I’m with Nicholas Kristof.  Thank goodness the long cold winter of willful stupidity is thawing. Referring to the ascendancy of Barrak Obama . . .

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.

So excuse me if I gag on this:  Uber-economist Greg Mankiw, writing in today’s NYT, advises Prez elect Obama to . . .

LISTEN TO THE ECONOMISTS During the campaign, Senator Barack Obama assembled an impressive team of economic advisers from the nation’s top universities, including Austan D. Goolsbee of the University of Chicago and David Cutler and Jeffrey Liebman of Harvard. The campaign’s director of economic policy, Jason Furman, is a smart, sensible and well-trained policy economist. I know: he is a former student of mine.

It would be a good idea to pay close attention to what they have to say.

Leaving aside that Mankiw is an economist and the crew he cites are pals, the implication that the children should go back to the little table so that the propeller heads can set things right is as wrongheaded as it is offensive.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of intellect, education, and all around smarts.  But let’s be clear on three points . . .

1. Propeller heads where the arms merchants of the mess we’re in right now. 
2. Economists aren’t a singular breed.  Find one who thinks one thing and I’ll show you another who thinks the opposite.
3. Economists as a group have been miserable failures at predicting nearly everything (with some exceptions). In the history of the dismal profession, you can count on no hands the number who have been able to call the tops or bottoms of markets with any more accuracy than a third grader.

I realize this sounds like a knee-jerk reaction because it is. Smart people are as capable, often more so, as the rest of us of making really bad decisions.  Or to put it another way, high IQ and multiple degrees isn’t necessarily a surefire defense against the litany of thinking traps that cause smart people to make bad decisions.  I’m sure I’m sure I’m projecting here, but I think a more sensible recommendation would sound like this . . .

1. Spend as much time as possible exploring the problem you’re trying to solve.  Solving the wrong problem really well gets us nowhere.  
2. To do that, make sure you consult with people who don’t agree with you.  Seek divergent and disconfirming points of view.
3. Pull decision making into the open.  The level of opaqueness these past years has been crippling.  Set up lots of war rooms with big visual maps of the problem as you currently understand it.  Keep looking at it, as long as you can.  You’ll be surprised at the insights serendipity will offer you.
4. If you really want to change things, insist on more dialog and less advocacy.  We’ve seen enough staking out positions to last us seven lifetimes.  
5. Generate a wide range of alternatives.  No party has a lock on good ideas.  Certainly no economist does.  Consider really weird ideas. Trailing after something that seems initially absurd often leads to unexpected insights.
6. You’re going to have to make trade-offs.  Make your decision criteria absolutely clear.  Insist on intellectually honest debate and advocacy. Once you make a decision, make it clear to us why you made the trade-offs you made.  Give us visibility into your process.
7. Be honest about uncertainty.  The cool you project gives you plenty of rhetorical room to remind us that nothing is certain. There will be outcomes we don’t expect or even want.  That’s just how these things work.  But don’t shrink behind the kind of bullheaded bluster that was the trademark of the last guy (and don’t descend into the weird self-doubts of the Carter years).

An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.