Mediocre Minds Think Alike Too

Within 24 hours, I see two articles based on the conceit of making some form of organized gambling a metaphor for capitalism: Jane Smiley in the Prospect (horseracing) and Marc Cooper in The Nation (Vegas casinos). Reason takes no responsibility for damage to your optic nerve occasioned by excessive eye-rolling if you click through. Oddly, while Smiley's the novelist, the second piece is far more engagingly written.

Comments

[Captain]

I guess they’re tired of organized crime as a metaphor for capitalism. Here’s an idea–why don’t intellectuals lay off lazy metaphors for, say, a decade, and force themselves to confront actual ideas.

[Joe L.]

Well Captain,
#1 Idea are what intellectuals deal and make a living in. If they laid off for 10 years, they’d probably have to get a REAL job and quickly would shed their illusions about life, plus a REAL JOB!?!? How plebian.
#2. In my scope of operations I have found that for people who value thought, investigation, and tolerance, intellectuals are extremely narrow-minded and rigid. Taking 10 years off would imply that they were incorrect in their formulations. Since that can not be, there is no need to take time off. And don’t try no stink’n evidence on us either… it’s all propaganda put forth by the ruling elite and YOU are suffering from false consciousness!

[dead_elvis]

Ouch, despite the warning I still damaged my eyes from rolling them so hard. What poorly crafted metaphors. They just feed into the common misperception that when you see someone with a nice house and a nice car and a good job that they just lucked out, and that talent and hard work had nothing to do with it. I know people who I can say got lucky in their careers, but when their moment of opportunity came along they were ready because of preperation and hard work.
These people that seem to think that having a job and saving for retirement is a gamble same as any other wager might as well live in medieval times. They seem to see their lives as subject only to the whims of fate, with no input by their own actions. “Oh Fortuna!” Poor souls.

[Rob Read]

Captain,
Maybe they stopped using the capitalism = organised-crime metaphor becuase Libertarians have beaten them off showing that it’s the State that has FAR more similarity to a protection racket.

Intellectuals have been told from a early age that they are THE elite, however as intelligence is genrally a much less useful asset than perseverance, they are never as succesful, influential as their free market peers. This leads them to invent excuses for why the world has ignored them.

[Ken Shultz]

I suspect it was unintentional, but the metaphor you used, “…Libertarians have beaten them off…”, is even more disturbing than their comparison of capitalism to gambling.

[Phil]

They just feed into the common misperception that when you see someone with a nice house and a nice car and a good job that they just lucked out, and that talent and hard work had nothing to do with it.

Not only that, but that everything they do have came at some less fortunate person’s expense, and maliciously so. Everything is zero-sum to these writers. I won’t even get into the fallacy that everyone who gambles even when their odds of winning are microscopically small are “suckers.”

[Douglas Fletcher]

Hmm, so where do Indian Casinos fit into all this?

[Franklin Harris]

Funny that the form of gambling with the longest odds and the most hype — the lottery — is the one run by the state.

[Franklin Harris]

Hmmm. Is it any surprise that unions still have power in Vegas given that town’s relations with organized crime?

[ismail ozgen]

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