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Expectations

All These Experts with their Fancy PhDs

Have you noticed how all these economists and psychologists get to call themselves Doctor just because they wrote a paper long enough to be a book?

That doesn’t mean they know anything about everything or everything about anything. It usually means that they know lots of things about one thing or one thing about lots of things. But for some reason, we keep asking them questions about everything, when there’s no such thing as a Doctor of Philosophy in Everything.

As any marketing expert will tell you, a specialty in everything is a specialty in nothing. Marketing experts don’t bother with PhDs because marketing is not science, philosophy or art. It’s just a thing that has to be done like flossing and oil changes. Marketing is a necessary lubricant to economic and social life, but it’s not an essential business, according to other experts who never buy anything but have PhDs in something.

If we have learned nothing else during this pandemic, it’s that some people know some things and other people will never know anything. Other people think they know things, but the things they think they know aren’t actually true. For example, it’s impossible to keep people home in Georgia because they were told at some point that being an adult means that math is optional after high school and no one can tell you what to do anymore.

It’s possible that they are choosing an alternative math, one that looks at bank balances instead of hospital beds and that is a perfectly valid thing to do. It turns out that even hospitals need banks.

However, the only good time to gamble with people’s lives is never, plus or minus two weeks which is why Las Vegas is re-opening tomorrow at midnight. The high rollers table now offers custom-fitted masks and a lifetime supply of hand sanitizer as the top prize.

Even if Covid-19 turns out to be no worse than the seasonal flu, it is clearly the great equalizer. All the experts – every single one of them – say drastic things must be done to save modern life from its unbalanced, thoughtless teenage self. Yet there’s no agreement at all on anything about moving forward, perhaps because PhD is synonymous with “I beg to disagree.”