Trump’s inexperienced Cabinet picks offer ‘creative destruction.’ That’s good news | Opinion
Some of President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees (Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary and Kash Patel for FBI director, in particular) have been criticized for their lack of experience. But history teaches us that a certain amount of ignorance, what may be termed “optimal ignorance,” can be instrumental in driving innovation and affecting change.
This is one of the enduring lessons of the great American inventor Charles Franklin Kettering, who is thought to be second only to Thomas Edison in the number of patents to his credit. Kettering harbored a fundamental distrust for so-called “experts,” believing that they could be so caught up in what they already knew that they frequently had a difficult time learning anything else. As a result, they might be less likely to find innovative solutions to difficult problems if they require thinking in a dimension different from that in which the experts were trained. At an observation of the sesquicentennial of U.S. patent law, Kettering observed that some of the greatest inventions in history were the work of nonspecialists.
It is very difficult to tell just who is going to originate a new thing. Teacher Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Charles Goodyear got his start with his family’s hardware store. Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse began as artists.. The Wright brothers ran a bicycle shop and George Eastman was a bookkeeper. The developments that made these men famous had practically no relationship to their original occupations. But of first importance, each of them had an idea. And, with these men, the perfection of the idea became the controlling influence.
This is a potentially useful lens through which to view Trump’s nominations for high-level government posts. His focus is less on whether the nominees’ CVs check all the right boxes and more about whether they can think creatively to solve the nation’s most pressing problems. In his classic treatise “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy,” the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously described the “perennial gale of creative destruction.”
This is the basic idea that in a capitalist economic system, new ideas and innovations continuously replace the old ways of doing things, and this leads to the improvement in goods and services over time to the benefit of consumers. With these outside-the-box appointments, Trump seeks to unleash the process of creative destruction to affect a sea change in how the government operates to the benefit of the country writ large — what the physicist and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn would describe as a paradigmatic shift. He wrote:
“Political revolutions are inaugurated by a growing sense, often restricted to a segment of the political community, that existing institutions have ceased adequately to meet the problems posed by an environment that they have in part created. … Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favour of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all.”
The reelection of Trump, one term removed, is testament to the fact that the American people want change. With the nontraditional slate of Cabinet secretaries and advisors he has nominated, change is in the offing. But change is hard and for it to represent a difference in kind rather than degree it must begin with the “burning of the fields.” The hope is that the light from these fires illuminates a path forward out of the darkness for a once great nation that has seemingly lost its way.
This story was originally published December 12, 2024 at 7:01 AM with the headline "Trump’s inexperienced Cabinet picks offer ‘creative destruction.’ That’s good news | Opinion."