Passionate But Not Careful

The other day a friend of a friend informed me matter-of-factly:

The fact is most of The presidents cabinet has no clue how to fix the problems they are worsening. Interesting fact, only 8% of the presidents cabinet members were previously employed in the private sector. That is the lowest amount of any president ever. Eisenhower had 57%, Reagan had 53%, and W Bush had 51%.

Setting aside issues of who does what in government, this 8% of cabinet members previously employed in the private sector struck me as just the sort of thing that's easy to check these days.

8% of 20 first-term cabinet members comes to just 1.6 individuals this person claims were previously employed in the private sector.

Susan Rice and the recently-resigned Peter Orszag were both consultants for McKinsey & Company — so we're already at 10%.

Ron Kirk,  Janet Napolitano, Gary Locke, Tom Vilsack, Ken Salazar and Hillary Clinton all practiced law in the private sector. That gets us to 40%.

Shaun Donovan worked in mortgage banking and Timothy Geithner started out as a consultant with Kissinger Associates. That's 50%.

Robert Gates, a holdover from Mr. Bush's cabinet, is indeed a career government employee with the CIA and NSC; but he's Secretary of Defense so some would argue that's not all bad. Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Eric Shinseki spent a career in the military (this is offset to some degree by his celebrity in business circles — in Fast Company: "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." — and his service as a director on the boards of half a dozen private sector companies).

And so it goes. There are a couple of cabinet members whose public careers seem to have begun in either government or politics. There's a working research scientist with his very own Nobel prize in physics; a couple of people from education...you can look them all up as easily as me.

Which is the point. This little inaccuracy was part of a torrent of opinions meant, I suppose, to overwhelm me or maybe our mutual friend into conceding this person is as smart or smarter or as well-read or better-read than me. And it was pointless because a) it's a slippery metric to begin with and b) it isn't true in the most obvious sort of way.

Now, in fairness, I sort of asked for it because, in response to an earlier burst of nonsense about congress that I keep hearing from from people I presume must be listening to the same radio program or something, I asked if he'd done much serious reading between January 1995 and January 2007. This was an impolite insult for which I subsequently apologized.

That said, I find very little virtue in thoughtlessly taking someone's word for something that, when you reflect on it for even a moment, just doesn't pass the smell test — especially when it's easy to find out the  facts of the matter.