Expertise vs. Politics

Populism challenges elitism

Is governing an art or a science?

That unarticulated question appears to underlie much of current political debate ranging from today’s Trump initiatives to Britain’s exit from the Common Market to an imaginary political group I’m affiliated with called Friends of Walmart.

Must we defer to the experts who tell us that a free-market meritocracy will yield optimal answers to today’s problem or can we indulge the option of rejecting their recommendations, not because we have better ones that can prevail in an intellectual debate, but simply because they intuitively feel wrong or uncomfortable.

Once you get beyond the Trump administration’s boorish behavior, the basic question it raises is how much deference credentialed experts deserve and whether they should be construed as our servants or masters. It is a question that is both difficult and unavoidable, coloring debates ranging from public health to tariffs to immigration.

The power of experts, human or otherwise (hello AI) seems to be relentlessly expanding but their batting average of decisions that ultimately prove good ranging from wars we’ve been involved in for the past half century, the response to the Great Recession in 2008 to immigration and trade policy remains underwhelming

The best you can say about these results is that we have survived them and that other strategies might have yielded worse outcomes

At the outset there’s a definitional question. What’s the difference between true expertise and the strongly-held beliefs of someone credentialed? Would American indifference to Vietnam’s civil war have really resulted in a red world? Would sulking bankers denied a bonus and immunity from prosecution have truly sabotaged recovery from the Great Recession?

Is listing seven steps to fascism science or phrenology?

Expertise can be useful and essential. Medical professionals do keep me healthier than asking Dr. Google how to deal with my complaints. And big buildings designed by trained architects and engineers are more likely to remain standing when the earth quakes.

But our confidence level does and should decline as distance from the hard sciences grows. While all science is tentative, germ theory is far more solid than economic theory, which seems modestly more reliable than political theory.

President Trump’s habit of simultaneously demeaning expertise and personally claiming it has both elevated the issue and made it more difficult to discuss. He has none of the credentials academics tell us are needed for an effective presidency but nonetheless has a massive, perhaps unprecedented, impact.

While I’m among those who’d argue he hasn’t governed wisely or well, no one, least of all the credentialing community, suggest his activities lack impact.

Meanwhile, Congress, which has become more diverse in some ways (in terms of gender and color) appears better prepared in terms of education– the Members of Congress lacking a college degree have nearly disappeared – but was decreasingly productive prior to the recent decision to give up and cede power to the President.

Less-prepared President has extraordinary impact while a better-educated Congress ducks decisions. Correlation or causality?

Among Harvard’s Michael Sandel’s predictably provocative analyses in Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? is the suggestion that the majority of voters who lack college degrees resent a legislature where nearly all solons were blessed by higher education. Is the suggestion that America would be a better place if each of us was a college graduate a helpful or harmful one?

Whether it is worth paying the price of a bleak coming Christmas for the remote promise of a domestic manufacturing renaissance is a decision better made by the voters than by credentialed analysts who know the price of everything, but are less expert about what voters value.

That’s a question better dealt with by my fellow friends of Walmart.