Frighteningly enough, the people running the world are essentially children. Think about the Supreme Court clerks who, for several decades, have all but determined the course of American jurisprudence, or the fresh-faced thirtysomethings who are running the Troubled Asset Relief Program. These kids are certainly bright, but there is nothing more alarming than knowing your future is in the hands of some notorious madman you knew from your days in the high school freestyle yodeling club.

I’ve been having this vague sense of dread a lot lately. The older I get, the more I sense that no one really knows anything--the supposed experts, however earnest or well-intentioned, are performing an elaborately fraudulent ritual designed to keep us assured. But like it or not, the kids are going to have more power rather than less, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. In a short essay published in Swiss Hedge magazine earlier this year, Robertson Morrow of Clarium Capital argued that the U.S. is at the beginning of a “bull market in politics.” Since 1982, government has not been where the action is, so to speak. The most ambitious and capable young people have generally frowned upon politics, sensing that they had more lucrative and intellectually challenging opportunities in the business world. But now, for a wide variety of reasons, that is changing.

Morrow believes that the driver of the new political bull market is the fact that the American economy is squeezed between China and India on one hand and advanced European and East Asian markets on the other. America’s entrepreneurial strengths won’t necessarily generate middle-class jobs quickly enough to prevent policymakers from embracing heavy-handed industrial policy.

This weekend, President-elect Barack Obama announced a sweeping jobs program, one that places infrastructure improvements front and center. Though this is a recession-fighting solution that many conservatives, myself included, embrace, there is no telling where this desire to reshape the economy will stop. My own view is that the political bull market also reflects a structural increase in the appetite for government.

In his brilliant book The Venturesome Economy--which I hope to discuss in a future column--Amar Bhidé briefly argues that major developments in technology, like the automobile or air travel or the Internet, create new coordination problems that government is well placed to solve. Then there is the fact an economy like ours has a lot of high-wage jobs in declining sectors, which is to say a lot of vulnerable workers with much to lose; this is a political fact that can’t be wished away by a million anti-bailout op-eds. I am absolutely against propping up dying industries, not least because pointless and counterproductive interventions waste intellectual capital that can be expended on badly needed interventions.

Given that we’re living in an activist era, it makes sense to think more about how we can make government smarter and more agile, and that means thinking about personnel. Are the people devising the public policies that will determine the future success of our economy ideological imbeciles or humble realists? We don’t know exactly what the Obama administration will look like, but we do know that it will be full of earnest workaholics. I think of it as the Organization Kids' coming of age. In the spring of 2001, before the national trauma of 9/11, David Brooks wrote an essay in The Atlantic vividly describing Princeton undergraduates as ambitious achievers who seemed strangely soulless. Far from the sloppy and slouchy undergrad rebels of his youth, these kids loved adults and authority, and their highest ambition was to climb the professional ladder. But since then, the world has taken on a darker cast, and many of these Organization Kids have thrown themselves into politics, most recently by opening their pocketbooks for Barack Obama. Some have gone further: Having achieved some measure of professional success in finance or law or academia, loads of women and men in their late twenties and early thirties are now fighting for junior-level jobs in the White House.

The Organization Kids are, let’s hope, part of the solution and not part of the problem. But let’s remember that this is a very confident generation, and for Obama's Organization Kids, there has been no real experience of political failure. All the lessons the Clintonites and Bushies learned will have to be relearned.

Ted Kennedy and Stephen Breyer began deregulating the economy because, as Great Society liberals, they learned the limits of government the hard way. Now, there are other ways to learn, including the easy way. Unfortunately, the hard way is the only way that really sticks.