Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives—But Why?

Aaron Renn writes Feb. 11:

Tanner Greer wrote a great piece about [Tom] Friedman’s story arc that explores what happened. Friedman studied the Middle East, then ended up as a New York Times correspondent in Beirut and Jerusalem. This gave him profound insights into the globalizing world that he used to write multiple influential books like The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat. It’s hard to overstate the extent to which the latter book made Friedman into a prophet like figure for corporate America.

Fifteen years later, Friedman was something of an internet joke. People would write parody columns in which he explained the world through a conversation with his cab driver. As a superstar columnist, he spent his days doing things like hobnobbing with other elites at the Aspen Ideas Festival. He wasn’t on the streets of Beirut anymore gaining insight into what was coming next. Those elite conversations are important, but they are also one dimensional. Perhaps Friedman overly relied on his proverbial cab driver because riding in a cab became one of the few times he interacted with the kinds of people he used to talk to daily when he was a foreign correspondent.