“American Policy Makers Do Not Read Books”, 2015-02-18 (; similar):
If the American strategist of 2015 has a deep base of historical, cultural, and scientific knowledge to draw on to guide the decisions he makes this is because he acquired this knowledge base before he was a senior policy maker. You can actually see hints of this in the survey data—Avey and Desch asked policy makers to list the living international relations scholars they thought had the greatest influence on actual policy making. Along with scholars-turned-officials (eg. Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anne-Marie Slaughter) and public intellectuals (eg. Francis Fukuyama, Fareed Zakaria) were a list of men whose scholarly apogee was 20 to 30 years ago, back when our policy makers were undergrads! (Funnily enough many of these men—Samuel P. Huntington, Albert Wohlstetter, Hans Morgenthau—are not only past their scholarly prime, but are no longer alive!) Those who rose to prominence after 1995 barely register.3
One of the lessons we can draw from this is that the books and material we expect American students to read and master in the early stages of their life will have an outsized influence on the knowledge they will possess in their old age. Today’s strategists survive off of what they learned when they were in school forty years ago.4 Absent dramatic changes in the life style of government officials or unforeseen technological developments, the policy-makers crafting strategy in 2040 will be working off of the knowledge base they are building from the books they are reading right now.
View External Link: