The statist, the believer in the magic powers of the state, is a totalitarian at heart. She wants one opinion, er, expert assessment, to govern us all.
The background attitude: nanny knows better than baby. Mind you, for nanny to have that advantage, she must be an expert. But what is an expert? An "expert" is what creates the magic difference between you, who doesn't know, and a higher force, who does know: the classic school yard star.
Our entire "educational" system is based on the idea of the ultimate know-it-all. A teacher friend of mine once warned me sternly against the internet, explaining that it provides no protection against false information. "Do teachers?" I replied, pointing out received wisdom in German school classes in the 1930s, going on to suggest that all human knowledge and information is fallible, and that the ability to discern information more likely to approximate truth from lesser candidates greatly increases with the internet, i.e. with the breadth of access to information.
Jonah Goldberg at the Los Angeles Times writes most sensibly:
There are no more devout members of the cult of expertise than mainstream journalists. They rely on experts for guidance about what is "mainstream" and accurate and what is not. Sometimes, that's fine. Surgeons are extremely reliable sources to explain how a heart attack happens. They're less reliable at telling you who will have one, save in a statistical sense, and even less reliable at telling you when a specific person will have one.
That's because prediction is hard. Experts — in politics, economics, climate — are very, very bad at telling people what will happen tomorrow, let alone next year or the next century. How many of the economists who tell us what to do now failed to see the mortgage debt crisis coming? Nearly all of them.
Philip Tetlock's 2005 book, "Expert Political Judgment," documents that the predictions of even the most credentialed and experienced experts are often worse and very rarely better than random guessing. "In this age of academic hyperspecialization," he writes, "there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals — distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on — are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in 'reading' emerging situations."
The cult of experts has acolytes in all ideological camps, but its most institutionalized following is on the left. The left needs to believe in the authority of experts because without that authority, almost no economic intervention can be justified. If you concede that you have no idea whether your remedy will work, it's going to be hard to sell it to the patient. Market-based ideologies don't have that problem because markets expect events in ways experts never can.
No president since Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt has been more enamored with the cult of expertise than Obama. That none of his economic predictions have panned out is not surprising. What is surprising is that so many people are surprised.
Make sure to read the entire, brief article at the source.
"...all human knowledge and information is fallible, and [...] the ability to discern information more likely to approximate truth from lesser candidates greatly increases with the internet, i.e. with the breadth of access to information."
Hear, hear, Georg - extremely well put. You make your point at least as well as Jonah G makes his. Unstifled dissemination of information (good and bad) may be the only hope we have.
And can we all bear in mind that it is not just the liberals who purport to be the true bearers of received "knowledge". I am to the point that I just reflexively pucker up a bit in my nether regions when I hear anyone, lib or con, say, "Here's the way it really is ...."
Posted by: Ed Stevens | 09/01/2011 at 09:01 AM
"Unstifled dissemination of information (good and bad) may be the only hope we have."
I agree with the antediluvian statement above. The major problem, as I see it, is the moment when the information becomes cemented into a legalized system created by those who believe they have it all figured out.
The creation of systems are necessary, and part of man's nature, but they are, in the end, flawed. They eventually break down. At such a time, a new system should appear but, when governments are involved, they prop up older systems until they are too big to fail. This only prolongs the moment of failure and makes that moment far worse for everyone.
Private systems fail, too, but in a smoother fashion provided that there are no legal barriers preventing the genesis of new systems to replace the old. Adaptability is paramount and requires constant tweaking in our thought processes. People need to be free for this to happen.
Posted by: Eric Parks | 09/01/2011 at 09:32 AM
Thanks, Ed, for your encouragement.
You are making an important point that I have neglected in my zeal to show how fundamentally authoritarian the left is - they are not progressives, they are reactionaries.
You are absolutely right Ed:
< ... it is not just the liberals who purport to be the true bearers of received "knowledge">
Posted by: Georg Thomas | 09/01/2011 at 10:41 AM
I couldn't agree more, Eric.
Posted by: Georg Thomas | 09/01/2011 at 10:42 AM