Comment: Nerds, Wonks, Engineers and Politics

From EETimes:

Given the problems facing the our current economy, and the need for elected representatives capable of dealing with complex problems and finding solutions, is it time for more engineers to run for office? Watching this year's bailout debates in the U.S. Congress and the Congressional/Presidential campaigns on C-SPAN has convinced me that American citizens have got to stop choosing our elected representatives based on any criteria other than their qualifications to run a complex government in an even more complicated world. Many of us vote for candidates based only on personality and whether they make us feel good about ourselves or are people we would like to invite into our homes. Instead, what we need are techno-nerds and policy wonks. We owe our well-crafted democratic form of government with its cleverly designed system of checks and balances, to a weird bunch of policy, technology, and scientific wonks and nerds such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton. These guys and their compatriots were the kind of wonks and nerds, who, when presented with a problem and a complex system to analyze and possibly replicate, threw themselves into learning as much about it as possible. Some were best at policy, and others were best at technology, and some, like Jefferson and Franklin were outstanding contributors to both. But today - because some of them did not exactly have winning personalities and others had personal morality issues - few would have little chance of getting elected. Which is a shame because not only did they have the desire, education and life experience to deal with such problems, they also had what Walter Lippmann - a premier political journalist of past decades - called "civic virtue.,"

Read the whole article