Our so-called experts, Jim Manzi says, build castles of words, and call it knowledge:
Both the UK and US experiences appear to validate what Matthew Sinclair — the amazing Research Director of the Taxpayers Alliance in the UK — has called the Iron Law of Climate Change Policy: Restrictions will always proceed by the least democratic route available.
Of course, the reply of a Progressive to this observation is presumably: Bravo, the system is working as intended.
But I think this raises the crucial question in this debate: What is the valid scope of expertise?
In the case of climate change, there is actual scientific knowledge about the properties of CO2, but advocates of emissions mitigation schemes constantly attempt to drape the mantle of science, or more broadly expert knowledge, around public policy positions that, as I have argued many times, do not follow even from the core technical reports produced by the asserted experts.
Bill Buckley famously said that he “would rather by governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty.” So would I. But I would rather fly in an airplane with wings designed by one competent aeronautical engineer than one with wings designed by a committee of the first 20,000 names of non-engineers in the Boston phonebook. The value of actual expertise in a technical field like wing design outweighs the advantages offered by incorporating multiple points of view.
The essential Progressive belief that Klein expresses in undiluted form is that crafting public policy through legislation is a topic for which, in simplified terms, the benefits of expertise outweigh the benefits of popular contention. Stated more cautiously, this would be the belief that the institutional rules of the game should be more heavily tilted toward expert opinion on many important topics than they are in the U.S. today.
This would be a lot more compelling if the elites didn’t have such a terrible track record of producing social interventions that work.
An aeronautical engineer can predict reliably that “If you design a wing like this, then this plane will be airworthy, but if you design it like that, then it will never get in the air.” If you were to build a bunch of airplanes according to each set of specifications, you would discover that he or she is almost always right. This is actual expertise. I’ve tried to point out many times that the vast majority of program interventions fail when subjected to replicated, randomized testing.
Our so-called experts in public policy talk a good game, but in the end are no experts at all. They build castles of words, and call it knowledge.
Not only can the aeronautical engineer make predictions, he knows he can and will be held accountable for his work, unlike most technocrats.
Megan McArdle adds her own skeptical thoughts:
The problem is not that the elites are venal self-interested autocrats out to screw the little guy and give their group more power; the problem is that, like every other group, they tend to understand the costs of programs that restrict their autonomy very well, and to be somewhat less sensitive to the freedom of others. As Anatole France drily put it: “The law in its majestic equality refuses the rich as well as the poor the right to sleep under bridges and to beg for bread.”
The other reason I don’t necessarily trust elites is that they really like thinking big. You don’t get hundreds or thousands of people into a vociferous debate over making some modest improvement to Medicaid reimbursements; you get them animated by proposing a radical overhaul of the health care system. Yet most innovation isn’t big; it’s continuous, incremental improvement. Companies are forced to this by market discipline, but we don’t draw that many policy people from business; they’re viewed as tainted by the commercial association.
So we get what most interests wordsmiths: a succession of enormous plans (health care exchanges! privatize social security!), most of which fail. We get very few mechanisms to improve them.
(Hat tip to Aretae.)