Less than a ring

There's a very good NYTimes piece on the growth of think tanks in Washington in recent years. It's worth reading in full. But I loved this line:

The research institutions say the boom is fueled by three major factors: big money from Wall Street, a post-Sept. 11 sense that foreign policy matters and anger at the Bush administration.

...“To a Wall Streeter, intellectuals are pretty cheap,” said Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World.” “There are wedding rings that cost more than I do.”