Outraged Twitter feeds abound.
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You don’t get these outcomes – you don’t get a whole culture like this – without the character-formation that happens for many in the frats and the clubs.
As I said in an earlier post, these places are structural to our country’s economic success because they help make these people:
At Peter’s memorial service in 2015 — held in a place he loved, with sweeping views of the Pacific — a young associate from his firm stood up to speak of their friendship and of the bands they sometimes went to see together, only to break down in tears. Quite a few of the lawyers attending the service were bent over their phones, reading and tapping out emails.
Their friend and colleague was dead, and yet they couldn’t stop working long enough to listen to what was being said about him.
And these people:
Wall Street CEOs like to think they are the adults, the big men in the room, the ones who know how the world works. Well, you know what? They screwed up their own banks, the financial system, and the economy like a bunch of two-year-olds. Every single major bank would have failed in late 2008 without massive government intervention — because of wounds that were entirely self-inflicted. (Citigroup: holding onto hundreds of billions of dollars of its own toxic waste. Bank of America: paying $50 billion for an investment bank that would have failed within three days. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs: levering up without a stable source of funding. Etc.) The financial crisis should have put to rest for a generation the idea that the big boys on Wall Street know what they’re doing and the politicians in Washington are a bunch of amateurs. Yet somehow the bankers came out of it with the same unshakable belief in their own perfection that they had in 2005. The only plausible explanation is some kind of powerful personality disorder.
They’re making another, similar, version of these people at Penn State. They’re making them at most of our universities. You couldn’t have Wall Street without them. You couldn’t have Marc Kasowitz without them. You couldn’t have (had) Lehman Brothers without them. You couldn’t have contemporary America without them.
So Niall Ferguson doesn’t have to huff and puff. The clubs are where you learn high-level substance abuse and arrant indifference – the heart of our red-hot economy. They’re not going anywhere.
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UD thanks Jack.
July 17th, 2017 at 12:59PM
don’t forget the west coast chaos monkey branch of the bro family tree:
https://ww2.kqed.org/forum/2017/07/14/google-pays-researchers-for-favorable-academic-research/
July 18th, 2017 at 10:26AM
http://www.wnyc.org/story/end-campus-greek-culture-near