The hyper-rise of hyper-rationalism
The Washington Post‘s Harold Meyerson criticizes the latter day McNamaras who amorally constructed our shaky financial system:
There has already been speculation aplenty about whether Donald Rumsfeld will ever reassess his performance in the Iraq war. But I’m not thinking about Rumsfeld or the other men who brought us the war in Iraq. I have in mind the architects — every bit as cerebral and self-certain as McNamara — of the financial world that imploded last year. The real latter-day McNamara may not be Rumsfeld but Robert Rubin, Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
In fact, the similarities between the men who crafted the Iraq war and the men who crafted Vietnam aren’t that strong. McNamara’s hubris was that of a hyper-rationalist. He and his whiz kids, his systems analysts and efficiency experts, stormed into an intellectually sleepy capital determined to subject what had been the haphazard realm of policy to scientific measurement. The Air Force flyboys may have wanted to bomb the bejesus out of the commies, but McNamara’s boys could tell you precisely what tonnage would destroy precisely what industrial capacity. Victory was just an equation or two away.
[. . .]
Will the creators of this crisis wander through an intellectual and moral desert as McNamara did for decades? As yet, the mea culpas have been few and, like McNamara’s, incomplete. Alan Greenspan did admit to a congressional committee that his belief in the rational behavior of financial institutions had been shattered. But the confessions of failure and assumptions of responsibility from Chicago School economists, leading Wall Street bankers and lax governmental regulators, all of whom assured us that the very profitable financial vehicles they had devised also reduced the risk to the rest of us, are almost nowhere to be found.
–Sam
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