Bootstrap Brilliance

I don't know about you, but I need some new bootstraps.  Mine are, surprisingly, not broken or worn out despite my many years of pulling my considerable self up by them.  I can still pull but I don't get any lift.  No upward torque. They just don't work anymore.

Wait...I feel a song coming on...(yes, apparently I woke up in a musical version of my life this morning...).
If Jerrod Neimann will excuse my bastardization of his "Lover, Lover" lyrics, my song goes "Oh leather, leather, leather, you don't lift me no good no more."  

OK, that's enough of that.  Here's the Knowledge Shared that offers one explanation for why my trusty old bootstraps ain't liftin' no good no more. I swear I didn't write it.  In fact, it comes to us courtesy of The Economist\Intelligent Life\On Bootstraps.

“Lifting oneself by one’s bootstraps is an almost entirely American accomplishment,” wrote I.A.R. Wylie in a 1927 article in the Sunday Times London...The disadvantage, she continues, is that “there are more second rate people in first class positions than there ought to be…all right so long as there is plenty of room for the first rate man who has no capacity for bootstrapping and so long as there is no sudden crisis.” So perhaps bootstrapping is yet another reason for our financial woes;  arrogant, second-rate bootstrapping traders crowded out all of those first-class market experts.

Damn you, Rampant Mediocrity!