In Wanting, Luke Burgis writes,

One hundred years ago, there was a much wider gap in knowledge between someone who had a doctoral degree and someone who didn’t. Today, with the world’s information at nearly everyone’s fingertips, the knowledge gap between people with a great amount of formal education and those with less has narrowed.

. . .Today value is largely mimetically driven rather than attached to fixed, stable points (like college degrees). This has created opportunities for anyone who can stand out from the crowd. This has positive and negative consequences.

We used to think of expertise as embedded in prestigious institutions. But attachment to a prestigious institution no longer guarantees expertise.

Another concept that Burgis introduced to this reader is the self-licking ice cream cone. This phrase was coined by Peter Worden of NASA to refer to an institution whose main purpose is sustaining itself, having lost sight of its higher mission.

Peacetime armies tend to degenerate into self-licking ice cream cones. The CDC and other bureaucracies that were supposed to help us deal with the virus turned out to be self-licking ice cream cones.

Harvard University once had a higher mission of selecting and training leaders for politics and business. But Harvard has degenerated into a self-licking ice cream cone.

We need new and better institutions.

I’ve finished one pass-through of Wanting, by Luke Burgis. The book is an attempt to spread and build on the ideas of Rene Girard. I liked the sections of the book that I thought I grasped. Other sections did not reach me, but perhaps I will get more out of a second reading.

The Burgis-Girard view is that we all have models, meaning people to whom we compare ourselves. What Girard calls mimetic desire is the tendency to want what our models want. That can make us jealous of our models, especially if they inhabit our intimate world rather than our remote world.

Here was one interesting aphorism:

think seriously about the people you least want to succeed

Some remarks:

1. I think of my friend from high school who, a few months before the 2020 election, said that he would never take a vaccine “developed by Trump and his cronies.” Clearly, he (along with many other Americans) really wanted President Trump to fail. That probably means that Mr. Trump was a model for my friend, in that my friend was comparing himself, consciously or not, with Mr. Trump. Incidentally, my friend was voted President of our student body our senior year.

2. I think of a situation from almost 30 years ago at Freddie Mac. I wanted to be in charge of a project, and when someone else was put in charge, I really wanted him to fail.

3. If I resent the success of Olivier Blanchard, Paul Krugman, or Ezra Klein, then that probably means that I treat them as models. Because I have met them, I cannot emotionally dismiss them as being part of the remote world.

4. I think that social media have crunched together the intimate world and the remote world. Burgis agrees that social media creates amped-up rivalry. He says that we are all like new college freshmen–feeling insecure and competing to stand out in a crowd of people who seem similar.

5. Think of someone who has had a nasty divorce. How would they feel if their ex were to be happy in a new relationship?