Megan McArdle picks up
on another depressing cultural trend, the tendency for modern critics
have to jump to a dismissive summing up in commenting on just about
anything. Her immediate target was a article in Forbes about a recent business debacle. McArdle says that she generally tends to agree that a harsh assessment is due but then wonders about the form it took.
Part of the answer is age. When I was in my twenties I had a tendency to assume that anything that didn't make sense to me didn't make sense at all and I had a tendency to assume that anything that bored me did so because it was actually boring. And, truth be told, I haven't entirely grown out of that. Generally, however, there tended to be adults in the room to do as McArdle did here and say, "If you know so much about big business, why aren't you running one?"
Nowadays, a voice like McArdle's is a rarity. Even writers I love reading do this sort of thing. And I'm pretty sure that someone could easily embarrass me by finding examples of me doing the very thing I'm complaining about here. There are probably quite a few of them. So the point here is not that some bad people do this and that they should have their knuckles wrapped.
What is it then? It's the larger cultural trend. This comes with an era that reveres youth. And youth isn't being helped by our reverence. Quite the contrary.
But how do we get from "that was a bad idea" to "Reed Hastings doesn't understand what business he's in?" When internet commentators see odd behavior that they don't understand, why do they assume that the most parsimonious explanation is that management must be a bunch of drooling morons?And that is a good question.
Part of the answer is age. When I was in my twenties I had a tendency to assume that anything that didn't make sense to me didn't make sense at all and I had a tendency to assume that anything that bored me did so because it was actually boring. And, truth be told, I haven't entirely grown out of that. Generally, however, there tended to be adults in the room to do as McArdle did here and say, "If you know so much about big business, why aren't you running one?"
Nowadays, a voice like McArdle's is a rarity. Even writers I love reading do this sort of thing. And I'm pretty sure that someone could easily embarrass me by finding examples of me doing the very thing I'm complaining about here. There are probably quite a few of them. So the point here is not that some bad people do this and that they should have their knuckles wrapped.
What is it then? It's the larger cultural trend. This comes with an era that reveres youth. And youth isn't being helped by our reverence. Quite the contrary.
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