[caseysoftware]

We have a government that generally believes we can legislate our problems away and that most people are incapable of taking care of themselves. When you start from that premise, everything that you do "for the good of society" or "because it's fair" ends up stepping on someone, usually those closer to the top. Alternatively, when you have leadership coming from fields where reason and making things better by creating are valued, you get a different result.

Oddly enough, I'll cite China as an improving example of this and I think it's due to the make up of their leadership:

* In the US, the top of the Obama Administration is mostly lawyers and/or mostly from Harvard. Over half the Senators were/are lawyers. The last President with technical/scientific training past Chem 101 was Herbert Hoover.. 80 years ago.

* On the other hand, China's president was a hydraulic engineer and the Communist Politburo is eight engineers and a lawyer. Their previous president was an electrical engineer.

Source: http://www.economist.com/node/13496638

Which country do you think values scientists and engineering more? Which country do you think understands science and engineering better and pushes to strengthen those fields or at least gets the hell out of the way?

(Now I feel dirty for celebrating something about China's political leadership.)

[jleyank]

No, Jimmy Carter was a nuc. Navy, selected by Rickover, etc.

[alexgartrell]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Naval_career

[ams6110]

Which just goes to to prove that technical or scientific knowledge is not a good indicator of political effectiveness. Carter's presidency was a disaster.

[nooneelse]

A little more grist for your mill... the former president of India, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._J._Abdul_Kalam , aeronautical engineer.

[presidenttrex]

Hoover was our only engineer president... and I wouldn't exactly cite him as an excellent example of presidential leadership.

[caseysoftware]

I didn't say that he was a good example.. just noting that it's been 80 years since any engineer, scientist, etc was in the role. No wonder they're disconnected.

[juiceandjuice]

Steven Chu?

[caseysoftware]

It makes sense that Energy Secretaries would have a scientific background.. but then when you look into the past 6 or so, Chu and Bodman are the only ones.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_Ener...

[dnautics]

I would never want an engineer as a president for fear that they would try to engineer our lives.

And pushing to strengthen those fields. That can be really bad. When I read the literature, my default attitude to when I read an article published by a chinese research lab is, "it's probably fraud, if you're dying to believe the result, try at least a simple experiment to make sure it's real first". I am not the only one. China may have a "good reputation" on the face of things, but theirs is not the sort of reputation I would want to have among the people in the know.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8448731.stm

a top-down approach to acting on fraud, in my opinion, just results in people trying to figure out how to game the system to not get caught. To fix fraud, you have to improve the culture, and remove the incentives to fraud. That's really hard when you have people competing for a small number of tenured positions which attract increasing amounts of funding.