Shorts, Tis Never the Season?

I pasted below an article I wrote last week for the school paper--the b-school paper, because there is no med school paper. Med students don't have time to write! It's a little more facetious than usual. Enjoy!

Economists and financial experts around the globe have tried to pinpoint the cause of the financial market collapse. Some policy wonks claim that our financiers got too smart, that our derivatives became too creative. I don’t know about you but I’ve never been taught that creative talent was a bad thing. Others try to say that we got too greedy, that we wanted things we couldn’t really afford. Again, I firmly believe that progress can only come about by pursuing those things that are at present out of our reach. The true reason why this country is in recession is because we as a nation have come up short with our dress codes. Standards are so lax that we are wearing shorts when pants are needed. We are wearing shorts to school; we are even wearing shorts to work!

In the Max Farash lecture on the 13^th of November, Daniel Forrester presented a very inspiring and powerful formula for better decision-making. He argued that Simon students must rely on data; they must possess the ability to tell the story; they must be visual and conceptual thinkers; and they must reflect and iterate on their work. The contributors of the Simonist fully agree with the above formula, but we recognize it omits one critical element to informed decision-making: pants.

We’ve made a lot of poor decisions in recent years. All of those telecom mergers, health savings accounts, subprime mortgaging, leadership over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are a few examples of some of the poor decisions we’ve made, decisions that for the most part were made by people dressed in shorts, or camouflage—equally bad.

How did this happen? Many human resource departments cite global warming for their shorts friendly dress codes. The most famous example is the UN. The UN announced this past July that it was going to reduce its carbon footprint by raising the temperature of its historic world headquarters building in New York. The announcement was hailed by the media as a green move. Not so fast, Simon readers! The true motivation behind the policy change was to allow employees to wear shorts! UN workers were encouraged to discard the professional suit and tie to “comfortably” work in a warmer climate. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon crowned himself the “environmental secretary-general,” but the truth is that the Secretary had a fall out with his tailor and could not keep wearing his 2002 trousers around his 2008 waist. And what can be said about the productivity of the UN under its new A/C policy? Their absence on the Georgia invasion and they’re failure with everything they recently tried to put their hands on in Africa: Congo, Zimbabwe, South Africa, etc, highlights the effect of shorts in the work place.

This professional slide in America to casual wear is a direct effect of school children who were educated in pro-shorts institutions. Many American public and private schools at one time required children to wear trousers to class until the seminal ruling in 1979 when Moody v Cronin 484 F. Supp. 270 (C.D. Ill. 1979) ruled in behalf of the students—a decision made by individuals dressed in robes, not pants. This ruling led to many other dress codes being overturned. School children united and fought any school policies framing the issue as an anti-shorts policy. This cleaver campaign attracted huge donations from powerful organizations such as the ACLU and Sesame Street. The school administrators managed to get AARP behind them but that was not enough to counter the strength of the anti-shorts campaign.

I remember the monumental day when the no shorts law was revoked by my local school district. Many readers can recall such a day in their own past. It seemed so much like the right thing for us to do then. We saw a nation no longer divided by a pant line; we believed freedom of expression, we believed self-actualization would come from this change. Little did we know the consequences would be so grave. Now we know, and knowing is half the battle. Let’s take care of the other half and put America back on track. Let’s wear our dress pants to campus lectures and activities, and when we reenter the work force, let’s be dressed in our best slacks. We won’t get out of this recession until we get back into our pants.