The Problem With Technocracy

In a piece at The New Atlantis Zach Graves and M. Anthony Mills make a pitch for technocracy in this age of rising populism:

In his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols, U.S. Naval War College professor and self-described Never Trumper, laments the turn of American politics toward “the worship of its own ignorance.” And libertarian-leaning Georgetown professor Jason Brennan writes in his book Against Democracy that “when it comes to politics, some people know a lot, most people know nothing, and many people know less than nothing.” Voters generally don’t know which party controls Congress, what major policy debates are about, or how federal spending is allocated. Brennan proposes the idea of “epistocracy,” a system where political power accrues more to the educated and knowledgeable — meaning, in practice, disenfranchisement schemes such as reviving literacy tests for voting, expanded to include basic economics and political science. Meanwhile, Parag Khanna, a TED Talker who describes himself as a “geopolitical futurist,” argues in his 2017 book Technocracy in America, “America has more than enough democracy. What it needs is more technocracy — a lot more…. Technocratic government is built around expert analysis and long-term planning rather than narrow-minded and short-term populist wins.”

America’s first flirtation with technocracy was in the early 20th century when there were serious proposals for a committee consisting of the heads of major corporations with the authority to control the country’s economy. You might not be surprised that these proposals came from the heads of major corporations.

“Technocracy” comes from a pair of Greek words, τέχνη (techne) and κράτος (kratos) meaning skill and power, rule, respectively, and means “rule by experts”. That immediately prompts the question who are the experts? A credential that says you’re an expert would be a start but it’s just a start. Would anyone seriously contend that an individual with a newly-minted Bachelors in Architecture was an expert in the same sense as a practicing architect with decades of experience and a track record of designing beautiful, functional building that were executed on time and within budget? Obviously not.

Some combination of education and certification, experience, and performance would seem to be a winning formula. Who would be dissatisfied with that? The answer, obviously enough, is the uneducated and the young. They would chafe at such a system and, since they had no say in the policies reached, should not be expected to support those policies.

All of the foregoing is the theory of technocracy but, as Yogi Berra pointed out, while in theory there’s no difference between theory and practice in practice there is. In practice technocracy inevitably means either rule by lawyers or rule by the connected. As evidence I would submit that Rahm Emanuel got a job in finance without a degree or prior experience in finance and became quite wealthy, purely on the basis of his political connections while Steve Rattner was placed in charge of the reorganization and recovery of General Motors without a degree or experience in the auto industry, business, finance, or General Motors. What’s the relevance of those two individuals? They represent the technocratic wing of the Democratic Party.

I would also point out that education and health care are two of the most technocratic sectors of our economy and they both have the same problems: enormous increases in costs coupled with diminishing marginal returns to additional spending.

Quite to the contrary there are significant advantages to letting policies emerge from a diversity of opinions. This has been characterized as “the wisdom of crowds”. A diversity of independent opinions can actually result in better decisions than would have been made otherwise.

In conclusion I would point out that under a technocracy Mssrs. Graves and Mills would have no role whatever in formulating the policies that would implement their suggestions. They don’t have the credentials or experience.