“So what do you do?” That conversation starter, annoyingly ubiquitous in the Washington Beltway, is a conversation killer at family dinners back home. The problem is that we are professional policy experts and, worse than that, experts who work in think tanks. This means that we wear fancy suits and speak to the national media on complex, serious topics like European security and nuclear weapons. Like other experts, we have rows of academic credentials on our walls and networks of high-level contacts in Washington and beyond.
But no one at our family dinners really believes any of this gives us special insight. Our relatives have their own ideas about what is happening in the world and what the United States ought to do about it. They don’t see why the letters after our names or our think tank perches should qualify us to make better policy choices. Other highly educated professionals don’t have this problem. Third cousins don’t usually look an M.D. in the eye and say, “Interesting point, but I have my own views on how to perform heart surgery.”
