Americans love rankings. There’s David Letterman’s “Top 10” list, of
course. You can hardly surf the Web without stumbling across lists of
best this and most that. “We’re number one!” is practically the national
slogan, and being number one is fairly meaningless without a number
two—and preferably a whole lot of other numbers against whom we can
measure.
I know of what I speak: in my day job I am an editor and columnist at U.S. News & World Report, one of the founding fathers of the modern rankings-industrial complex. Our ubiquitous “Best Colleges” ranking has long since spawned a host of similar efforts—for high schools, law firms, hospitals, and grad schools—many of which have been imitated elsewhere. There is, so far as I know, no truth to the rumor that we’re about to launch “best rankings.”
It’s no surprise, then, that one of the enduring pastimes of political junkies and casual politicos alike is ranking the nation’s 44 chief executives. Here too I have some tangential connection: in 1948 my grandfather, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., conducted a landmark poll of 55 historians for Life aiming to put our chief executives in a definitive order. It was a polling exercise that would be repeated at least a half-dozen times over the subsequent six decades. That half dozen included Grandpa himself conducting a second poll in 1962, and his son, my father, Arthur Jr., running one in 1996.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/executive-order/
I know of what I speak: in my day job I am an editor and columnist at U.S. News & World Report, one of the founding fathers of the modern rankings-industrial complex. Our ubiquitous “Best Colleges” ranking has long since spawned a host of similar efforts—for high schools, law firms, hospitals, and grad schools—many of which have been imitated elsewhere. There is, so far as I know, no truth to the rumor that we’re about to launch “best rankings.”
It’s no surprise, then, that one of the enduring pastimes of political junkies and casual politicos alike is ranking the nation’s 44 chief executives. Here too I have some tangential connection: in 1948 my grandfather, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., conducted a landmark poll of 55 historians for Life aiming to put our chief executives in a definitive order. It was a polling exercise that would be repeated at least a half-dozen times over the subsequent six decades. That half dozen included Grandpa himself conducting a second poll in 1962, and his son, my father, Arthur Jr., running one in 1996.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/executive-order/
No comments:
Post a Comment