Yesterday, I wrote that The more titles an organization has, the more it will select for people who really care about titles.
I want to elaborate on the problems this can cause. While re-reading Not What They Had in Mind, my long paper on the 2008 financial crisis (which I want to summarize in a future post), it occurred to me that there are parallels between the way an incorrect consensus emerged and was vigorously defended then and the way something similar happened with COVID. And I think that one can make a case that another policy disaster, the Vietnam War, shared similar policy dynamics.
My thesis is this: