Via Matt Taibbi's Taibblog on True/Slant, I found Mother Jones' very good profile of Elizabeth Warren.
It was 2003, and Warren, an earnest-sounding and ever enthusiastic Harvard law professor who specializes in bankruptcy, was on the set of Dr. Phil. She had written a book with her daughter called The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers & Fathers Are Going Broke, and she'd expected to sit next to the host and explain its key points. Instead, Dr. Phil was interviewing a stressed-out couple with serious medical and financial troubles. After they mentioned they had obtained a second mortgage to pay off their credit card debt, the lights went up on Warren, and Dr. Phil asked her if this had been a smart step. No, she declared, because now they could lose their home if they defaulted.
As soon as her turn was over, Warren found herself thinking, "You've been doing this work for 20 years now, and it is unlikely that any of it has had as direct an impact as these 45 seconds." She had reached millions, some of whom might actually pay attention to her advice. "So here you are, Miss Fancy-Pants Professor at Harvard. What do you plan to do now? Is it all about writing more academic articles, or is it about making a difference for the families you study? I made a decision right then: It was for the families, not the self-aggrandizement of scholarship."
Since then she's proved herself to be surprisingly mediagenic, in a very understated, just-drove-the-minivan-to-the-office kind of way. At the same time, she's not given to oversimplification or jargon: she's really good at explaining the stakes in TARP (she's part of the Congressional office that tries to oversee TARP), where the money's going, of why we don't know where the money's going. (Check out her appearance-- in two parts-- on The Daily Show.)
Yet despite, or more accurately because, of her willingness to choose "families" over "the self-aggrandizement of scholarship,"
Harvard economists... dismiss Warren as insufficiently theoretical. "They think she shouldn't be talking about bankruptcy except as someone in the economics department would—that is, with formulas and theorems, not about how it affects real people."
I suppose this drives me around the bend for two reasons.
First, my work has sometimes been accused of being insufficiently theoretical (usually in reader's reports), as if theory is the sine qua non of importance. As Taibbi would put it, first of all, few kinds of scholarly work are both harder and less likely to stand the test of time as theory; and second, what the fuck? When did we all turn into mini-Derridas? Isn't theory a tool? I mean, we all use word processors, but I don't see many of my colleagues rushing to create their own versions of Microsoft Word.
Second, probably the single greatest personal intellectual epiphany I've had since leaving academia is that the real world actually has interesting problems: not just problems that you ought to deal with because life as we know it could get pretty screwed up if we don't, but problems that are actually intellectually engaging, make use of the cognitive muscles you developed in academia, force you to develop new abilities, and expose you to interesting questions you would never have discovered otherwise. The assumption that academia is where people grapple with interesting questions, and the business world is where stupid things happen, is just wrong.
I kind of like Matt Taibbi's argument that she should be drafted to run for president, and if
someone like Elizabeth Warren doesn’t want that responsibility, well, she shouldn’t have gone into office and gone on TV making all that sense and shit. She’s pushed for transparency in the Fed, is openly furious about the misuse of bailout money, and seems to take personally the chicanery that credit card companies and banks use to game the suckers out there. I simply cannot see her suddenly flipping and holding $2000-a-plate fundraisers with Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon.
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