"In the U.S., many of the best and brightest end up in the military or government service."
Would you please care to provide examples?
If you said that the best and the brightest are funded by military and government, I'd agree. After all, that's what DARPA and NSF are for. But I have never met one bright person who enjoyed working for the U.S. military or government. Not one. They all quit their jobs after a while, and came back to academia, or the private sector.
I'm sure there are plenty of intelligent, power-hungry people working for our government in either a martial or administrative capacity. Dick Cheney is an example of such a person.
Your certainty that there are intelligent people working for the U.S. government stems from 1st hand experience, or does it stem from wishful thinking?
I thought Cheney was no longer in the government. And if he's so smart, why didn't he anticipate the Iraq quagmire? Maybe he desired one?
That makes sense. A quagmire would provide the U.S. Military an excuse to stay in Iraq for years and control the Middle East's oil fields.
With NATO in Afghanistan and closer ties with the former Soviet republics in Eurasia, the U.S. could deny China land access to energy resources. The icing on the cake would be a major war against Iran. That would allow the U.S. to effectively control the world's energy resources.
It's relatively easy to measure how smart a mathematician is. How do you measure how smart a politician is?
Then there's another problem: in certain organizations, it does not matter if you're very smart because you can't act on it. There's no better career suicide than making your superior look dumb in the corporate world. Your co-workers may feel threatened and conspire against you.
In government, you can't do certain things because the powerful interest groups or public opinion just won't let you. Hence, I ask again: how do you measure the performance or the smarts of a politician?
BTW, Cheney himself said in the early 1990s that going to Baghdad in 1991 would have resulted in a Vietnam-like quagmire. How ironic.
Would you please care to provide examples?
If you said that the best and the brightest are funded by military and government, I'd agree. After all, that's what DARPA and NSF are for. But I have never met one bright person who enjoyed working for the U.S. military or government. Not one. They all quit their jobs after a while, and came back to academia, or the private sector.