ADHD At FTX

There have been persistent stories that Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and other key people at FTX were being treated for Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and they were apparently being prescribed amphetamines to treat it. The tweet above from Caroline Ellison at least suggests this. On the other hand, this is difficult to confirm for several reasons. Diagnosis of ADHD must be done by a medical or mental health professional, and nobody can diagnose it from a distance in any case. Medical records are highly confidential (unless they relate to COVID vaccination, in which case they are completely public). In addition, statements from John Ray III, FTX's new CEO, indicate that company records are so poor that nobody is quite sure who even worked there.

My own interest in the question stems from my research into public information on the minimal job histories of those key people, Caroline Ellison and the Bankman-Fried brothers, and their vapid public personas. If they were such prodigies from such privileged backgrounds, why did they need to be such crooks? And why have they turned out to be incompetent even as crooks? Their peers, Kenneth Lay and Bernard Madoff, kept their scams running for a decade and more, while the elite graduates of Stanford, Brown, and MIT could manage it for only a few years.

I'm inclined to accept the ADHD hypothesis, at least until a better one comes along. According to the National Institute of Mental Health,

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is marked by an ongoing pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development. . . . Many people experience some inattention, unfocused motor activity, and impulsivity, but for people with ADHD, these behaviors. . . [i]nterfere with or reduce the quality of how they function socially, at school, or in a job.

More specifically, the site goes on to say that adults with ADHD have difficulty sustaining attention during tasks such as conversations, lectures, or lengthy reading; have difficulty organizing tasks and activities, doing tasks in sequence, keeping materials and belongings in order, managing time, and meeting deadlines; and avoid tasks that require sustained mental effort, such as preparing reports, completing forms, or reviewing lengthy papers.

All of these qualities are apparent in accounts of Sam's behavior even in important meetings with investors, where he is reported to have fidgeted, fiddled with toys, and played video games. He is reported to have said few books are worth reading. Caroline Ellison's video accounts of her duties disparage tools like stop-losses or tasks like technical analysis or use of math above the elementary school level. But it's worth pointing out that new CEO John Ray III's published analysis of Alameda Research, where Ellison was previously CEO, indicate that it was owned 90% by Sam and 10% by another of Sam's cronies; she had no ownership stake and probably had few actual duties as "CEO".

This story in the New York Post is suggestive as much for what it doesn't say as for what it reports:

Dr. George K. Lerner, a psychiatrist, reportedly served as a therapist to disgraced FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and an adviser to many of the firm’s employees. Bankman-Fried and his ex-lover Caroline Ellison were reportedly part of a 10-person group that ran FTX and its sister cryptocurrency trading firm Alameda Research from a “luxury penthouse” in the Bahamas.

“It’s a pretty tame place,” Lerner told the New York Times. “The higher-ups, they mostly played chess and board games. There was no partying. They were undersexed, if anything.”

Lerner told the outlet he moved in June to the Bahamas, where he served as an adviser at FTX for 32 hours per week and also maintained a “small private practice.” The performance coach asserted the FTX executives were workaholics with little in the way of social lives.

. . . Lerner also addressed viral rumors about the alleged use of stimulants by FTX executives. Ellison, the CEO of Alameda Research, admitted to “regular amphetamine use” in an April 2021 tweet, while Bankman-Fried has openly discussed his experimentation with Adderall and other stimulants.

Amphetamine can be prescribed under the brand name Adderall as medication to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Lerner told the Times that while some FTX employees may have had prescriptions for ADHD medications, the “rate of ADHD in the company was in line with most tech companies.”

To which I have two reactions. One is that if the rate of ADHD at FTX "was in line with most tech companies,” then maybe Elon Musk had a point in firing half of Twitter (he might have if he'd taken more than just a week to fire them, of course). But also, based on John Ray III's remarks, nobody knew who worked there or how many employees they actually had, so how can Dr Lerner even know what the ADHD rate actually was? As Ray put it,

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” Ray said. “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

In other words, it's as if the place was run by a little clique of people with ADHD.

Yet the key players came from remarkably privileged backgrounds. What does this say, for instance, about the schools and universities to which the powerful parents were able to send their children? If we can reason backward from the circumstance that those offspring seem to have suffered from serious symptoms of ADHD as adults, how could they possibly have qualified for admission to exclusive schools and universities as adolescents?

Remember that people with ADHD have problems with completing tasks, meeting deadlines, listening to lectures, or doing lengthy reading, all of which are normally required for elite-school admission. How did they manage even to sit through the SATs, much less pass them with distinction? How did they manage to graduate at all, much less to have had professors say glowing things about them?

And we're back to the question I raised above, why the Bankman-Fried brothers and Ellison, with degrees in math and physics from top universities, couldn't get careers going after graduation that were consistent with such outstanding credentials. Something's seriously missing in this whole picture.

Oh, right, this is David Brooks's new meritocratic American upper class.

Another Bankman-Fried

The photo above is Gabe Bankman-Fried, Sam's younger brother, who appears to have been involved in Sam's various enterprises in one way or another since their start. According to his Linkedin profile, he graduated from Brown University in 2017. Brown, an Ivy, has a reputation for accepting more than the usual number of offspring of celebrities, royalty, and wealthy donors, including John-John Kennedy and assorted other Kennedys, the son and daughter of Sunny von Bülow, Amy Carter, and John Kerry's daughter Alexandra.

Immediately after Brown, he worked as a trader at Jane Street Capital alongside his brother Sam and Sam's sometime girlfriend Caroline Ellison. However, Sam left Jane Street only months after Gabe's arrival, and Gabe didn't last there much longer. After a period of unemployment, he worked six months as a data consultant for Civis Analytics, a political data analysis firm tied to Democrats. Civis Analytics also has ties to the Bankman-Fried family:

Civis Analytics has positioned itself as a Democratic powerhouse in recent years. The firm was "born" from President Obama's campaign after Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and executive chairman of Alphabet, helped as a recruiter and trainer for the campaign and later teamed up with Dan Wagner, the chief analytics officer for Obama's 2012 campaign, to help launch the company.

As Gabe Bankman-Fried worked for the firm during the 2018 election cycle, Civis received nearly $4.4 million from the likes of the Senate Majority PAC, House Majority PAC, Priorities USA Action, Democratic National Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The cash was primarily for research and data analytics consulting, FEC filings shows.

Barbara Fried leads Mind the Gap, a secretive organization that funnels massive amounts of money to Democratic campaigns, according to Influence Watch. The group has received major funding from well-known Silicon Valley donor. . . . In 2018, Mind the Gap paid Civis about $90,000 for data analytics services.

Isn't that peculiar? During precisely the same six-month period that Gabe worked for Civis, his mom funneled $90,000 to the company, which would have funded Gabe's salary plus a lagniappe. I'm having a hard time staying away from an imputation that Gabe is a pretty useless guy, and mom was fully aware of it.

In January 2019, as Sam was moving to start Alameda Research and FTX, he went to work for Rep. Sean Casten, D-Ill.

Casten, then a freshman congressman, was named that same month to the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees regulation of cryptocurrency and hedge funds, among other matters.

Gabe Bankman-Fried remained employed for two years on the House staff, according to his LinkedIn profile. The website Legistorm, which tracks members of Congress and their staffers, says he worked for Casten.

. . . The Daily Signal and The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project asked Casten’s spokesperson, Jacob Vurpillat, whether the congressman met with or received donations from FTX or any other cryptocurrency company. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

Casten’s spokesman didn’t respond to email or phone inquiries Monday by publication time. We also reached out Tuesday to Casten through a Twitter direct message, but did not get a response.

We made inquiries by email asking whether ethical limitations regarding interactions with cryptocurrency companies were placed on Casten or Gabe Bankman-Fried, who was employed by Casten as a legislative correspondent from January 2019 through February 2021.

Typically in government, when an apparent conflict of interest arises involving a relative with whom a government employee has a close relationship, that employee or government office would seek counsel from a lawyer regarding ethical issues.

We also asked Casten’s spokesperson whether the congressman met with Treasury Department officials and discussed FTX or any other cryptocurrency companies.

In July 2020, according to Linkedin, he becme Director of Guarding Against Pandemics, which is

a left-leaning advocacy created in 2020 to support legislation that increases government investment in pandemic prevention plans. The organization was created to support a specific proposal by the Biden administration to allocate $30 billion in federal funding for the containment of future pandemic outbreaks. The organization was founded and is funded by cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and directed by his brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried.

According to NBC News,

Gabe Bankman-Fried resigned Monday from Guarding Against Pandemics, the nonprofit that purchased the Capitol Hill townhouse and served as the hub for its philanthropic work, telling his roughly three-dozen employees he didn’t want to get in the way of the group’s mission as it scrambles to find new funders.

Neither Gabe Bankman-Fried nor Guarding Against Pandemics responded to a request for comment.

The story suggests that Gabe was little more than a useful idiot for Sam:

Bankman-Fried’s collapse was so abrupt that his political point man in Washington only found out about it via Twitter, according to two sources.

That’s especially notable since his point man is his younger brother, Gabe, who quickly flew to the Bahamas to console Bankman-Fried, and who, like their parents, is now caught up in the ignominious collapse.

“A lot of people in D.C. thought this was the next big thing. Everybody was trying to get in,” said one source close to the Bankman-Frieds’ political operation who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “This went from the hottest thing to the most toxic thing. But that’s how D.C. works.”

The high-priced consultants and lobbyists the Bankman-Frieds employed will be fine, said the source. “The person who got most f----- from all this is probably his brother,” the source continued, “Somebody who probably had no idea what was going on on the business side, who unfortunately shares the same hyphenated name, who has worked in politics and is now probably not going to be able to.”

One pattern that's emerging here is that Sam Bankman-Fried knew what was going on, and directed the whole enterprise. He was surrounded by at least two ciphers, his sometime girlfriend Caroline Ellison and his brother Gabe. The parents of both Caroline and Gabe were, I would guess, delighted to have something that not only kept their no-count kids busy, but paid themselves a substantial income as well.

These are vignettes of life in the new meritocratic American upper class.

The Other Set Of Parents

Yesterday we took a closer look at Caroline Ellison's parents, both faculty members at elite-university MIT. This link provides an introduction to Sam Bankman-Fried's parents; in an odd mirror-image reflection, both are husband-and-wife faculty members at elite Stanford Law School, ranked Number 2 on the US News list, although Stanford recently withdrew from the US News rankings. Both of Sam's parents, Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, hold endowed chairs at Stanford Law, which places them somewhat higher in David Brooks's new meritocratic American upper class than even the Ellisons, of whom only one holds an endowed chair.

This places the family income, I would imagine, at something well north of $250,000 per year. This would be consistent with the private school to which they sent Sam befoere he went to MIT, the main building of which is shown in the photo at the top of this post. According to the first link,

[H]e attended local elite private school Crystal Springs Uplands School in the equally tony Bay Area suburb of Hillsborough and where tuition now costs $56,620 a year. At the school, Bankman-Fried won physics awards, but “kept to himself, spending most of his free time playing computer games (StarCraft, League of Legends) and a trading card game, Magic: The Gathering, according to a glowing, now-deleted profile of him on an investor website.

If he won physics awards in secondary school and went on to MIT as an undergraduate, especially given his backgound and putative talents, wouldn't we expect him to transition into a prestigious physics PhD program, if not at MIT itself, then at, say, Cal Tech or Berkeley? In fact, wouldn't he have been Nobel material? But he didn't, and he wasn't. That's a big dog that simply isn't barking here, just like the dog that didn't bark over Caroline Ellison. Both had parents who were in positions to foster major academic careers for their children after undergraduate degrees at prestige schools, and it simply didn't happen.

I used to look up the ratings for my former graduate school classmates at ratemyprofessors.com, but eventually I got out of the habit. This scandal has brought me back to that amusing exercise, especially when I found that Caroline Ellison's mother was rated "awful". (I dated a classmate who later got the same rating, too. In hindsight, I could see how.) However, like Glenn Ellison, neither Barbara Fried nor Joseph Bankman is listed on ratemyprofessors.com at all.

I can think of two explanations. One would be that law students, like graduate students at MIT, are primarily playing the game, and there's just no point in annoying a powerful professor whose recommendations can make or break a career, who doesn't need the rating and would not be moved by it. The other, equally credible to me, is that the professor is so powerful he can simply get his name removed from the app.

Nevertheles, the first link above does carry informal accounts of Bankman and Fried as professors:

Bankman-Fried’s parents are highly regarded professors at Stanford Law School. Joseph Bankman is a leading scholar in tax law and Barbara Fried is an award-winning teacher who specializes in moral philosophy and the law.

So Sam's mother specializes in moral philosophy? It brings to mind a remark by a priest who said that he had an erudite professor in seminary who, however, was Jewish. Nobody was more familiar with the writings of St Paul, except that the priest one day suddenly realized the professor didn't actually believe a word of them. Interestingly, the article links to a quote from Barbara Fried herself on Sam's moral development, written before the current scandal:

[My sons Sam and Gabe} have shown me by example the nobility of the ethical principle at the heart of utilitarianism: a commitment to the wellbeing of all people, and to counting each person — alive now or in the future, halfway around the world or next door, known or unknown to us — as one.

As far as I can tell, if Sam saw each person as one, he saw them all as one big sucker. The first link above also characterizes Sam's father, Joseph:

“Joe Bankman is sensitive and extremely soft-spoken,” one of the former students said. “Both of [Sam’s] parents were very quintessentially open-minded professor types, more than Socratic types. They seem like really supportive people.”

Bankman was also interested in helping the world, and he was a staunch believer in utilitarianism, the doctrine that the most ethical thing is to work on maximizing happiness for the greatest number of people. He passed this belief onto his son, who became a major proponent through the effective altruism movement.

This is illustrated most clearly by the Bankman-Frieds' effective altruistic participation in Sam's investment schemes:

Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX, his parents and senior executives of the failed cryptocurrency exchange bought at least 19 properties worth nearly $121 million in the Bahamas over the past two years, official property records show.

. . . The documents for another home with beach access in Old Fort Bay -- a gated community that was once home to a British colonial fort built in the 1700s to protect against pirates -- show Bankman-Fried's parents, Stanford University law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, as signatories. The property, one of the documents dated June 15 said, is for use as a "vacation home."

When asked by Reuters why the couple decided to buy a vacation home in the Bahamas and how it was paid for -- whether in cash, with a mortgage or by a third party such as FTX -- a spokesman for the professors said only that Bankman and Fried had been trying to return the property to FTX.

"Since before the bankruptcy proceedings, Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried have been seeking to return the deed to the company and are awaiting further instructions," the spokesperson said, declining to elaborate.

Well, the lawsuits have begun, and they're only likely to get worse. Speaking only as a lay observer, I've got to think the Bankman-Frieds, eminent law professors both (and indeed authorities in moral philosophy) face civil liability in clawbacks of investor assets, for instance in their multimillion-dollar property they secured via FTX and Sam, as well as the potential for criminal conspiracy charges, depending on what they knew of Sam's whole frammis.

Even leaving civil or criminal penalties aside, I can see the potential for legal fees alone wiping out their net worth. Some lawyers, huh? But this is David Brooks's new meritocratic American upper class.

Some FTX Data Points

Above is a screen shot from the evaluation of Sara Fisher-Ellison at ratemyprofessors.com . She is the wife of Glenn Ellison, the Gregory K. Palm Professor of Economics at MIT. Although she's listed as a Senior Lecturer in the Economics Department at MIT, as far as I can tell, this is not a tenured or tenure-track position, and in the sort of arrangement I discussed yesterday, she's on the faculty primarily to pad the compensation for her powerful husband. I quote from a student evaluation that dates from June 19, 2021, before the FTX scandal broke:

Very nice but can't teach. She makes a lot of mistakes and seems nervous. When she's solving a problem she often has to back peddle because she made a mistake, which leads to a lot of confusion. Biggest critique is that she doesn't show her work for a lot of the problems she works through. She does a lot of solving in her head... sorry not sorry

My experience from my brief academic career is that non-tenure track faculty are expendable, and an instructor with such bad reviews is usually not renewed after a limited number of semesters -- EXCEPT. The except is either if the instructor is female and married to a powerful male dean or tenured professor, or she is in bed with him. Barring evidence to the contrary, I've got to assume something like this is the case with the Ellisons. Her MIT faculty thumbnail is suggestive as well:

She has spent most of her career at MIT, but has also held visiting positions at institutions such as the Centre for Economic Studies in Munich, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Hoover Institution, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the Paris School of Economics.

So, why hasn't she advanced beyond senior lecturer at MIT if her vita is so astounding? Or indeed, if it would somehow violate MIT's ethics standards (cough, cough) to have two married tenured faculty in the same department, why couldn't she just move over, say, to Harvard or Northeastern or UMass or Tufts or Brandeis, just as examples, and get promoted there? I think the answer is pretty clearly that she's at MIT to collect baksheesh for husband Glenn and has nothing else to contribute anywhere.

Why would all those other prestigious institutions have her, an apparent mediocrity, as a visitor? Because Glenn could, at minimum, block peer review for publication by members of those other places, or alternatively, smile on their careers. This is also how their daughter Caroline, by all indications an airhead with neither talent nor social skills, got into Stanford and why Stanford professors would give her glowing recommendations.

Intriguingly, there is no ratemyprofessors entry for Glenn. Either he's so powerful, no graduate student would dare rate him, or he's so powerfu;, he can keep his ratings off the site.

Consider as well that the Ellisons, Caroline's father in particular, are prestigious authorities on economics, but now they're hovering in the background of a major financial scandal. In fact, the YouTube video below suggests that Caroline was likely selected by Sam Bankman-Fried as CEO of Alameda Research not because she was a whiz at finance but specifically because she was not up to par intellectually.

In other words, Caroline was quite possibly more like a special-needs child who'd never matched the hype that was built up for her. Certainly that's what you see in the video clips. What I hear is that since the FTX collapse, she's disappeared and can't be located. What role are Glenn and Sara playing in this phase of the story? They're going to have to turn her over when she's indicted or face felony charges on their own.

Another data point on which I've been musing is the actual short life of the FTX fraud. Looking at the broad outlines of Enron, it was founded in 1985 by Kenneth Lay. Jeffrey Skilling joined the company in 1990. Enron filed for bankruptcy in 2001. It took over a decade for the full range of the fraud tro develop. Bernard Madoff founded Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960:

In 1999, financial analyst Harry Markopolos had informed the SEC that he believed it was legally and mathematically impossible to achieve the gains Madoff claimed to deliver. According to Markopolos, it took him four minutes to conclude that Madoff's numbers did not add up, and another minute to suspect they were fraudulent.

Reported admissions by Madoff to his family indicate that his financial operations had always been a Ponzi scheme, which suggests he had evaded detection for 40 years. Yet somehow Sam Bankman-Fried managed to steal amounts comparable to Enron or Madoff only between 2019 and 2022, but the bubble popped within three years.

This is David Brooks's new American upper class. Heck, Madoff and Kenneth Lay were smarter. The Bobos aren't even good at hype.

The Whole Elite-School Racket And FTX

I left off yesterday wondering if the whole elite-school racket, which earlier fraudsters like Madoff, Lay, and Kozlowski avoided, has anything to do with some of the less familiar features of the FTX scandal. I referred to David Brooks's 2000 Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, which bases his argument on what might be called the bourgeois-optimistic interpretation of elite-school admissions: after World War II, James B Conant reformed the Ivy admissions process by introducing the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which devalued the role of money and social standing in determining who got into Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Stanford, MIT, and the like, and instead stressed merit and ability.

At the same time, the Ivies are thought to have dropped Jewish quotas, which allowed Jews to increase their presence on campus and qualified them in greater numbers for careers at upper levels in business and government. One needed to look no farther for confirmation than Brooks himself, from a Jewish family but admitted to Chicago purely on merit. Brooks doesn't hesitate to say that the Bobos, bourgeois bohemians, baby boom Jews from elite schools, became the new US upper class, and this is a Good Thing.

Alan Dershowitz, a much smarter guy than Brooks, offered a different take on Conant, the SATs, and Jewish quotas in his 1991 Chutzpah. In his view, the elite schools made good publicity for themselves by seeming to abolish Jewish quotas, but in fact they simply fudged their admissions criteria to accomplish the same ends: instead of directly ruling out applicants with identifiably Jewish surnames or aquiline features in their application photos, they claimed to stress applicants from outside the Northeastern cities and suburbs in order to achieve "diversity" and cancel out factors like the toublesome SAT scores themselves. Jewish quotas continue, but just with a different name -- and in their objective they now apply to Asian applicants as well.

Jerome Karabel's 2006 The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton in part echoes Dershowitz, but it goes much farther to argue that admissions departments put applicants into "basket" categories whose criteria and proportions are closely guarded secrets. There are occasional controversies that spill into the public forum -- several years ago, it was revealed that Dartmouth had reduced the number in the athletic "basket", athletes specifically recruited by coaches for the incoming class, in order (presumably) to increase the size of the academically gifted "basket", but where either basket stood in relation to other baskets, and what those other baskets comprised, was never explained.

Karabel, though, argues that legacy "baskets" for offspring of alumni are still highly important, as are "baskets" for offspring of donors who intend simply to buy a spot for their children in the incoming class -- the cost of this route, although presumably in the multimillions, is nevertheless completely legal and tax deductible as well. This is in contrast to the celebrities who didn't have the resources to endow a football stadium but felt a lesser amount in bribes to the right people could get their kids in as easily; this, however, was illegal.

It's hard to avoid thinking that the Varsity Blues scandal exposed only the tip of the iceberg. On one hand, it left aside the question of why lots of money via the right channel -- say, endowing a computer center -- can assure one child completely legal admission, while less but still significant money paid to a volleyball coach is against the law. And what the Varsity Blues scandal completely left aside was the question of how all these policy routes that bypass transparently meritocratic admissions can thrive, which they continue to do.

This brings me to Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried, and FTX. I noted yesterday that they're the offspring of David Brooks's bourgeois-bohemian "new upper class", people who at least according to Brooks have risen entirely on merit. And we'd be entitled to think this was the case if the university system were in fact provably transparent and meritocratic, which it definitely isn't.

Let's just take the peculiar case of the parents, the Ellisons and Bankman-Frieds, both of whom are in the remarkable circumstance of being married to each other and together on the faculties of elite schools -- and not just on the faculty, but in the same department. There are marked class divisions on faculties, the first between those on the tenure track and those like graduate assistants and adjuncts who are not. Then there's the distinction between those who can earn tenure and become associate professors and those who are promoted to full professor -- but then there's the distinction between those with an endowed professorship ("Harley Throckmorton Distinguished Professor of Blahblah") and those who are simply full professors.

But the absolute pinnacle are the Ellisons at MIT: Glenn Ellison is the Gregory K. Palm Professor of Economics at MIT, and his wife, Sara Fisher Ellison, is currently described as "also an economist at MIT", although for whatever reason, I haven't been able to reach her faculty listings on the MIT website, quite possibly due to the current publicity over their daughter. If two faculty members are married in the same department at the same university, it frequently means that one spouse has been hired effectively to grant the other a family income that exceeds university limits on individual faculty pay.

Thus a Harvard or Yale may wish to recruit a pinnacle-level academic, who wants to be paid N. However, the university's policy limits professor pay to N - Y. But if they can work out a deal where they can also hire the prospect's spouse for Y, the total family income will reach N, and they can hire the big gun. This leaves aside the question of how the typical elite school like Stanford or MIT, with multibillion-dollar endowments, would be so parsimonious in its faculty salaries while maintaining informal means of bypassing that parsimoniousness. My own view is that the academic world loves corruption; it breeds it. If there were hiring and salary policies that were models of transparency, the deans would seek out ways to undermine them, and not even for their personal benefit, just on general principle. That's just how the academy runs.

We may assume the Bankman-Frieds, married and teaching together at Stanford Law, are in a similar enviable position. They're powerful people; they have cronies, contacts, and enablers across the world university system and beyond. My assumption is that their ability to place their utterly unpromising and incompetent children at elite schools is just one indication, though not a small one, of their standing in a corrputed and interdependent system. I've got to wonder what their kids picked up from that family environment.

Bobos in paradise indeed.

"The Top Of Mount Stupid"

In the aftermath of the midterms and Trump's presidential announcement, the FTX scandal hasn't been a top story, even though some commentators are calling it worse than Enron. So far, in fact, nobody has noticed an odd coincidence that the scandal emerged within days of Elizabeth Holmes's sentencing for the Theranos hoax -- but both Caroline Ellison, the reputed queen of Sam Bankman-Fried's harem and CEO of Alameda Research, and Elizabeth Holmes were products of Stanford University.

I did a quick check; Stanford produced 11 Nobel laureates since Elizabeth Holmes was on campus in 2002, but it's worth noting that Ellison and Holmes must hold ranks equivalent to the Nobel Prize among famous financial hoaxers, up there with Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay and Dennis Kozlowski. Two of them in just a decade! Remember as well that Madoff, Lay, and Kozlowski didn't achieve prominence until they were well into middle age; Holmes and Ellison emerged meteorically when they were much younger.

But it's also worth noting that the Stanford Nobelists weren't undergaduates there; they were largely recruited to the faculty specifically for the Nobel prospects they'd developed in their careers elsewhere. Holmes and Ellison were selected for their unique adolescent promise via the elite-school admissions game and were home grown. And the elite-school connections don't stop there. Ms Ellison is the daughter of Glenn Ellison, the Gregory K. Palm Professor of Economics at MIT, and Sara Fisher Ellison, also an economist at MIT.

I have a question. If she's so smart, and indeed the offspring of such smart parents, how can the YouTuber at the top of this post credibly assert she's reached the peak of Mount Stupid? The video shows clips of her giggling sophomorically and making vapid remarks worthy of the most superficial Valley girl. Yet

Ruth Ackerman, a math professor who taught Ellison at Stanford 10 years ago, called her former student “bright, focused, very mathy” — a challenge, she said, to reconcile with Ellison becoming wrapped up in one of the largest alleged frauds of the past decade.

“The first I heard of the current controversy was when people started contacting me on LinkedIn, telling me to withdraw my endorsement of her skill as a computer scientist,” Ackerman told Forbes.

This carries echoes of Elizabeth Holmes, who also seems to have had a remarkable ability to con otherwise educated adults. As the Youtube psychologist Dr Todd Grande noted a few days ago at the time of Holmes's sentencing,

"Some people have called her extremely intelligent. One of her references said that she was the most intelligent person they had ever met, which means they need to get out more. . ."

There are similar questions about her collaborator, Sam Bankman-Fried. Although he himself went to MIT, his parents are Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School, an odd mirror image of Ellison's background with both parents at MIT. Both are clearly products of the post-1960s American gentry class, and both appear to have risen with the help of enablers in the same class. Elizabeth Holmes's background is very similar:

Her father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron, an energy company that later went bankrupt after an accounting fraud scandal. Her mother, Noel Anne (née Daoust), worked as a Congressional committee staffer. Christian later held executive positions in government agencies such as USAID, the EPA, and USTDA.

All of these notorious hoaxers come from the same prosperous, highly educated backgrounds, and we might almost say they were groomed for their roles throughout adolescence, with Holmes and Bankman-Fried attending prestigious private schools and Ellison attending the controversial Newton North High School, one of the largest and most expensive high schools ever built in the United States. All were treated as prodigies; Bankman-Fried attended Canada/USA Mathcamp, a summer program for mathematically talented high-school students; Ellison represented the US in the 2011 International Linguistics Olympiad (if you ask me, the whole field of linguistics is a hoax); Holmes's parents arranged Mandarin Chinese home tutoring.

These backgrounds are in remarkable contrast to Ken Lay, raised in poverty as the son of a Missouri Baptist preacher; Dennis Kozlowski, raised in a working-class Polish-American family in Newark, NJ; or Bernard Madoff, a Jewish working-class graduate of Far Rockaway High School with a spotty later academic record. Ivan Boesky, a contemporary of Madoff, had a similar background, although the crimes for which he pleaded guilty in 1986 were much less severe, and his reputation has faded.

The Stanford-MIT millennial fraudsters are instead products of what David Brooks in Bobos in Paradise calls the bourgeois bohemians, unlike the boomers and depression kids Lay, Kozlowsi, and Madoff, groomed and entitled from the start, though by no means polished -- and few of their peers had any questions. I'm still digesting this, but I'm wondering if the whole elite-school racket, which the earlier fraudsters avoided, has anything to do with it. David Brooks would likely deny it. Still, how come Ellison and Bankman-Fried look like they've ascended the to the summit of Mount Stupid, while the likes of Bernie Madoff, Dennis Kozlowski, or Ken Lay never came off that way?

Trump's Future, The Midterms, And COVID

On Sunday, I mentioned that I'd found an opinion piece that made some productive observations about Trump, COVID, and the disastrous year 2020, but I hadn't been able to locate it again. I finally did, it's by David Srrom at Hot Air, which has greatly improved with the departure of Allahpundit. Strom expands on those insights in this piece from Thursday, Trump's Achilles' heel?

Lots of arrows will be fired at his vulnerable heel. Some are likely to hit.

The target? Trump’s response to COVID was simply awful. He did exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, pushed all the worst Establishment folks to the top of the policymaking heap, and actively aided them in destroying his chance to get reelected. Trump was forced to choose between good policy and bad, courageous leaders and bureaucrats, and he chose wrongly. It was his undoing in 2020, and could be his undoing in 2024.

He quotes a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Justin Hart:

When Mr. Trump announced his 2024 campaign Tuesday, he didn’t apologize for the lockdowns or even mention them. I supported him in 2016, and during his tenure he did much to dredge the political swamps, but his decision to approve and extend drastic Covid interventions should disqualify him for a second term.

The White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, put the Constitution into an induced coma. Mr. Trump’s decision to adopt Chinese Communist Party tactics and close down the country gave license to states to amplify and extend these terrible policies, to governors to wield unprecedented executive powers, and to school districts to shut students out for months or even years.

The COVID-related electoral revisions, including universal mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, also contributed to Trump's defeat later that year, and they probably had an impact on Republican underperformance in 2022. Strom continues.

The Declaration of Emergency that Trump put into place in 2020 has been extended into 2023, and in all likelihood will be extended again. This time around some Democrats stood up to stop it, but the Left had made clear that they will be punished. Emergency powers for the president will extend indefinitely–powers Trump first put in place.

Trump didn’t just make bad choices during COVID, he actively attacked those such as Governors Kemp and DeSantis for making the correct ones. Unsurprisingly he took shots at both men before and after the midterm elections, and I would be surprised if his vulnerability on the COVID issue didn’t play a role in his decision to do so. He took particular aim at Sweden, one of the only places in the world where they got things right.

. . . Trump didn’t quite make Anthony Fauci on his own, but he did make him a czar with power over my life and others’. That is hard to forgive, and I suspect it may cost his his shot at the presidency for a second time.

My feelings, at least for now, are closer and closer to Strom's. My current sense is that Trump will fade before 2024, although there is a risk that if Biden uses the FBI and the Justice Department to pursue Trump politically, it could enhance his status as a cult martyr and damage Republican unity going into the election. On the other hand, I simply don't think either Biden or the Democrat leadership is smart enough to develop that subtle a strategy, and it's probably more likely that they will simply pursue an exclusive anti-Trump focus and ignore the rise of a more effective 2024 Republican candidate.

What I've been seeing, though, is a tendency for neoconservatives to emerge from the woodwork, who have generally been aligned with the Never Trump movement in the past, and as I've been saying, figures like Secretary Blinken and Anne Applebaum have advocated an activist anti-Russian Ukraine policy that's hard to distinguish from the classical neoconservatism at the Institute for the Study of War. So far, Trump has continued to make public statements that distance himself from such a policy, and the Republican right continues to insist that Ukraine aid is being diverted by corruption there.

It's too early to tell how this may impact the alignment of the Democrats in the 2024 election, or indeed if rhe Ukraine war and the Russia problem will have been quickly solved by then -- but I donk't think the Russia problem in particular can be disposed of so easily, I still think Trump's issues have been overtaken by events, and the political environment will be different in 2024.