Arnold Kling has posted his list of influential books. The first one is The Best and the Brightest, the book I’ve been blogging about the last few weeks:
My take-away from that book might be described as “The Exclusive Country Club Theory.” He makes foreign policy in the 1950’s and early 1960’s in the United States sound as if it was the province of an exclusive country club of people with a certain temperament and background. Wall Street lawyers, mostly. I have to say that I have carried this model with me for a long time. To this day, I view the relationship among Treasury, the Fed, the New York Fed, and large financial institutions in Exclusive Country Club terms. These people vet one another, agree with one another, and support one another. They do not question whether their interests coincide with those of the rest of the country–they just assume that the country depends on their institutions and their class leadership.
I plan to steal this analogy for a future post, because I think there are interesting parallels between the Vietnam fiasco of the 1960s and the Wall Street fiasco of the present day. But I want to make a few more observations about Vietnam first.
