That is the theme of my latest Free Press article . Excerpt, which offers the beginning of the story:

If we look at the 1960s, the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson administrations brought James Tobin, Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow (all three later Nobel laureates), Arthur Okun, Walter Heller, Gardner Ackley, Otto Eckstein, and Walt Rostow into government. Those were all names with significant academic heft who could count among the world’s leading macroeconomists. Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson served as a consultant to the government. Heller and some of the others helped to shape the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut of 1964.

That cluster of talent and its influence should come as no surprise. This was an age of elites, of love for science, of the moon landing project, and of network news shows with an establishment bent. Americans were used to deferring to elites, who had won World War II for them, and who were not out there making fools of themselves on the internet.…