How America Became the World’s Brain

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, October 13, 2020

 

One of the unkind stereotypes of Americans is that we are an un-intellectual and even anti-intellectual people. Like many enduring stereotypes, this one has some basis in truth — whatever has led the country to a choice between Donald Trump and Joe Biden for its highest elected office, it is not that Americans are thinking too hard about things. Europeans sneer at the famous American lack of facility with foreign languages, and Americans traveling abroad often are self-conscious about that, fearful of embodying the Ugly American.

 

There is much that is perverse, ugly, and illiterate in our national intellectual life. But, at the same time, we are the world’s intellectual superpower. This year’s Nobel prizes offer a case in point: the prize for medicine went to a three-man group, two of them Americans; the physics prize went to a three-man group, one American; the chemistry prize was shared by a French woman and an American woman; the literature prize was awarded to an American poet (a thing which exists!), Louise Glück; the peace prize was awarded to the U.N. World Food Program, an agency currently run by a former Republican governor of South Carolina, David Beasley; the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to two American economists working at Stanford.

 

Every Nobel prize in 2020 was awarded either to an American, a team of Americans, or a team with an American member. Not bad for a group of people comprising 4 percent of the world’s population.

 

How did that happen?

 

For one thing, American institutions are terrific at identifying and cultivating extraordinary intellectual talents. Conservatives spend a great deal of time sneering at our institutions of higher education because there are too many Froot-Loops and crackpots in the English department at Bryn Mawr (where the current course offerings include “Colonizing Girlhoods: L. M. Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilder” and “Lesbian Immortal”), but these credentialed mediocrities are going to land somewhere — the U.S. military is not manned exclusively by heroes, our sentimental rhetoric notwithstanding. Last week, the New York Times published a very interesting essay titled, “Everything I Know About Elite America I Learned From ‘Fresh Prince’ and ‘West Wing,’” written by a doctoral student at Cambridge, Rob Henderson, who is a product of the American foster-care system. His path forward in life was very like that of Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance: service in the military and then undergraduate studies at Yale. From Henderson’s military experience, he learned the value of higher education (those “who had college credits or a degree were typically promoted faster, and supervisors often urged subordinates to take night classes”), and from television, he learned the value of elite education.

 

Princeton is creating a new residential college to replace the one named for Woodrow Wilson (now persona non grata at the university he once ran) with a large gift from Mellody Hobson of Ariel Investments. Hobson, a black woman, grew up in a poor, single-mother household in Chicago (poor here meaning frequently evicted or without electricity) but found a place at an elite Catholic prep school and then one at Princeton. After Princeton, she went to work for Ariel, which was founded by another Princeton graduate. She thrived at the firm — she is unusual in having worked all of her post-college life at the same company — and ended up sitting on the boards of several big companies. (She also married George Lucas — the rich get richer, and sometimes much richer.) Her gift to Princeton will help to ensure that the opportunities that she enjoyed will be available to others, including those who, like her, come from modest or impoverished backgrounds.

 

Henderson’s story and Hobson’s are excellent examples of how remarkably effective our elite institutions are at finding and cultivating unusual talents. There are many like them: Princeton helped a young man born to a teenaged mother in Albuquerque, Jeff Bezos, on to a reasonably successful business career.

 

The Ivy League is not the exclusive preserve of the upper classes. This is not a question of fairness but a matter of brute fact: Most people do not have the intellectual gifts to benefit from the best of a Princeton or Yale education, and they cannot acquire those capacities any more than a short basketball aficionado can will himself into greater height. Gifts are unequally and unfairly distributed. There is no way — none yet known — to give those kinds of gifts to people who do not have them. It wasn’t Lang Lang’s brutal practice schedule — six hours a day at five years old — that made him the musician he is. The work is necessary but not in itself sufficient. The role of elite institutions of higher education is to locate those with the gifts and the inclination to do the work, to cultivate them, and to concentrate them socially: Great advances most often happen within networks and within teams, our romantic notions of the lone genius laboring in his private workshop notwithstanding.

 

The United States as a whole acts in a similar way when it comes to highly talented immigrants. Elon Musk came to the United States to attend an Ivy League university (Penn) and came to California to pursue a doctorate in physics at Stanford. (He famously quit after his second day to pursue business ideas.) Microsoft’s Satya Nadella came to the United States to study computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and then took an MBA from Chicago. The most important project of Donald Trump’s administration is not being entrusted to Mike Pence or Lindsey Graham but to a man named Mohamed, the Moroccan-born Belgian-American immigrant Moncef Mohamed Slaoui, formerly of GlaxoSmithKline and currently the chief scientific officer of Operation Warp Speed, the national effort to produce a coronavirus vaccine. The anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Trump administration do not add up to much in the face of a genuine worldwide crisis. If you want to Make America Great Again, here’s Mohamed from Brussels via Harvard and Tufts.

 

For businesses — and for countries — the gains associated with very high-end human talent have always been enormous (the liberation of British mindpower by the end of feudalism and the emergence of a modern labor market made that nation a superpower in its day) and they are even more dramatic in a globalized world, when relatively small advantages at the margins can produce huge aggregate effects over time. Understanding this and acting on it would fundamentally reorganize not only how we think about education but also how we think about immigration, our various failed efforts to fortify manufacturing and increase manufacturing’s share of the work force, our tax system, and much more. It would also mean a deep rethink of such vague but emotionally charged ideas as nationalism, populism, and inequality.

 

Instead, our political discourse remains dominated by the politics of resentment and group-interest status-jockeying. And so the world’s intellectual superpower prepares to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, two embodiments of mediocrity — mediocrity at best — as witless and feckless as American public life has ever produced.