Political Backgrounds and Aptitude

One of the major benefits to online news is that it's very easy to create interesting interactive visual presentations; today's example is the New York Times with a little graph about what sort of experience and qualifications each of our current members of Congress have.

The write-up they've attached to their graph notes a number of interesting ways in which the makeup of Congress doesn't at all match the makeup of the country as a whole, and offers some speculation on the potential consequences of that. Most of it has to do with problems they might not understand very well (because very few of the people with experience with them go on to become politicians) or ways in which Congress might be more willing to aggressively deal with issues because they disproportionately affect the areas of society that most representatives come from.

While some of it is plausible, though, I don't think I agree with all of it. And I think it's worth considering exactly what we want the job of one of our representatives to be - because depending on how we define those responsibilities, it's entirely natural that not everyone will want to deal with them.

For example, while I do think more people with scientific or technical backgrounds in Congress would be good for the country, it doesn't surprise me that the sort of person that likes a job in those fields might not like being a politician. And part of the ideal of picking people to represent us is that we pick some of our best for leadership roles, so one would expect at least some deviations from the mean in that group.

To be entirely clear, I think we do still have a problem as far as our pipeline for political jobs is concerned, and I think we should be more willing to look for talent in a wider pool than we currently do. But I think we need to be careful when we're defining what success in that endeavor looks like.