I heartily urge you to read columnist John Kass’s diatribe on the likely outcome of the elections next Tuesday. It rolls on and on, unified by the metaphor of this quotation from President Obama:
“I’ve got to get home because Michelle is on the road,” the president explained. “So I’ve got to be home to tuck in the girls and walk the dog. And scoop the poop.”
I think that Mr. Kass’s column is amusing and interesting but I don’t think it presents a complete picture. In my view President Obama has systematically and routinely allowed ”the experts” to guide policy decisions, to our and his detriment. The political experts like David Axelrod guided his campaign. The economic experts like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Director of the White House National Economic Council Lawrence Summers, and Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer guided the economic policies. Military experts like Gen. David Petraeus guided the policy in Afghanistan. And the Congressional experts, the Congressional leaders, lead the way on healthcare reform, financial reform, and the stillborn bills on energy, transportation, and so on.
Of course a leader must rely on his advisers for information but a balance must be struck between that reliance and delegating the responsibilities of decision-making and crafting of policy to them. One of the problems is inherent in the nature of expertise today. Experts who have legitimate expertise in very narrow specializations with naturally human exaggerations of self-worth bootstrap their legitimate expertise into universal expertise in all areas even vaguely related to their actual areas of knowledge. The experts are not as expert as we think.
The experts are not even as expert as they apparently think. Surely the military experts are aware of this since the military even has a phrase to describe this: “the fog of war”. Evidence of the phenomenon is clearest in the notorious and now rued claim by the president’s economic experts that, if the stimulus package were passed, unemployment would be kept below 8.1%.
Further, the experts are not emotionless automata dispensing The Truth but human beings, complete with foibles, prejudices, agenda, and blind spots.
Worst of all, the experts are not merely experts but courtiers, retained not only for their expertise but, apparently, for their loyalty and reluctance to bring bad news.
So I guess in a sense Mr. Kass is right. The change of fortunes of Democrats is the fault of President Obama, if only for his excessive reliance on experts who are incapable of giving him the reliable information he so desperately needs. The alternative is even worse to contemplate: that fortified with complete and accurate information he has made of series of major miscalculations.
Just to be sure that my views are clear I blame the Congress, the Congressional leadership. And it is the Congress and Congressional leadership that will be punished and will almost certainly have changed when all of the votes have been counted.
Of course Obama has to rely on experts, untrained and clueless as he is concerning simple math, science and economics.
I would have thought the story was the continuity of these experts and their solutions across Presidents and Congresses.
(Jimbino seems to have read you as saying this was a new thing.)
It’s also interesting to see people ask Obama to go outside the mainstream, when they might might not like where he goes. Convention, as bad as it can be, doesn’t quite have the risk of choosing an outlier. I’m sure we can all think of people worse than Summers.
(Mentally I might hope for Volker, but end up with Krugman.)
You have been railing against the experts for a while, but I think you have it a bit wrong. You cannot function with people who know nothing about the area they manage. You clearly, IMO, need some level of expertise. I think what it goes back to is the distinction between foxes and hedgehogs. IIRC, Irving Berlin wrote about this and it gets covered every now and then. There are even studies, Cowen has linked to some, on the issue. You need a mix of expertise. You need both foxes and hedgehogs. With some exceptions, you need to have the foxes, with their broader viewpoints, making management decisions.
Steve
I think that management styles differ in different administrations. So, for example, I believe that the accusations that Dick Cheney was actually in charge was as much a canard as the accusations against Reagan that he was uninformed and uninvolved in in the details of formulating policy.
I think that Republican presidents have tended towards the staff model introduced by Eisenhower while Democrats have tended more towards a horizontal model. That puts enormous pressure on Democratic presidents and also makes Republican presidents the targets of accusations of being stupid or figureheads.
Steve:
I don’t object to experts. After all I am one. I object to how they are used. For example, I don’t think we should elect lawyers to office. If we need a lawyer we should hire one. Less policy, less personality, more use of their actual expertise.
Do CEOs need to have engineering degrees, law degrees, management degrees because they manage engineers, lawyers, and managers? Obviously not.
Different styles if you say so, but if you look at thinks like bailout histories you see patterns repeating for decades. They are the same patterns that Bush and Obama acquiesced to. Why?
I think it’s less personality, or internal administration dynamics, and more that they are caught between voters economic identities and economic realities.
To me a really crucial illustration came when Bush gave the auto companies bridge financing, to get them into the Obama administration (who would surely bail them out). It was done with full understanding. It was a hand-off, a relay.
We saw that no matter what their ideologies there are certain things President’s cannot do. Letting GM go to full bankruptcy was one of them.
It becomes a luxury of the powerless to criticize things like that, because they never have to feel the real weight of the decision, and a hundred thousand jobs or whatever, on their shoulders.
Irving Berlin would have written a great song about it.
I think you mean Isaiah?
The Gershwins did a pretty good job in favor of experts:
“I think you mean Isaiah?”
LOL, yes. At least it was some Berlin. maybe Munich?
Steve
You may have heard about this simulation, the recap at ZH is a good rant on expertise:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/watch-political-central-planners-were-doomed
There’s also the issue of experts come to be experts. From my vantage point I see a greater emphasis on the benefits of social networking,reputation enhancement, and credentialism, all built on a plausible foundation of some expert knowledge, and all too often this results in a steady process of failing upwards. What I rarely see is experts being held to account for their predictions and losing stature and losing expertise when their predictions turn out to be wrong.
To my mind an expert should have a better track record than a non-expert when it comes to predicting outcomes in their field of expertise and a more highly regarded expert should have a better prediction track record than an expert who is not as well regarded.
Some of what you’re writing about is what Glenn Reynolds has been complaining about as credentials rather than ability. Which reminds me of a story.
Many, many years ago a resume came across my desk. It was an absolutely incredible resume. However, I knew the guy and recognized that he’d been a disaster at every place he’d ever worked.
I didn’t hire him but, judging by the resume, quite a few people who should have known better had.
Reynolds is very late to the game. A whole bunch of us were attacking credentialism 10 years ago.
As for your story, it looks like the guy was “failing upwards.” People don’t fail upwards because of the value of their expertise, they fail upwards because factors that have no bearing on expertise outweigh the consequences of incompetence.
“The change of fortunes of Democrats is the fault of President Obama, if only for his excessive reliance on experts who are incapable of giving him the reliable information he so desperately needs. ”
Daniel Larison argues that the root cause of the Democrats’ problems this go-around is that they’ve lost the senior vote (over fears of Medicare cuts).
Tracked down the cite for that last:
What If “The Biggest Tent†Falls Short? Worse For Republicans, What If It Succeeds?
On the “root cause” thing, I was misleadling; I failed to mention the Larison also flags high unemployment — well, of course – my bad. But I was struck by the weight he gives to the elderly being angry at the Democrats.
I think that “root cause” is a slippery term. What if David Axelrod had warned President Obama that passing a healthcare reform bill wouldn’t be popular with the electorate?” What if Christina Romer had warned President Obama that unless a stimulus package were crafted in a very specific way (very different from the version the Congress produced) that unemployment would be 9.6% at the time of the 2010 midterms? What if David Petraeus had warned President Obama that, if U. S. troop strength were raised to 100,000 in Afghanistan, things wouldn’t be a great deal different in the country at the end of 2010 than it was at the end of 2008?
I suppose one could retort how do I know that they didn’t? Besides that being burden-shifting I might well ask how do you know that they did.
I think they didn’t offer that advice. They were either wrong and not nearly as expert as they should have been or they didn’t want to be the bearers of bad tidings and weren’t nearly as reliable as they should have been.
“They were either wrong and not nearly as expert as they should have been or they didn’t want to be the bearers of bad tidings and weren’t nearly as reliable as they should have been.”
You forget the dual , at least, nature of the POTUS. As the occupant of the bully pulpit, he is also chief cheerleader. Even when war was not going well, presidents have always announced that our troops are fighting bravely and are sure to win. Even when the economy is doing poorly, they still tell us we are great and can turn things around.
Steve
My goodness, Steve, are you really claiming that President Obama is getting accurate information from his advisers and is lying to us to keep our spirits up? That’s a truly damning indictment considering what a lousy job he’s doing of keeping our spirits up. I’d much prefer to believe that his advisers aren’t serving him well.
Dave’s point about Congress seems to be getting overlooked.
It starts with Congress not passing laws but deferring to executive agencies to make laws under the semblance that there is an expert solution. Increasingly there is not; there are solutions with trade-offs, and when the people are not a part of making the decisions on the political trade-offs, they decide that the government is ineffective at best, corrupt at worst. Congress is passing the buck, and the price is the government’s legitimacy.
Well, Congress also goes to industry also. I know someone who was working for an oil services company when she was asked to help write a major piece of environmental regulation. She’s since made that her expertise, and spends a fair amount of time at environmental conferences.
(She tells me that insiders have accepted adaptation as the climate change outcome, which was painful to hear, but a year or two later I can accept it as harsh reality.)