Being a head football coach is similar to being the president in certain respects. You work very hard and you hire the best people you can think of and hope for the best. If things go well, everybody thinks you are a genius. If things go badly, everyone thinks that you are an idiot. The same with the assistants that you hire. They were considered very bright in their previous employment, but will be bumps if things get worse even if you have worse players now.
I am thinking of Norm Chow who is the offensive coordinator for UCLA and Monte Kiffin, the defensive coordinator of USC. They both have been around for a long time and previously have been considered geniuses in their professions. I am sure they have not become stupid all of a sudden. But now that UCLA can't move the ball against high grass and USC have holes that a truck can drive through, the blame is on them. If this continue then it is not only their jobs are in jeopardy but those of their head coaches as well. Of course, when Chow and Kiffin were successful, they got too much credit. It is unlikely that Chow made Carson Palmer and Ty Detmer great quarterbacks by himself. Most likely the QBs abilities and other players around them made Chow looked great, even though he is a very good coach. Now with more difficult situations, Chow and Kiffin look very mediocre.
The same with Obama. He can't possibly know more about economics than the economic experts that he hired. No president is an expert on everything. He depends on assistants to guide him. When the economy is going well, he and his advisors are geniues. When things are going badly, they are idiots. Economics, like football strategy, is not an exact science. That is why there are completely opposite strategies coming from very smart people. Alan Greenspan was considered a genius by both Republican and Democratic presidents. But I watched a PBS documentary recently where it showed that Greenspan and others completely disregarded the dangers of derivatives. What president would have heed the warnings of lower rank economists over the opinion of Greenspan? The economy will determine the fate of the president. He depends on his advisors. He must hope that they don't make any mistake. The advisors, in turn, need to be very lucky.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
2 comments:
Use the following html code to make a clickable link in your comment (instructions in the sidebar). You can test the link by previewing your comment.
<a href="http://angryyellowman.blogspot.com">Angry Yellow Man</a>
The above example will display as Angry Yellow Man
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Interesting analogy with the coaches and advisers.
ReplyDeleteI've always been a believer in the idea that you are only (in leadership) as good as the people you surround yourself.
As far as Greenspan, I don't quite understand his role as far as politics goes. Is he truly an independent who does what he thinks will be best for the economy or does he work under orders from the president?
I can see that if he's working under orders from the president, then his agenda has a certain biased towards it. And I don't necessarily think this is the case, but I would think that there is pressure from the president to sway things a certain way, especially if that means he could lose his job.
These next two years for Obama are huge. No doubt that we were going to see turnover in his staff and growing pains but it looks like he will lose support in congress with some of the dems losing control.
-LBOAYM
I am of the opinion that nobody really knows what to do about the economy. Every politician claims that he can create jobs. Only entrepreneurs create jobs. New technologies create jobs. We are not going to get those manufacturing jobs back. Our wages cannot compete with those of China and others. In the long term, improving education, more money spent on research and development and better infra-strutures are some of the things that government can do to improve the economy. Short term, nothing much the government can do.
ReplyDeleteIf I am the president and I inherited a bad economy, I will do the opposite of what my predecessor did in the short term. This is what FDR did and what Reagan did. Bear in mind that these strategies did not work very well in the beginning. FDR was lucky the war came along. And Reagan was not improving on Carter's situation in the first two years. Remember inflation was way out of control in the early 1980's. Eventually things got better and Reagan was a hero. But his policies led to big deficits and eventually led to the defeat of Bush#1. Clinton got lucky and Bush #2 was not so lucky. If Obama is lucky, he will get re-elected, if not he will be defeated. Base on this I will also predict that if he loses in 2012, his successor will do well because of the cycle. If Obama wins in 2012, his successor will do poorly.
Greenspan is a smart guy. But he didn't do much when things were going well. He certainly did not want to rock the boat and be the one to put a damper on the market. So he ignored the dangers of derivatives as did Nobel prize economists. This proves to me that nobody really knows what to do with the economy.