It’s difficult to overstate how barren and lonely intellectual life at Brown University felt as a policy major circa mid-2005, at least if one was more interested in policy than politics. It’s not that there weren’t a bunch of very bright people around, just that most had reliably been informed that everything had fundamentally been figured out. We Ivy Leaguers already knew what worked — expansive redistributive social planning as overseen by experts like us — and building an equitable social democracy was simply a matter of securing enough funding and pushing selfish obstructionists out of our way. Thus, many of my peers tended to direct their formidable talents toward landing the right internships, shaking the right hands, crunching the right numbers the right ways to yield the right statistics, and getting into the right graduate programs for the glide path to the right careers.
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