Academics are very smart people who excel at school.  Those who do well in school are promoted to the highest levels of academia itself.  They are often very self-assured, smug  people who are convinced of the superiority of their smarts over such people as might find themselves working in a job somewhere or running a small business. These working people probably did not do that well in school–perhaps they were only ‘B’ or ‘C’ rather than ‘A+’ students.  Yet when it comes to tasks in the real world, I prefer the those who have actually worked at a real job in the productive world at least at some point in their lives.  The academic is likely to make a shambles of a real-world situation.  I agree with William F. Buckley who once said, “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”  Yet nothing reveals the true nature of the education bubble better than when such academics fail in the real world.

Now the Obama administration is made up of a lot of the Harvard-type academics who are very smart.  In this video at CNBC, Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, talks about what is wrong with the Obama administration and the Democrats who control Congress: none of them have real business experience–they are predominantly academics who have tenure, not business people who have to risk their fortunes in order to make their small business succeed.  They seem to have no clue that their offer of federally assisted loans is not what is needed.  Washington is over-regulating small business, and every new regulation costs  money and forces businesses to downsize their workforce.  The best thing, according to Marcus, if you want to help business, is to shut-down Congress for a couple years, so that they can’t pass any more stifling regulations.  This is a must-see interview for understanding the malaise that is facing businesses in America.  It also helps us to understand the education bubble.  Perhaps only people with real world experience, who have worked, for example, as a truck driver or a commercial fisherman, should ever be allowed to teach in universities.  That way the theories that they teach in universities might have a chance of being related to practical realities on planet earth.