I wanted to make one point about the development of which James Joyner took note the other day: the change in guidelines on COVID by the Centers for Disease Control, e.g. “treating it like the flu”.
Here’s my comment. The CDC can either be professional and technocratic or political not both. The latter inevitably undermines the credibility of the former.
That’s one of my objections to technocracy. Everybody has preferences even experts. Stepping beyond one’s expertise into one’s preferences is inevitable. My other objection to technocracy is that in practice it means rule of everything and everybody by one group of experts which isn’t technocracy at all. It’s plain old oligarchy and, if the oligarchs pass their status on to their kids, aristocracy.
Scientists: There’s a giant meteor heading towards Earth. YMMV.
Policymakers: Yikes! What should we do about it?!
Scientists: Whatever.
Cosmologists: Probably won’t make any difference in the scheme of things.
Psychologists: “The goal of all life is death.”
Carlin: The planet will be fine; the people are fucked. Difference.
Geologists: Might be interesting to see where the continents end up.
Biologists: The cockroaches should be fine.
Contra Zachriel’s examples, Covid policy and most other real-world examples are not clear cut and come with real tradeoffs.
“The CDC can either be professional and technocratic or political not both. The latter inevitably undermines the credibility of the former. ”
That’s why I think Covid policy lines-of-authority were set up wrong from the start. We ostensibly had a Covid czar in charge of a Covid task force. That should have been the central clearing house for recommendations and mandates. Instead, the Trump administration handed it off to the CDC, probably so the WH wouldn’t have any actual responsibility for any bad decisions, and Biden kept that structure in place.
The public health science people are never going to be good at evaluating tradeoffs. Covid sure proved that, and so does this. Someone else needs to be doing that.
Andy- Dont forget that we also had Trump interjecting himself with his opinions, not based upon any medical literature or physiology or pharmacology or virology. On top of which medical care is largely run at the state level. So CDC could issue guidelines but states decided what they wanted to do. On top of that, in many/most states if individual cities/counties wanted to do something they largely did without much consequence.
So if you limited yourself to what CDC suggested it was generally good advice and pretty consistent. They were slow in concluding there is asymptomatic transmission and a few other things but overall they followed what literature we had and when we didnt have good literature they followed the advice of the best expertise they could find.
So in short, the CDC has much less influence on what actions are taken than the states do. On the political side politicians were all over the place and we had huge amounts of misinformation with people quoting stuff they didnt understand.
Steve