The Changing Goals of the Best and Brightest

I've been reading Niall Ferguson's Colossus, a briskly written brief for liberal imperialism -- and consequent criticism of United States for hampering overseas missions by going over-the-top in denying their imperialstic natures. I'll save a large reaction for later, but wanted to share one passage I recently enjoyed:

[Few], if any, of the graduates of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton aspire
to spend their lives trying to turn a sun-scorched sandpit like Iraq into the prosperous caoitalist democracy of Paul Wolfowitz's imaginings. America's brightest and best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia but to manage MTV, not to rule the Hejaz but to run a hedge fund. Unlike their British counterparts of a century ago, who left the elite British universities with an overtly imperial ethos, the letters ambitious young Americans would like to see after their names are CEO, not CBE [Commander of the British Empire].

This is interesting to me particularly because I have absolutely no interest in managing any business, running a hedge fund, or anything else so mercantile. (The only lucrative dream I have might be to write a best-selling book.) Yet, of course, for so many of my college and law school classmates, all that is indeed the height of their aspirations.

It's probably a good thing; this is why America is such an economic powerhouse. And of course it's also a good thing to have more talented people see the private sector as the place for them, rather than trying to expand government. But it is striking that fewer young Americans now aspire to public service than they did even a few decades ago. (Forget the Victorian Brits, recall Kennedy's eponymous Best and Brightest.) This trend has reversed itself since 9/11, to be sure, but I wonder how much.