Monday, September 17, 2012

business experience is terrible experience for a politician

there, i said it.

it's crazy how much "business experience" (aka "real world experience", as if the non-business world is not real), usually referring to the experience of people in change of a business rather than the vast army of underlings who actually get the stuff done, has come to be an unquestionable valuable commodity for an american politician to have.

i think experience says otherwise. a lot of the qualities that make a good CEO, are disastrous when running a political campaign (exhibit A: um, just about every decision romney has made in the past few months, but, just to pick the latest, see this. exhibit B: herman cain), or governing (e.g. a state, a public university). the american public likes to idealize the prowess of our captains of industry. but the captains we point to are the minority who didn't run their businesses into the ground. even among the successful ones, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that their skills transfer to managing a government.