The Best and the Brightest

 

It is impressive to see how closely the attitudes that led to the blow-up of Long Term Capital Management in 1998 (as described in Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed) resemble those at the root of US’ debacle in Vietnam (as recounted by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest).

 

In both cases, there is, at the heart of the disaster, a small set of brainy superstars, acknowledged by those around them as intellectual superiors – and themselves taking their outstanding abilities as a given. In both cases, they enter the story with prior commitments to models and theories, which turn out to be woefully inadequate, but which are nonetheless never seriously questioned in the process. And in both cases, the brilliant key players increasingly isolate themselves from the warning voices around them, pressing ahead to prove to the world their own brilliance – only to run into disaster.

 

(Tellingly, in both cases, key players from these select gangs of intellectual superstars are recruited from Harvard Business School: Bob McNamara in the Vietnam saga, Eric Rosenfeld in the LTCM story).

 

It’s a beautiful image that emerges from these tales: the self-confident male – intoxicated by his own brilliance and enamored with the crystalline beauty of the analytical models into which he has locked a messy world – sleepwalks into his own undoing, without ever taking his eyes off his models to check what actually lies on the road ahead.