In other words, the New Hampshire lower house.
KG - February 25, 2011 | 12:59 pm · Link
@Violet: I think Plato came up with a better system, but it’s only worked, in theory, once, and then Alexander went and got himself killed trying to conquer the world.
Comrade Dread - February 25, 2011 | 1:01 pm · Link
Doug, I’ve long believed that we would have a better overall government if a computer just pulled 535 random names off the registered voter list and assigned them a job as President, Veep, Senator or Congressman for a one year term with a mandatory psych evaluation before they were sworn in.
Southern Beale - February 25, 2011 | 1:08 pm · Link
I’m still waiting to find out what that 1 weird old tip is to have a tiny belly. They never tell you, you have to read five chapters of crap. I gave up.
Anyone know?
cyntax - February 25, 2011 | 1:08 pm · Link
@Citizen_X:
“How many people have you met who’ve been hanged?”
Ah, it’s great when fate transpires to put Louis CK and Rumsfeld on the same radio show.
Southern Beale - February 25, 2011 | 1:09 pm · Link
Oh yeah that reminds me: remember when Bush was supposed to be our “first MBA president”?
LOL LOL LOL
How’d that work out for ya, America?
Southern Beale - February 25, 2011 | 1:11 pm · Link
@Comrade Dread:
Two words: jury duty.
Kinda scary thought.
ppcli - February 25, 2011 | 1:14 pm · Link
@WereBear: Actually I think the Overlords may have already anticipated Doug’s suggestion and taken measures. That’s why they made Aaronson an unperson. Along with Jones and Rutherford.
A Commenter at Balloon Juice (formerlyThe Grand Panjandrum) - February 25, 2011 | 1:15 pm · Link
@Southern Beale:
Eat less than Tunch.
Comrade Dread - February 25, 2011 | 1:19 pm · Link
@Southern Beale: Meh, not really. It would certainly be a lot more entertaining when we got the inevitable congress composed of fundamentalists and atheists, actual Marxists and libertarian anarchists, gays and redneck hillbillies.
joes527 - February 25, 2011 | 1:20 pm · Link
The first 500 names in the phone book elected Scott Walker, both of the Pauls and this guy.
Pass.
gelfling545 - February 25, 2011 | 1:21 pm · Link
@Southern Beale: In my county we’re now suffering the effects of having elected a county executive who promised to “run the county like a business” and has yet to discover that you can’t run something like a business that isn’t one. Why people always fall for this I do not know.
ppcli - February 25, 2011 | 1:24 pm · Link
@gelfling545: Quite true. Somehow “Let’s run the county like a county” doesn’t pull in the votes, even though you would think it hard to argue with.
Glen Tomkins - February 25, 2011 | 1:26 pm · Link
That phonebook thing—been done.
It’s called Athenian democracy.
After going around the pike a few thousand times with monarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, and representative democracy—the Athenians settled on participatory democracy.
If you elect people to important posts, they found that representative democracy quickly evolves back to oligarchy (money has always talked since the day it was invented), so to keep public offices from being bought, they filled them by lottery. They didn’t have a phonebook, so they had to make up and maintain a list of citizens from which to draw names at random.
Unfortunately they didn’t trust their system completely enough. They left one office, that of strategos, or general, elective. That bought them an empire, and that never ends well.
jwb - February 25, 2011 | 1:31 pm · Link
@gelfling545: The same reason they fall for the argument that we should run the government like a family or the federal government should be run like the state government. When people confront something unknown, the initial attempt to make sense of it is always to find an analogy to the known. Nothing wrong with that in principle, so long as you stay alert for the moments that the analogy fails and make adjustments accordingly. But once the analogy fails, many will insist on blaming the unknown for refusing to behave the way the analogy says it should; then, you are in a heap of trouble.
sparky - February 25, 2011 | 1:32 pm · Link
so, Buckley instead of Vidal. maybe it IS a center-right blog after all. ;)
Southern Beale - February 25, 2011 | 1:45 pm · Link
@gelfling545:
Good lord but I have that old canard. Everyone repeats it, even Democrats. No one ever fucking stands up and says WHY? WHY do you want to run government like a business? It’s NOT a business! Nor should it be! Then government would be COMPETING with business and that’s illegal!
I’ve written about that a lot. It’s just infuriating.
Martin - February 25, 2011 | 1:46 pm · Link
@MikeJ: Actually, Jobs would be awesome. People don’t seem to realize that Apple cares vastly more about the customer experience than the myriad of vendors that sit alongside Apple. Those other guys make money – it’s their job to adapt.
Steve Jobs would make everything about the voter and tell corporations to solve their own fucking problems.
Maude - February 25, 2011 | 1:47 pm · Link
@jwb:
Donald Trump hopes it works for him.
Maude - February 25, 2011 | 1:50 pm · Link
@Martin:
Disagree about Jobs.
Apple has off shored it’s labor and did have child labor.
Apple is sitting on a huge pile of cash. It is just like any major corporation. They do customer service, but some repairs can be pricey.
Sentient Puddle - February 25, 2011 | 1:52 pm · Link
@Southern Beale: I remember that old crank Jerry Brown actually saying it in an interview, and making the point rather succinctly. Dog bless his soul.
gbear - February 25, 2011 | 2:07 pm · Link
I say use a business directory. At least government would get our cars started on cold mornings.
catclub - February 25, 2011 | 2:13 pm · Link
@jwb: I think you are referring to Chainsaw Al I forgethislastname, who did that to various companies.
catclub - February 25, 2011 | 2:17 pm · Link
@Southern Beale: I have that belly. my solution appears to be portion control, exercise, and careful choice of grandparents.
Reader of the Most Depressing Blog Evah, Formerly Known as Chad N Freude - February 25, 2011 | 2:28 pm · Link
If the government were run like a business, it would strive to make a profit. This would be done by . . . Snarky conclusion left to the imaginations of my betters on this blog.
cmorenc - February 25, 2011 | 2:30 pm · Link
@Doug Hill :
I get the point you’re making here, I really do. However, for the suggested tradeoff to result in a better rather than a (possibly much) worse result, you’d need to be at least mildly selective in which place the phone book you used was for. There are quite a few communities across our country where 80% of the first 500 names in the phone book are dumber than dirt and don’t control much of anything, and the remaining 20%, who are smarter only by comparison with the 80%, are dominated by a tiny handful of folks who are essentially small-time, local variants of the Fortune 500 CEOs you’re replacing. That’s a bargain?
Think, for example, how many towns in Alabama you’d be better off trading 500 Fortune 500 CEOs for their first 500 in the phone book.
For the first 500 names in the Portland, Oregon phone directory, I would gladly make that trade. For the first 500 names in the Andalusia, Alabama phone book, well…I’m not so sure ‘bout that.
fucen tarmal - February 25, 2011 | 2:43 pm · Link
you know what this means;
no-bid contracts for AAAA towing!
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods - February 25, 2011 | 2:57 pm · Link
@Sly: The following is a paid political announcement: Aaron A. Aaronson SAYS he’s for family values, but how much do we REALLY know about Aaron A. Aaronson.
Quaker in a Basement - February 25, 2011 | 3:31 pm · Link
Sure. People whose last names start with A hate Ameri…uh, the United States.
Splitting Image - February 25, 2011 | 4:06 pm · Link
You do realize that people named Abdul, Ali, Abdullah, and other variations thereof are starting to dominate the first pages of the phone directories in more and more cities, don’t you?
Doug, why do you want to implement sharia law in the U.S.?
And why did William F. Buckley want to do it, for that matter?
Ryan - February 25, 2011 | 4:26 pm · Link
Adams… Adamle… Adamowski… Adamson… Adler… Anderson… Bueller…
Bueller…
Bueller…
Martin - February 25, 2011 | 4:38 pm · Link
@Maude: Offshore of labor isn’t to reduce costs – it’s to reduce time to market, which is vastly more important. The big advantage of China is the ability to have all of your suppliers in such close proximity that you don’t have the kinds of production and supply chain issues that routinely beset other industries. That’s why everyone is there – China’s economic zones are the modern equivalent to River Rouge – but for a whole host of tech companies. The US needs to figure out how to deal with that.
ruleoflaw - February 25, 2011 | 5:04 pm · Link
If I change my name to Aaron Abaas, can I be the president, please?