Instapundit links to this WaPo story about young professional "world-savers" who can't find lucrative careers in Washington, DC.

Armed with a Georgetown University diploma, Beth Hanley embarked in her 20s on a path hoping to become a professional world-saver. First she worked at nonprofit Bread for the World. Then she taught middle school English in central Africa with the Peace Corps. Finally, to certify her idealism, she graduated last spring with a master's degree in international relations from Johns Hopkins University.

But now the 29-year-old faces a predicament shared by many young strivers in Washington's public interest field. After years of amassing so many achievements, they struggle to find full-time employment with decent pay and realize they might not get exactly what they set out for. Hanley, a think tank temp who dreams of aiding the impoverished and reducing gender discrimination in developing countries, is stuck.

First, I find the term "public interest" presumptive. I'm certainly not knocking charitable work, but it seems to me that dollars or votes determine today's "public interest", not a Georgetown University curriculum.

When I was in college, I was looking for interesting work for summer breaks, noticed "MoPIRG" (Missouri Public Interest Research Group), and thought that might be interesting. Later, I discovered that Ralph Nader amassed his fortune though these "PIRGs", collecting big dollars and paying out below-minimum wages to mostly-volunteer idealists. While the Post article wisely portrays a "public interest" worker who (uncontroversially) wants to feed the poor, "public interest" is also construed to include various forms of international socialism, transnational government, and left-leaning policies.

Unsurprisingly, she runs across George Soros trolling for more lawyers:

One evening, she stumbled onto an intriguing posting. The Open Society Institute was advertising a "mid-level" position to develop strategies and identify priorities for its mission in Africa.

"They want someone with a law degree, but they will consider advanced degrees in a related field," she said, head nodding, hopefully. "I could apply to this."

I'd rather she fed people, even if that meant getting a job and paying out of her own pocket, using wealth she actually created.

Like Chelsea Clinton, the girl in the Post article has a postgraduate degree in "international relations". There's something touching (and a bit scary) about the idea of young person fresh out of academia, with almost no real-world experience, viewing themselves as 'experts' in telling whole nations how they should interact.

When you think about it, it's truly a mind-blowing proposition.

It seems to me that one shouldn't be qualified to dictate international policy until one has done good, and quite a lot of it, on the small scale. If you want to alleviate poverty, then first try creating some wealth, and then share it with someone poor. That should give you an appreciation for the whole process. If you weren't able to lift that one individual or family out of poverty in the long term, maybe you won't be so good at doing it with an entire society.

(And if you succeed, then maybe you're onto something.)

Likewise, if you're interested in international conflict resolution, perhaps you could start by trying to talk some sense into a local gang. If you can't talk them out of their violence, or have to resort to using threats of force (the police), then perhaps you shouldn't expect any better results with, say, North Korea.

When you look back through history at the number of movements who were obsessed with saving the world, a repeating pattern appears: many stood, in theory, for a greater national or international good, offering sweeping solutions, while simultaneously doing very little good (or even tremendous harm) in their own personal sphere of influence. Che Guevara or Mao, for example, both of whom were or still are enormously popular among the world-savers.

I do realize that the whole point of an education is to allow us to learn others' lessons. It's unlikely that a kid will stumble onto, say, Pythagoras' theorem on their own so we show them what others have discovered. So why can't we do the same with "international relations"?

Theoretically, we can. But the evidence frequently suggests that what is being taught isn't "what works", but rarefied abstractions which can only thrive in places where actual results don't matter -- academia. Marxism, for example, wasn't stunningly popular in universities for the last century because Marxist economics were shown to have worked so well (indeed, it produced starvation instead), but rather because professors liked the ideas of Marxism, as a kind of materialistic religion. When it failed utterly, academia was the last group to get the news. (And in many departments, it still hasn't sunk in.)

The big antidote to this disconnect has always been a de-programming environment called "the real world", in which idealistic young things were disabused of their (extremely expensive) ivory-tower ideologies by intimate encounters with certain inflexible aspects of reality.

The subject of the Post article seems to have noticed this:

"I have friends who did investment banking," Hanley said. "They were making more when they were 22. I don't think I'll ever make that. They seem more grown-up. But they seem miserable. Wait -- they seem fine. I would be miserable if I were them."

She continued: "A couple of them made comments to me suggesting I haven't grown up, like, 'I've been working for five years -- isn't that incredible?' "

At least for now, Hanley said, disillusionment has not set in...

But as government continues to grow, it will increasingly find room to employ such people as cogs in a larger machine, where their ideologies can continue to incubate, safe from contact with opposing points of view, with the full power of the state (or ultimately, they hope, the world) at their disposal.