Whiz Kids

By Deane Barker • • tags: idiom, history • 1 min read •

This has two common meanings, one depending on the other.

Just after World War 2, ten veterans and their commander went to work at Ford. They had all served in the Army during the war in a unit called Statistical Control, which broke new ground in information management for logistics.

After the war, they marketed their services to corporate America, and were hired by Ford as a group.

This is a review of a book about the Whiz Kids which helps put into context what they did.

There were ten so-called “Whiz Kids” – youngish veterans of the Army Air Force’s Statistical Control Command who in 1946 sold Henry Ford II on hiring them as a unit to revivify his troubled empire.

[The author] takes the Whiz Kids and their disciples to task for putting near-blind faith in the decisive power of numbers and arrogantly imposing severe financial constraints on enterprises whose bottom-line results could almost certainly have been improved by allowing fallible human beings to exercise their intuition and creativity.

One of the men was Robert McNamara, who became Secretary of Defense under JFK in 1961 (after becoming the president of Ford for just two months). He surrounded himself with a group of RAND executives that inherited the “Whiz Kids” title, to assist him in the management of the Department of Defense.

The description of a smart group of people who are relied on for expert advice reminds me of Brain Trust and the scenarios in which that has been used.

The name has also been applied in other contexts – for example, an iteration of the Philadelphia Phillies, and a short-lived TV show in the 80s.

Why I Looked It Up

From The Tyranny of Clichés:

Before then, in the 1960s, it was the Whiz Kids who held that modern economics was too complicated to leave to voters and consumers.

Links from this – Soldiers Of Reason: The RAND Corporation And The Rise Of The American Empire April 24, 2022
The book is what it claims to be: a comprehensive history of RAND. The problem is that it’s just not that interesting. RAND (short for “Research and Development”) is a company created by the U.S. Air Force. During the Cold War, we were scared that the Russians were winning the military technology...
Links from this – Brain Trust July 8, 2022
A group of advisers or experts. It’s usually used to refer to a group of people supplying advice to another person – so they are a brain trust to someone else. Specifically, three professors at Columbia were known as “the Brain Trust” to FDR during his 1932 presidential campaign.
Links from this – The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas July 6, 2023
This is a sort of snarky book, but still very well-written. The author is tired of clichés that he believes the political Left has “captured,” but which he believes are simply not true. He spends the book deconstructing them. Some of the clichés the author is upset about (written in the form of...