In other words, who knows without going through the cabinet careers of all the individuals?

As this chart stands, it is nothing more than an intellectual Ponzi scheme.

I’m gratified that you tempered the initial idealogical cast of the post with your concession that the Obama administration is stocked from a bureaucratic caste most commonly associated with Stalin. For a minute, there, I was beginning to worry that this post was a total hack job.

Elliot: Me: [Would people be happier if the Treasury Secretary instead was another former CEO of Goldman Sachs with extensive Wall Street experience?]

Yes.

So Elliot, you’re on board with Treasury Secretary Jon Corzine?

HarryEagar: It wouldn’t have been a whole lot more trouble to have graded the performance of the secretaries and then separated them into private sheep and public goats.

Well, for one, you’d have to establish critereon for grading. Unlike, say, Congresspeople, where there are simple metrics available to discern how active/inactive they are (votes taken, bills sponsored, commitees served on, etc.), I’m not aware of any such metrics on how effective a cabinet secretary is.

Nice to see that any moron can slap together a graph without any explanation and have it treated as if it indicates something.

Yes, any moron can slap together a graph designed to generate support for an argument among those who don’t look too carefully. But not every moron would rely on that type of graph.

anon again again: The VC is an important platform in the modern conservative movement — akin to a leading think tank.

By all means continue to post anonymously.

I wonder if AEI got hoaxed.

Would people be happier if the Treasury Secretary instead was another former CEO of Goldman Sachs with extensive Wall Street experience?

Yes.

But I’d want to have more information before drawing too many conclusions from this nonetheless fascinating chart.

The chart is fascinating . . . like, and only like, a shiny watch (for a particular audience).

Obama is by far the most left wing president we have ever had — and also, sadly, the most incompetent to deal with the real world.

The second part of that assertion makes sense — unless one’s memory travels back as far as 11 months.

As for Cornellian’s worries about defense contractors as secretaries of Defense, I think we lost that one with Engine Charlie Wilson, back in the days of Lena Horne, Kate Smith and Lenny Bruce.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by jeffnolan: Private Sector Experience of Cabinet Secretaries… which presents an idea for the upcoming jobs summit… http://bit.ly/92WasL...

I’m honored you think of VC as a kind of virtual think tank – but I probably don’t think of it that way, or at least not to that extent. Perhaps I should, and it would change the nature of how I post, and I’ll consider it, but I can’t say as I do now. Anyhow, I’m going to go silent on this thread and try to come back at some future date with a post specifically on what kind of support blog posts should offer, and who has the burden … in the meantime, happy thanksgiving to you and yours.

anon again again: Now I’m sticking with that bad decision.

Smart Move.

it doesn’t seem worse, at this precise moment, than a hockey stick.

Well, if you don’t understand that data back the blade of the hockey stick, I suppose you wouldn’t understand that no data appear to back the chart.

That’s why you’re not a cabinet member, and why nonsensical, most-likely-erroneous charts don’t get play with the Obama folks in picking a cabinet. They can tell the difference between a blade and a shaft, and they work to avoid getting the shaft. People who complain that hockey sticks don’t exist probably deserve the shaft they will get, but the rest of us don’t. Steven Chu has more expertise than the entire Bush cabinet.

I understand American Enterprise Institute didn’t rate Ken Salazar as having private sector experience. They think their steak is a government-produced benefit? They think milk comes from the Department of Agriculture? At the American Enterprise Institute, “private sector experience” is more important than “wisdom,” or “competence.”

I can gin up a chart that shows the American Enterprise Institute is unrestricted by reality. I can’t figure out of that is a result of inexperience in policy, or a result of drug use, but does that matter? Both causes could be sufficiently in the private sector.

My original comment was sharply written (“a silly shot”) to prompt you to question the appropriateness of posting and extrapolating about a figure you had and have no reason to think reflects actual reality. It’s not a “graph”. It’s a figure or a picture. Graphs present data we can analyze. Again, the burden shouldn’t be on us to find the data, it should be on the presenter of the figure to make it clear. And even now I can’t figure out how he gets to the percentages he does, just in the Obama Administration! I mean this literally. Yankee is right–the numbers make no internal or external sense as presented.

Big picture. The VC is an important platform in the modern conservative movement — akin to a leading think tank. Passing on this kind of crap makes being a conservative look bad – it turns the VC into Instapundit, or some other hackish platform. You raised “questions” about the data, but essentially endorsed the conclusions by posting it and musing about it. I think you did so because the picture confirmed your priors. (This is an implicit process. I don’t think you said to yourself “I’m going to knowingly post a bad analysis because it confirms something I think. Instead, you saw the figure as credible because it seemed true to you.)

I think you should run an update saying something like “My bad. The figure is as good as the data, i.e., fanciful.” Because that update would have the virtue of being honest, politically charitable, and a good model for other folks on this blog. Good things to do on thanksgiving day.

And yes, there is something slightly jarring about having someone post as anonymous who refers to me, not as Kenneth or Kenneth Anderson, which is how I post here, but as Ken. Why? Ken is what my friends and acquaintances in RL use. Which leaves this slightly unsettling sense that we know each other in RL but you’re unwilling to say so. So I’m actually asking, do we know each other? I’m great with anonymous or pseud commenters, but it is a little weird if it carries the sense that you’re someone I know in RL but you’re not saying so.

A “Toast” to you and “Happy Thanksgiving”.
If you have family, I thank them for their sacrifice and courage and I trust they are surrounded by friends and family while you are away.

Be with God

anon again: For example, the author writes: “In the rankings, private-sector experience at a law firm counts for a 33% score, which I think is very generous. My wife strongly suggested raising this to 50%, but I refused.” Apart from that, there’s no definition of prior private experience.

With that kind of methodology (arbitrarily assigning percents to different types of jobs), his wife was smart not to be listed as a co-author of the “study”. Nice to see that any moron can slap together a graph without any explanation and have it treated as if it indicates something.

Certainly more C-suite experience in Bush’s cabinet, more lawyers in Obama’s. Having looked at everyone’s bio, it’s really hard for me to think any of this stuff is a big deal; yeah, rising through the management ranks at a large corporation is nice but is that really make-or-break experience required to be a good Secretary of Transportation? Also, no idea where that 5% number in the graph comes from. Clinton, Salazar, Vilsack, and Locke have all practiced law. Even the 67% discount leaves you at 1.3 out of 9.

Bottom line: private sector experience is important. But maybe if the author of this graph had more experience in the public sector, he would have realized that the Secretary of the Interior does not play a large role in setting economic legislation. And isn’t that important to know?

John Moore: Frankly, it would take a whole lot of cherry picking to arrive at the sort of contrast shown here.

Not really. If you were determined to misrepresent the data, all you’d need to do is take the Obama Cabinet, cross off the departments where the incumbent Cabinet member ran a company or something, and define “private-sector experience” to exclude whatever non-government experience the remaining people have. If you did that you’d be guaranteed to produce a chart like that one. I have no absolutely reason to believe Cembalest did anything that extreme, but you get the point.

I’ve also noticed that according to this graph, out of 9 Cabinet department heads, 7-8% of them have private sector experience—i.e., about 2/3 of one person. That suggests that there’s some funny math going on here.

The question, of course, is whether the result is robust under other analyses: what happens if you look at a different selection of departments, or include the cabinet-level officials who don’t head Cabinet departments, or use a slightly different definition of “private sector”? If Obama is still an outlier, that suggests there’s a real effect. If not, it indicates that this graph is an artifact of cherrypicking. I’m not about to go through the resumes of hundreds of current and former Cabinet members to find out though.

On another topic: many conspirators wished me luck as I deployed to Iraq. I am now 1/8 of the way through and thank you all.

For example, the author writes: “In the rankings, private-sector experience at a law firm counts for a 33% score, which I think is very generous. My wife strongly suggested raising this to 50%, but I refused.” Apart from that, there’s no definition of prior private experience. No sense of why certain departments are excluded. He suggests at one point that he focuses on individuals who ran or started companies. Maybe the graph means: “what percentage of selected cabinet members were previously CEOs of companies, excluding law firms, no matter what their size”. But who knows? It’s still a joke.

So lets assume it was optimally cherry picked by cabinet post.

It’s still a shocking deviation and (caveats re: definitions take) appears to support the theory that Obama is by far the most left wing president we have ever had – and also, sadly, the most incompetent to deal with the real world.

We shall see if the cherry picking/definitional issues are strong enough to disprove that statement. I doubt it, but its possible.

Look, if you feel comfortable publicizing this picture for political purposes, god bless, but that’s not the attitude I’d expect from an academic of your stature & reputation. The original source says that he thinks the figure is “semi-whimsical”. I’d remove the qualifier.

anon: Ken,
It must be useful to have your priors so nicely confirmed by a chart that, without the underlying data, is about as verifiable as the creation story.

It wouldn’t have been discussed on this blog otherwise.

I assume that is also why it is so hard to find out what they count as private sector experience. it makes it much easier for a political hack to use the graph to prove their own biases.