Expertise and Irrationalism
Thoughts on the toxic relationship at the heart of progressivism
In yesterday’s New York Times, there appeared an article on the debacle that is California’s much-ballyhooed high-speed rail project. Intended to create a link between Los Angeles and San Francisco, since 2008 it has been consuming billions and billions in state and federal funding while going nowhere in particular. The initial estimated price tag was $33 billion; current estimates of the ultimate final cost run up to $113 billion. And fears are growing that the project may never be completed.
No one involved in the California high-speed rail project actually asked, How would we do this if we were fools? But that was the effect that political influence and meddling produced: The most efficient, cost-effective routing and construction options were rejected under pressure from politicians seeking advantages for their own constituencies. Most egregiously, it was decided to begin construction in the middle of the projected route, rather than at one end or the other. As a result, the completed portion of the line goes from nowhere to nowhere and has yet to carry a single passenger.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, European governments are grappling with the disastrous results of their much-ballyhooed green energy policies. Germany, for instance, committed itself to a rapid transition away from fossil fuels and nuclear energy, with natural gas imported from Russia as a bridge to a 100% “renewables” energy economy. When president, Donald Trump decried this policy, telling European leaders that they were making a big mistake by relying on V. Putin. Naturally he was mocked and laughed at. Today one may well ask: Who’s laughing now?
These twin fiascos have an element in common: call it the hubris of expertise.
In progressive circles, the superior wisdom and efficiency of experts working under government supervision is taken as a given. In the area of healthcare policy, for example, progressives’ opening argument is that a centrally managed government system would be many times more cost-effective and efficient than any private-sector alternative. The same assumption undergirds progressive climate policy: If only purposeful, centrally directed government policies can be set in motion, “climate change” can be mastered.
All this is magical thinking, of course. Claims on behalf of planning and expertise can only be made plausible by making a simplified picture of the problem under review. A classic example is poverty. If we could send a man to the Moon, the argument goes in the form of a rhetorical question, why can’t we eradicate poverty in America? Well, there’s an answer to that. Sending a manned mission to the Moon was a straightforward engineering problem—complex, no doubt, yet transparent. But viewed as a problem, poverty is many times more complex than any Moon shot, with political, economic, social, and cultural elements that are often poorly understood and sometimes unsuspected. Progressives simplify it by arguing that some people have too much money, while other people have too little, so that poverty can be solved by striking a more equitable balance.
Since the New Deal era, America has been striving to solve the poverty problem in just that way. And it’s true enough that to a considerable extent, poverty has been reduced. Even the definition of poverty has had to be revised, this thanks to a steady improvement in the general standard of living, decade by decade. Indeed, by global standards there is no poverty at all today in the United States.
But relative poverty persists. True, some people who start life in the lower reaches of the income and wealth scale make their way up by virtue of hard work and perhaps a helping hand. Others, however, do not. They remain stuck close to the bottom, and the welfare assistance they receive, through it saves them from destitution, can’t seem to lift them out of the slough of despond. Why? There are plenty of explanations on offer, many of them politically controversial: systemic racism and the cruelties of capitalism on one side; dysfunctional social and cultural norms on the other. And there’s the problem, nicely encapsulated. If poverty can only be solved by eliminating racism, or smashing capitalism, or changing social and cultural norms, then it probably can’t be solved at all. The problem is simply too big for the bureaucrats and the experts. All that can reasonably be achieved is a greater or lesser mitigation of poverty’s worst effects. And that’s more or less what we’re doing now.
Let it be stipulated that not all progressive policy goals are wrong or idiotic. Some, such as the demand for criminal justice reform, make eminent sense. The trouble with progressivism isn’t aspirational, it’s methodological. Take criminal justice reform. In the wake of the 2020 George Floyd riots, we witnessed defund-the-police insanity and a plague of progressive prosecutors determined to keep criminals out of prison. In consequence, America is now suffering through a crime wave of frightening scope and intensity.
Somewhat paradoxically, progressivism’s great faith in expertise coexists with a deep streak of irrationality, which infects much of the expert class itself. During those 2020 riots one group of experts, public health professionals, piped up to advise that since racism is a public health issue, pandemic restrictions on large gatherings could be disregarded. It seems doubtful that COVID-19, which like all viruses is an opportunistic pathogen, modified its behavior accordingly. And it’s hardly surprising that absurdities of this kind aroused the skepticism of the American people concerning the claims of expert opinion. They sense, even if they don’t express it in so many words, that specialized expertise and pie-in-the-sky ideological blather don’t mix.
Nowadays conservatism has problems of its own, as the bloviations of Tucker Carlson and the antics of Marjorie Taylor Greene attest. But people like that will have to put in a lot more work before they produce disasters like California’s high-speed rail system or Europe’s impending winter of cold and darkness and discontent. Hippocrates had it right: “First do no harm.” These days, alas, even many of the physicians to whom his admonition was addressed are disregarding it.
Another excellent brief, to-the-point post.
A different aspect of this problem is the pseudo-expert, those posing as if they know when they actually don't, but are in some position of power and authority. The COVID pandemic gave us manifold examples of this large and small. Fauci and Birx themselves fit the mold: both are former laboratory research scientists who slithered up the greasy pole of power in DC to the higher reaches of the CDC and NIH, classic bureaucratic figures. Neither is a public health expert, contrary to what is told or implied. Those doctors who said critical things about these policies -- the Great Barrington doctors, Makary from Hopkins, and others -- were pilloried as quacks and dangerous extremists -- they are actual public health experts, with decades of direct, hands-on experience in the field.
(In the case of Fauci, we mustn't forget the debacle of AIDS vaccines in the early 90s, when Fauci pushed to ignore pretty much the most effective public health advice in favor of his obsession with vaccines that never materialized. Fortunately, intelligent people prevailed then -- real experts kept saying that an AIDS vaccine was unlikely because of the nature of retroviruses, and circa 1990, they were listened to. An obsession with vaccines over effective public health practices -- sound familiar?)
Not to mention the likes of Google and Facebook, where 23-year-olds "curate" search and feed results in areas -- COVID, climate, whatever -- where they haven't the slightest idea of what they're doing. You can see the results clearly if you compare search results from Google and Facebook with, say, DuckDuckGo or Bing.