Imbalance is unhealthy for any human institution.
Too much “liberal arts minded” and it is hard to make or do much of anything.
Too much “legalism minded” and it takes a priestly class to find out if you can do anything, and once you do find out, years to decide if you can decided to do anything with your decision.
What if you have the opposite side of the brain from the liberal minded and legal minded intellects dominating leadership? Well, just look to China;
Xi Jinping, the top leader in the Communist Party of China and the President of the People’s Republic of China, studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which is the same university where previous Chinese President Hu Jintao went for a degree in hydroelectric engineering.
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Yu Zhengsheng, the chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, is also an engineer. He graduated from the specialty of ballistic missile automatic control of the Missile Engineering Department of the Harbin Military Engineering Institute.
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A study by Li Cheng and Lynn White entitled “Elite Transformation and Modern Change in Mainland China and Taiwan: Empirical Data and the Theory of Technocracy” describes the domination of scientists and engineers in the Chinese political elite. At the time the authors conducted the study, mayors and Party secretaries of cities of over a million, governors and provincial Party secretaries of China’s provinces, autonomous regions, and province-level municipalities; and Central Committee members were found to be 80% technocrats. This means that 8 out of 10 among them have four-year degrees or more in science or engineering.
The downside? Things over people. Metrics over ethics. Conformity over creative friction.
Strive for balance to blend out the harsh edges that come with imbalance.
Something to ponder in our by-design STEM-biased Navy? Perhaps.
