Second rate people hire third rate people.
Third rate people hire fifth rate people.”
This is André Weil’s Law of Faculties — a theorem propounded by the mathematician André Weil (1906 – 1998), which appears on page 10 of Absolute Zero Gravity, a collection of science jokes I once coauthored.
Weil’s Law also gives insight into the problems inside our White House and Justice Department–which one former Reagan US Attorney analyzed rather cynically for the LA Times:
“The incompetence has been amazing … There are too many Stepford husbands in this administration: young men who are perfectly coiffed and have great clothes, but very few of them have ever been in a courtroom.”
Weil’s Law explains so much about the progression from young Karl Rove pushing George W Bush into politics because Bush looked so good in cowboy boots, down and around to George W Bush agreeing to turn Federal Emergency Management over to the inexperienced Michael Brown, an old college roommate of his pal Joe Allbaugh.
Lift a rock, and see Stepford husbands, all the way down.
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(thanks to Talkingpointsmemo for pointing to the Stepford quote.
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Not to disappoint any Bourbaki fans, I had the pleasure of spending many hours with Andre Weil for a 1990s project at the IAS, collecting an oral history from four retired mathematicians there. You can find transcripts in the IAS library–my only surviving mention from that era now on the web is a footnote in a memoir by Armand Borel.
About those Bourbaki meetings, Weil recalled with delight the way participants would meet to dispute mathematics with screams of rage, then emerge from the meeting room in perfect amity to enjoy an excellent dinner. One evening, Weil himself emerged from the meeting room a bit earlier than the others and encountered the hotel concierge standing outside the door. “Oh Monsieur,” she said with great anxiety, “I have been standing here for half an hour trying to decide whether I should perhaps call the police to make sure that nobody in there is being harmed.”
This memory gave Professor Weil enormous pleasure–and, remembering his pleasure now, I’m smiling too.