Hero Worship As The Philosophical Basis For Plutocracy

Paul Krugman, and many other pundits, have finally come to understand what Intel's founder Andy Grove told us last year. America's computer industry grows revenue faster than it grows jobs. They scale up their business outside of the US for a variety of reasons. Krugman was able to connect this phenomenon to the work that he has done around the value of clustering. He made an important philosophical point as well. The GOP responder to the president's State of the Union speech based his attack on the president on a couple of GOP themes. Economic stimulus is a waste of money. It does not create jobs. He used Steve Jobs to illustrate the other part of the theme. Heroes like Steve Jobs are the job creators. Government has nothing to do with job creation. He apparently did not read the NYT article about the 700,000 jobs created by Apple outside of the US. More importantly, however, he identified Apple's success with the work of one person, out of the hundreds of thousands of contributors to Apple's success. Steve Jobs was a remarkable CEO, and he probably contributed much more to Apple's success than the typical CEO. It takes a village, however to build a successful business. We give too much credit (along with too much compensation), and too much blame to those who climb up the ladder to the CEO position. Hero worship is part of the GOP philosophy. The team does not matter. That is the philosophical underpinning for plutocracy.