A huuuge difference between the VietNam War, the 2008 bank crisis (count me & my husband in the tiny group of educated people--both of us former bankers--who saw through the Bernanke BS), and the COVID disaster is the change in media control.
In the '60s, there were a small number of broadcast radio & TV stations, and hundreds of newspapers, which most Americans trusted as sources of truth.
In '08 narrative control was through a larger number of cable TV stations & fewer newspapers, still trusted by most, although there were alternative news outlets (mostly wingnut radio) for those who didn't.
In 2020, after the rise of social media & the DJT campaign (fake news!) as well as an increasing number of easier-to-find alternative news outlets (we learned about the Wuhan lab leak in Dec 2019 through ZeroHedge, who got it from the Epoch Times), it's much harder to control the Narrative. This despite attempts by the deep state to grab control of social media, which have also now been increasingly exposed (thanks, Elon Musk!). So trust in media, especially the MSM, is at an all-time low, although the same factors have fueled an explosion of conspiracy theories (vaccines magnetize people or change their DNA) that are no more valid than the preferred narrative.
PS: We hated Fauci in the '80s during the AIDS crisis and were stunned and alarmed to find him in charge of the COVID response (even before we knew the link with the GoF work at Wuhan).
It is a fundamental flaw in our nature and it will always be with us. You are correct- good leaders learn to recognize this flaw and work around it, but good leaders are sadly few in number in large organizations and will usually get weeded out long before they reach that leadership chair.
1. Were the primary beneficiaries of Paulson/Bernanke's machinations the shareholders or the bondholders? I was under the impression it was mostly the latter, although I do recall with some fondness that the shotgun marriage of National City to PNC that Paulson orchestrated worked out very well in the medium and long run for PNC shareholders. Not so much for National City shareholders, though; I'm pretty sure they got wiped out.
2. Maybe you could have been more strategic about attempting to garner publicity for your point of view, but people are just in general wired to pay more attention to primeval phenomena like viral infections than to esoteric concepts like mortgage backed securities, risk-weighted capital requirements, and credit default swaps. "The greed of wealthy bankers is to blame" was all anyone really wanted to hear.
3. Losing control of the narrative about the war helped get Nixon elected. I wonder if the media learned a lesson from that, and that's at least in part why we see the modern media having chucked any skepticism towards the institutions it covers. Probably other incentives matter more, but still....
1. Some organizations tend to select for individuals who prioritize status-seeking over the search for the best answers.. 2. A successful status-seeker operates by intuiting where the organization’s political consensus will wind up. Once a strategy is adopted, the successful status-seeker will defend the consensus ruthlessly. That the consensus could be forming around the wrong policy does not concern the status-seeker. 3. The coalition that supports the consensus policy will put up a defense of it that employs political hardball rather than intellectual rigor.
Congratulations. You just figured out how every corporation's middle management works.
Status-driven syndrome is probably inherent in any large bureaucracy. While incentives might limit its impact, implementing such measures in the face of opposition from an entrenched, status-driven status quo would be difficult. Profit and loss impose a reality check on bureaucracies in businesses, but those in government agencies and non-profit organizations face no such constraint.
Possible solutions include maximizing the activities done by profit-oriented (and loss-disciplined) companies, minimizing those done by government and non-profits, and eliminating regulations, such as "too big to fail," that encourage business consolidation and growth. In addition, ceasing to bail out failing companies would also promote responsible behavior.
DEI policies will likely exacerbate status-driven syndrome by reducing merit-based promotion and employee empowerment. However, their most significant impact could be the creation of hostile work environments - through tokenism, perceptions of unfair advantage, group polarization, and backlash - leading the most competent employees, who have other job opportunities, to leave.
It is worth remembering that up until World War II, the traditional fear of the military ingrained by the founding fathers meant America never maintained a standing army. After every war, the armed forces was turned into a skeleton crew as most of the officers and most of the enlisted men were cashiered. This meant every war relied on a draft of unschooled green recruits among both enlisted and the officer corps.
The result was interesting. For the first six months, every American war is marred by tremendous errors as the green recruits figure out how to fight the current conflict. But after that, it always swung in America's favor. At least, up until WW II.
In 1945, for the first time in US history, we retained our standing army. We created a professional corps of veterans who stayed in uniform despite the peace treaties. And, as night follows day, Korea was the story of WW II vets fighting the last war. Vietnam was Korean vets trying to make Korean War principles work in Southeast Asia. Once the military was professionalized and filled with titled political veterans, America started racking up military losses.
It's an old story, but it bears repeating. You've just restated the old Peter Principle in new language: "People are promoted to their individual level of incompetence."
This post also made me think of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, as well: "Every organization will be taken over by people who value the organization for the organization's sake from the people who sincerely believe in the organization's mission."
I have a funny feeling that each of these observations are merely different aspects of a particular phenmenom!
You've done an excellent job of concisely capturing many of the Covid response failures. While I wouldn't say it is bad, your section on the financial crisis is not as compelling. Maybe this speaks to why the Great Barrington Declaration is better known than Not What They Had in Mind.
'Moreover, the response consisted of ill-considered bank bailouts and desperate fiscal “stimulus.” '
Recognizing I have yet to read, "Not What They Had in Mind," your section, and especially the quoted sentence about the response to the 2008 financial crisis, reminds me of the saying about capitalism being the worst economic system, except for all the others. While the response certainly could have been fine tuned, I've yet to hear a compelling argument for an alternative approach to keeping things from getting worse than they did.
Do you think that there is any way we can re-align the successful status seekers with long term goals? A belief that after one's death, God is going to judge you on your actions, and you cannot invoke 'plausible deniability' and other sorts of rules-lawyering with God seems to have worked for some people in the past. Some people have also really cared, a lot, what the history books of the future would say about them. Having the respect of your local community, your church or synagogue has also served as some sort of moral guide to the sort of status that is acceptable. Is there anything besides the exercise of power that current leaders want? Frightening to think that 'I am powerful enough to make a bad decision stick' might be something that people have as an explicit goal to demonstrate, rather than something to sit up nights worrying about.
I think that status-seekers generally consider themselves aligned with the organization's long-term goals and view politics (including status-seeking and silencing nay-sayers) as how they advance these goals. So they sleep - and contemplate death - serenely. McNamara certainly thought at the time that his Vietnam policy was data-driven.
I take Dr. Kling as accepting this aspect of human nature and looking for organizational ways to link political success with the actual achievement of the goals. In business, the profit motive works wonders. Elsewhere it's very difficult.
And I don't know why I have to keep saying this, but as of now the conflict between Iran and Israel cannot be won. If one side starts to win, the other side will use nuclear weapons. As Reagan and Gorbachev recognized long ago, a nuclear war "cannot be won and must never be fought."
This should be a comfort to you to some extent, since it goes for Iran winning as well (and their behavior indicates they know this). If you talk to anyone who used to interact with them as a diplomat, they will say that Iran is a rational actor. And that doesn't go for all Muslim-majority nations, people don't say that about Pakistan or ISIS.
In my experience, to a first approximation, there are three kinds of people: (1) People who care about status, (2) people who care about money, (3) people who care about both.
To a second approximation, there are six kinds of people: the three above, plus those who care a lot about status and a little bit about truth, those who care a lot about money and a little about truth, and those who care a lot about both and a little about truth.
Wanting to be more widely read, and by implication taken seriously, is certainly about wanting status. I'm sure Kling believes it is deserved status, because he is more right than the ruling narrative. In fact, one of his concerns is that "being right" and "being high status" aren't more closely correlated. But in a better world, they would be.
And, of course, most people don't think, "It's too bad I'm deliberately going along with lies to keep/improve my status." They haven't done a deep dive into the truth-value of things and are willing to go along with the conventional wisdom.
Or they change the goal posts to feel better. From a former career:
Me - We say students learn things because they pass a course, but a year later they've forgotten almost everything.
Concerned Colleague - But they'll do better than they otherwise would when they take a similar course in college.
"Wanting to be more widely read, and by implication taken seriously, is certainly about wanting status."
Maybe I should have said "status-driven syndrome" instead of status but either way I think your statement is incorrect. It is entirely possible, even likely, that he wants to be more widely read because he thinks what he says is true and has value for the reader and society more generally. Whether that's true or not, it is not the same as seeking status, which he might also be doing.
As for "deliberately going along with lies to keep/improve my status", I'm sure that happens but some also truly believe and some subconsciously believe/agree based on being part of the group without independently thinking through why they hold that opinion.
I think we may be, as someone once said, "violently agreeing".
Arnold's main reason for his Fantasy Intellectual Teams experiment was to try to more closely align being prestigious and being right (or at least practicing good intellectual hygeine).
Maybe. I was wondering if we were seeing the same thing with a very different emphasis. Maybe that's not quite the same as violently agreeing but this difference might also not exactly be a disagreement.
When I was much younger, my wife became unexpectedly pregnant. Turns out that one in one hundred thousand chance of getting pregnant while on the pill is not zero in a hundred thousand :( We didn't know what to do and went to see a therapist. There isn't course of action that just seems right, I told her. Everything, I have mixed emotions about. She said (I paraphrase) expecting a clear obvious decision is unrealistic. You will always have mixed emotions. And since then, I have been leery of simple explanations of why people do anything. There are usually several reasons, at least partly contradictory. Embrace the power of "and".
A North Vietnam or Viet Cong general said they were ready to give up by 1970. Apparently President Nixon’s, and Henry Kissinger’s (whom I loathe) policies were working. But then that general saw the anti war protests and sympathies here and abroad, and that gave the Viet Cong further motivation to keep fighting. In other words, the anti war hippies and protesters gave aid and comfort to the enemy.
If we had been victorious, our standing on the World Stage would have greatly increased and we would have been feared by our enemies.
Also, I read that the democrats in congress refused to fund (spend money on weapons) the war. So, in several different respects, the democrats were more concerned with destroying President Nixon (because he exposed them when he found out there were Soviet spies in the Truman Administration back when he was a member of Congress).
Ugh. I hate communists. I despise them. And I despise liars almost as much as God does. Or the sins of lies and lying. And that’s all the democrats do. They lie. About everything.
The Vietnam War wasn’t a total policy disaster. Our presence prevented the spread of communism in the region. As soon as we left, more problems developed. The same thing happened when we left Iraq and Afghanistan.
>Those three tendencies make up what I call status-driven syndrome. I will illustrate it using the three examples I mentioned above.<
I am not sure if this needs a fancy term; I would refer to it simply as human nature. Intellectual rigor is the exception in human social behavior, not the norm. And this is for good reason. Staying in the good graces of the powerful and influential is nigh-guaranteed to confer more benefits to an individual than any attempt at truth-seeking. Even if the attempt at truth-seeking meets with some degree of success, if enemies are made in the process, on the level of the individual who bears those social costs, they are likely to be worse off in life than if they'd just kept their trap shut and gone with the flow. Status-chasing is perfectly rational from the standpoint of one's own self-interest, and this is always the case in all but the most exceptional circumstances.
This problem certainly seems to be intractable under current conditions. The government is fundamentally unaccountable and certainly is not going to be held in check by some magical vague quality of "leadership" in a single individual. Of course Bush and Trump deferred to people the entire world was telling them were experts in the respective crises that they faced--why and how could they have done otherwise, given their environments at the time? The scope of the institutions and problems in play are far too vast to expect that one person, no matter how exceptional, could reliably discern and enforce truth under such conditions.
The primary hope I see for improvement here is that technology will somehow change the nature of information such that it becomes more difficult for false narratives to survive public scrutiny. There is certainly some encouraging evidence here regarding the Internet and COVID--before the Internet, when government-controlled legacy media were the only source of mass information, I imagine that the entire affair would have gone very differently.
I would need a great deal more information about Scott Atlas before I accepted him as a "better choice" as such.
I'm willing to admit that there were several times when his basic arguments about the biological realities of COVID were a lot closer to the mark than Fauci or Birx, but that does NOT automatically make him a useful leader of the entire federal healthcare establishment. I don't have any reason to believe that literally placing Scott Atlas in charge of the entire federal health response in 2020 would have had any better results than, say, placing me in charge of it.
That said, how Fauci or Birx managed their leadership responsibilities wasn't much better, either. I have an enormous list of things they SHOULD have been able to do, given their budget, clout, and professional knowledge, which they very clearly never actually attempted to do. The big item on the list is that it was downright humiliating that they apparently thought that arranging fundamental double-blind tests of actual testable hypothesis was somehow NOT THEIR JOB.
There were SO MANY field studies which needed to be done, and could have been done, if only Fauci and Birx had just SAID "Ok, I designed the basic protocol for the study on two hours notice on the back of an envelope last night, here's what I came up with, I need several million dollars from congress and authority to do an emergency direct hire of a few trusted PHD's in the private research sector. No, I am NOT going to wait 24 months for the normal vetted grant process to play through in all the normal ways"
That said, I'm really not convinced that Scott Atlas could have done any better in terms of actually getting those studies commissioned ASAP, or any of the other basic tests of minimal leadership that we failed during those years.
"Some organizations, especially government agencies, tend to select for individuals who prioritize status-seeking over the search for the best answers."
Maybe it doesn't invalidate your claim but I'd argue the vast majority of government employees did not chose government employment because they were status-seeking. Or maybe you are just referring to people who come from outside to take senior positions?
People may not initially choose government employment with status-seeking in mind, but once they are in the door, the incentives are that they keep their head down and enjoy the job security, benefits, etc. Absolutely no incentive for a regular government employee to rock the boat, and lots for him to lose if he does so and gets tossed overboard for it.
They may have signed up for faux-altruistic (idealistic) reasons, ideology (government good) or just because it's the best job they could land. But once in the bureaucracy, the best, or maybe only way to advance is status-driven. Fauci's entire career follows this arc, with both the AIDS & COVID crises offering him golden opportunities to advance further.
"the best, or maybe only way to advance is status-driven. "
Some people never want to and never try to advance.
Believe it or not, some people advance because they are judged competent.
We can argue about whether it's the best way to advance but it's surely not the only way. If you had said it's the fastest I'd be inclined to agree with that.
Great examples!
A huuuge difference between the VietNam War, the 2008 bank crisis (count me & my husband in the tiny group of educated people--both of us former bankers--who saw through the Bernanke BS), and the COVID disaster is the change in media control.
In the '60s, there were a small number of broadcast radio & TV stations, and hundreds of newspapers, which most Americans trusted as sources of truth.
In '08 narrative control was through a larger number of cable TV stations & fewer newspapers, still trusted by most, although there were alternative news outlets (mostly wingnut radio) for those who didn't.
In 2020, after the rise of social media & the DJT campaign (fake news!) as well as an increasing number of easier-to-find alternative news outlets (we learned about the Wuhan lab leak in Dec 2019 through ZeroHedge, who got it from the Epoch Times), it's much harder to control the Narrative. This despite attempts by the deep state to grab control of social media, which have also now been increasingly exposed (thanks, Elon Musk!). So trust in media, especially the MSM, is at an all-time low, although the same factors have fueled an explosion of conspiracy theories (vaccines magnetize people or change their DNA) that are no more valid than the preferred narrative.
PS: We hated Fauci in the '80s during the AIDS crisis and were stunned and alarmed to find him in charge of the COVID response (even before we knew the link with the GoF work at Wuhan).
It is a fundamental flaw in our nature and it will always be with us. You are correct- good leaders learn to recognize this flaw and work around it, but good leaders are sadly few in number in large organizations and will usually get weeded out long before they reach that leadership chair.
A few random comments:
1. Were the primary beneficiaries of Paulson/Bernanke's machinations the shareholders or the bondholders? I was under the impression it was mostly the latter, although I do recall with some fondness that the shotgun marriage of National City to PNC that Paulson orchestrated worked out very well in the medium and long run for PNC shareholders. Not so much for National City shareholders, though; I'm pretty sure they got wiped out.
2. Maybe you could have been more strategic about attempting to garner publicity for your point of view, but people are just in general wired to pay more attention to primeval phenomena like viral infections than to esoteric concepts like mortgage backed securities, risk-weighted capital requirements, and credit default swaps. "The greed of wealthy bankers is to blame" was all anyone really wanted to hear.
3. Losing control of the narrative about the war helped get Nixon elected. I wonder if the media learned a lesson from that, and that's at least in part why we see the modern media having chucked any skepticism towards the institutions it covers. Probably other incentives matter more, but still....
I'm not exactly sure why but somehow you've made me think of SBF going to prison yet creditors have been made whole with interest.
1. Some organizations tend to select for individuals who prioritize status-seeking over the search for the best answers.. 2. A successful status-seeker operates by intuiting where the organization’s political consensus will wind up. Once a strategy is adopted, the successful status-seeker will defend the consensus ruthlessly. That the consensus could be forming around the wrong policy does not concern the status-seeker. 3. The coalition that supports the consensus policy will put up a defense of it that employs political hardball rather than intellectual rigor.
Congratulations. You just figured out how every corporation's middle management works.
Status-driven syndrome is probably inherent in any large bureaucracy. While incentives might limit its impact, implementing such measures in the face of opposition from an entrenched, status-driven status quo would be difficult. Profit and loss impose a reality check on bureaucracies in businesses, but those in government agencies and non-profit organizations face no such constraint.
Possible solutions include maximizing the activities done by profit-oriented (and loss-disciplined) companies, minimizing those done by government and non-profits, and eliminating regulations, such as "too big to fail," that encourage business consolidation and growth. In addition, ceasing to bail out failing companies would also promote responsible behavior.
DEI policies will likely exacerbate status-driven syndrome by reducing merit-based promotion and employee empowerment. However, their most significant impact could be the creation of hostile work environments - through tokenism, perceptions of unfair advantage, group polarization, and backlash - leading the most competent employees, who have other job opportunities, to leave.
This is indeed the problem.
It is worth remembering that up until World War II, the traditional fear of the military ingrained by the founding fathers meant America never maintained a standing army. After every war, the armed forces was turned into a skeleton crew as most of the officers and most of the enlisted men were cashiered. This meant every war relied on a draft of unschooled green recruits among both enlisted and the officer corps.
The result was interesting. For the first six months, every American war is marred by tremendous errors as the green recruits figure out how to fight the current conflict. But after that, it always swung in America's favor. At least, up until WW II.
In 1945, for the first time in US history, we retained our standing army. We created a professional corps of veterans who stayed in uniform despite the peace treaties. And, as night follows day, Korea was the story of WW II vets fighting the last war. Vietnam was Korean vets trying to make Korean War principles work in Southeast Asia. Once the military was professionalized and filled with titled political veterans, America started racking up military losses.
It's an old story, but it bears repeating. You've just restated the old Peter Principle in new language: "People are promoted to their individual level of incompetence."
This post also made me think of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy, as well: "Every organization will be taken over by people who value the organization for the organization's sake from the people who sincerely believe in the organization's mission."
I have a funny feeling that each of these observations are merely different aspects of a particular phenmenom!
You've done an excellent job of concisely capturing many of the Covid response failures. While I wouldn't say it is bad, your section on the financial crisis is not as compelling. Maybe this speaks to why the Great Barrington Declaration is better known than Not What They Had in Mind.
'Moreover, the response consisted of ill-considered bank bailouts and desperate fiscal “stimulus.” '
Recognizing I have yet to read, "Not What They Had in Mind," your section, and especially the quoted sentence about the response to the 2008 financial crisis, reminds me of the saying about capitalism being the worst economic system, except for all the others. While the response certainly could have been fine tuned, I've yet to hear a compelling argument for an alternative approach to keeping things from getting worse than they did.
Do you think that there is any way we can re-align the successful status seekers with long term goals? A belief that after one's death, God is going to judge you on your actions, and you cannot invoke 'plausible deniability' and other sorts of rules-lawyering with God seems to have worked for some people in the past. Some people have also really cared, a lot, what the history books of the future would say about them. Having the respect of your local community, your church or synagogue has also served as some sort of moral guide to the sort of status that is acceptable. Is there anything besides the exercise of power that current leaders want? Frightening to think that 'I am powerful enough to make a bad decision stick' might be something that people have as an explicit goal to demonstrate, rather than something to sit up nights worrying about.
I think that status-seekers generally consider themselves aligned with the organization's long-term goals and view politics (including status-seeking and silencing nay-sayers) as how they advance these goals. So they sleep - and contemplate death - serenely. McNamara certainly thought at the time that his Vietnam policy was data-driven.
I take Dr. Kling as accepting this aspect of human nature and looking for organizational ways to link political success with the actual achievement of the goals. In business, the profit motive works wonders. Elsewhere it's very difficult.
Ken
And I don't know why I have to keep saying this, but as of now the conflict between Iran and Israel cannot be won. If one side starts to win, the other side will use nuclear weapons. As Reagan and Gorbachev recognized long ago, a nuclear war "cannot be won and must never be fought."
This should be a comfort to you to some extent, since it goes for Iran winning as well (and their behavior indicates they know this). If you talk to anyone who used to interact with them as a diplomat, they will say that Iran is a rational actor. And that doesn't go for all Muslim-majority nations, people don't say that about Pakistan or ISIS.
In my experience, to a first approximation, there are three kinds of people: (1) People who care about status, (2) people who care about money, (3) people who care about both.
To a second approximation, there are six kinds of people: the three above, plus those who care a lot about status and a little bit about truth, those who care a lot about money and a little about truth, and those who care a lot about both and a little about truth.
I missed the immense pessimism in Kling's kinds of people until your slightly less pessimistic list. Do you really think nobody cares about truth?
Besides that, I'd argue there are A LOT of people who don't much care about status or money, At least not about getting more status or money.
No doubt Kling wishes he were more widely read. Is that the same as wanting status? I'd say possibly but probably not.
Wanting to be more widely read, and by implication taken seriously, is certainly about wanting status. I'm sure Kling believes it is deserved status, because he is more right than the ruling narrative. In fact, one of his concerns is that "being right" and "being high status" aren't more closely correlated. But in a better world, they would be.
And, of course, most people don't think, "It's too bad I'm deliberately going along with lies to keep/improve my status." They haven't done a deep dive into the truth-value of things and are willing to go along with the conventional wisdom.
Or they change the goal posts to feel better. From a former career:
Me - We say students learn things because they pass a course, but a year later they've forgotten almost everything.
Concerned Colleague - But they'll do better than they otherwise would when they take a similar course in college.
"Wanting to be more widely read, and by implication taken seriously, is certainly about wanting status."
Maybe I should have said "status-driven syndrome" instead of status but either way I think your statement is incorrect. It is entirely possible, even likely, that he wants to be more widely read because he thinks what he says is true and has value for the reader and society more generally. Whether that's true or not, it is not the same as seeking status, which he might also be doing.
As for "deliberately going along with lies to keep/improve my status", I'm sure that happens but some also truly believe and some subconsciously believe/agree based on being part of the group without independently thinking through why they hold that opinion.
A lot of what may seem like status seeking is the fear of being left behind or left out. Go along to get along described much behavior
And there's a benefit to just being part of the group.
or feeling insecure.
I think we may be, as someone once said, "violently agreeing".
Arnold's main reason for his Fantasy Intellectual Teams experiment was to try to more closely align being prestigious and being right (or at least practicing good intellectual hygeine).
Maybe. I was wondering if we were seeing the same thing with a very different emphasis. Maybe that's not quite the same as violently agreeing but this difference might also not exactly be a disagreement.
When I was much younger, my wife became unexpectedly pregnant. Turns out that one in one hundred thousand chance of getting pregnant while on the pill is not zero in a hundred thousand :( We didn't know what to do and went to see a therapist. There isn't course of action that just seems right, I told her. Everything, I have mixed emotions about. She said (I paraphrase) expecting a clear obvious decision is unrealistic. You will always have mixed emotions. And since then, I have been leery of simple explanations of why people do anything. There are usually several reasons, at least partly contradictory. Embrace the power of "and".
Arnold, you remain one of the most succinct writers on earth.
A North Vietnam or Viet Cong general said they were ready to give up by 1970. Apparently President Nixon’s, and Henry Kissinger’s (whom I loathe) policies were working. But then that general saw the anti war protests and sympathies here and abroad, and that gave the Viet Cong further motivation to keep fighting. In other words, the anti war hippies and protesters gave aid and comfort to the enemy.
If we had been victorious, our standing on the World Stage would have greatly increased and we would have been feared by our enemies.
Also, I read that the democrats in congress refused to fund (spend money on weapons) the war. So, in several different respects, the democrats were more concerned with destroying President Nixon (because he exposed them when he found out there were Soviet spies in the Truman Administration back when he was a member of Congress).
Ugh. I hate communists. I despise them. And I despise liars almost as much as God does. Or the sins of lies and lying. And that’s all the democrats do. They lie. About everything.
The Vietnam War wasn’t a total policy disaster. Our presence prevented the spread of communism in the region. As soon as we left, more problems developed. The same thing happened when we left Iraq and Afghanistan.
>Those three tendencies make up what I call status-driven syndrome. I will illustrate it using the three examples I mentioned above.<
I am not sure if this needs a fancy term; I would refer to it simply as human nature. Intellectual rigor is the exception in human social behavior, not the norm. And this is for good reason. Staying in the good graces of the powerful and influential is nigh-guaranteed to confer more benefits to an individual than any attempt at truth-seeking. Even if the attempt at truth-seeking meets with some degree of success, if enemies are made in the process, on the level of the individual who bears those social costs, they are likely to be worse off in life than if they'd just kept their trap shut and gone with the flow. Status-chasing is perfectly rational from the standpoint of one's own self-interest, and this is always the case in all but the most exceptional circumstances.
This problem certainly seems to be intractable under current conditions. The government is fundamentally unaccountable and certainly is not going to be held in check by some magical vague quality of "leadership" in a single individual. Of course Bush and Trump deferred to people the entire world was telling them were experts in the respective crises that they faced--why and how could they have done otherwise, given their environments at the time? The scope of the institutions and problems in play are far too vast to expect that one person, no matter how exceptional, could reliably discern and enforce truth under such conditions.
The primary hope I see for improvement here is that technology will somehow change the nature of information such that it becomes more difficult for false narratives to survive public scrutiny. There is certainly some encouraging evidence here regarding the Internet and COVID--before the Internet, when government-controlled legacy media were the only source of mass information, I imagine that the entire affair would have gone very differently.
I would need a great deal more information about Scott Atlas before I accepted him as a "better choice" as such.
I'm willing to admit that there were several times when his basic arguments about the biological realities of COVID were a lot closer to the mark than Fauci or Birx, but that does NOT automatically make him a useful leader of the entire federal healthcare establishment. I don't have any reason to believe that literally placing Scott Atlas in charge of the entire federal health response in 2020 would have had any better results than, say, placing me in charge of it.
That said, how Fauci or Birx managed their leadership responsibilities wasn't much better, either. I have an enormous list of things they SHOULD have been able to do, given their budget, clout, and professional knowledge, which they very clearly never actually attempted to do. The big item on the list is that it was downright humiliating that they apparently thought that arranging fundamental double-blind tests of actual testable hypothesis was somehow NOT THEIR JOB.
There were SO MANY field studies which needed to be done, and could have been done, if only Fauci and Birx had just SAID "Ok, I designed the basic protocol for the study on two hours notice on the back of an envelope last night, here's what I came up with, I need several million dollars from congress and authority to do an emergency direct hire of a few trusted PHD's in the private research sector. No, I am NOT going to wait 24 months for the normal vetted grant process to play through in all the normal ways"
That said, I'm really not convinced that Scott Atlas could have done any better in terms of actually getting those studies commissioned ASAP, or any of the other basic tests of minimal leadership that we failed during those years.
"Some organizations, especially government agencies, tend to select for individuals who prioritize status-seeking over the search for the best answers."
Maybe it doesn't invalidate your claim but I'd argue the vast majority of government employees did not chose government employment because they were status-seeking. Or maybe you are just referring to people who come from outside to take senior positions?
People may not initially choose government employment with status-seeking in mind, but once they are in the door, the incentives are that they keep their head down and enjoy the job security, benefits, etc. Absolutely no incentive for a regular government employee to rock the boat, and lots for him to lose if he does so and gets tossed overboard for it.
And yet lots of government employees rock the boat when they think something isn't right.
They may have signed up for faux-altruistic (idealistic) reasons, ideology (government good) or just because it's the best job they could land. But once in the bureaucracy, the best, or maybe only way to advance is status-driven. Fauci's entire career follows this arc, with both the AIDS & COVID crises offering him golden opportunities to advance further.
"the best, or maybe only way to advance is status-driven. "
Some people never want to and never try to advance.
Believe it or not, some people advance because they are judged competent.
We can argue about whether it's the best way to advance but it's surely not the only way. If you had said it's the fastest I'd be inclined to agree with that.
I'll take that correction. Also, this is in context of people who go work for the government.
Yes. In that case there are huge differences between agencies. In at least some cases, huge differences in advancement paths within agencies.