Expert failure (cambridge studies in economics, choice, and society)

Roger Koppl Frontmatter More Information EXPERT FAILURE The humble idea that experts are ordinary human beings leads to surprising conclusions about how to get the best possible expert a

Roger Koppl

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EXPERT FAILURE

The humble idea that experts are ordinary human beings leads to surprising

conclusions about how to get the best possible expert advice All too often,

experts have monopoly power because of licensing restrictions or because they

are government bureaucrats protected from both competition and the

conse-quences of their decisions This book argues that in the market for expert

opinion we need real competition in which rival experts may have different

opinions and new experts are free to enter But the idea of breaking up expert

monopolies has far-reaching implications for public administration, forensic

science, research science, economics, America’s military-industrial complex,

and all domains of expert knowledge Roger Koppl develops a theory of

experts and expert failure, and uses a wide range of examples — from forensic

science to fashion — to explain the applications of his theory, including state

regulation of economic activity

  is Professor of Finance in the Whitman School of Management

at Syracuse University in New York, and a faculty fellow in the University’s

Forensic and National Security Sciences Institute His work has been featured

in The Atlantic, Forbes, and The Washington Post

Timur Kuran, Duke University

Peter J Boettke, George Mason University

This interdisciplinary series promotes original theoretical and empirical

research as well as integrative syntheses involving links between individual

choice, institutions, and social outcomes Contributions are welcome from

across the social sciences, particularly in the areas where economic analysis is

joined with other disciplines such as comparative political economy, new

institutional economics, and behavioral economics

Books in the Series

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Rights Approach 2014

Morris B Hoffman, The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury 2014

Peter T Leeson, Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better

Than You Think 2014

Benjamin Powell, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy 2014

Cass R Sunstein, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral

Science 2016

Jared Rubin, Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the

Middle East Did Not 2017

Jean-Philippe Platteau, Islam Instrumentalized: Religion and Politics in

Historical Perspective 2017

Taisu Zhang, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property

in Preindustrial China and England 2018

DOI: 10.1017/9781316481400

© Roger Koppl 2018 This publication is in copyright Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2018 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc.

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Motivational Assumptions of Information Choice Theory 163

Identity, Sympathy, Approbation, and Praiseworthiness 197

Roger Koppl

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Roger Koppl

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Acknowledgments

Leonard Read taught us that no one knows how to make a pencil

Some-thing similar can be true of a book My name appears on the title page, but

the true authors of this book are the participants in several scholarly

communities I have had the honor of engaging, as well as many journalists,

reformers, forensic scientists, public defenders, intellectuals, family,

friends, acquaintances, and passing strangers I will single out a few

persons for thanks, but I know I have unwillingly omitted others no less

deserving of gratitude and acknowledgment I thank them all

Unfortu-nately, however, I cannot blame them for anything wrong with this book

My wife, Maria Minniti, has been an unfailing source of love, support,

and stinging criticism Peter Boettke has provided encouragement and

helpful commentary I have profited from an ongoing conversation on

experts with David Levy and Sandra Peart Stephen Turner helped me

work out the contours of the literature on experts Ronald Polansky

improved my understanding of Socrates and the Apology I have profited

from exchanges with Simon Cole and from opportunities and generous

help he has given me Alvin Goldman has given me some helpful lessons in

social epistemology He is not to blame for my more synecological vision,

however Lawrence Kobilinsky extended himself to eliminate errors and

omissions from my first published paper on forensic science, which led to

my work on the general problem of experts Our conversations have been

helpful and stimulating Michael Risinger has provided many stimulating

comments and conversations, along with general support and

encourage-ment Phillip Magness and David Singerman both helped me understand

J M Keynes’s opinions on eugenics and eugenic policy Phil also guided

me to source materials on that topic Francisco Doria provided a

manu-script copy of After Gödel, which was later published as Gödel’s Way Chico

xi

Roger Koppl

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has also helped me with computability theory Santiago Gangotena

sug-gested the metaphor “experts all the way down.”

I received help from many other people A few of them are Trey Carson,

Jim Cowan, Alexander Wade Craig, David Croson, James Della Bella,

William Butos, David Colander, Christpher Coyne, Abigail Deveraux, Itiel

Dror, Teppo Felin, Christine Funk, Paul Giannelli, Nathan Goodman,

Colin Harris, Keith Harward, Steve Horwitz, Keith Inman, Stuart

Kauff-man, Dan Krane, Robert Kurzban, Moren Lévesque, David Lucas, Thomas

McQuade, Barkley Rosser, Norah Rudin, Meghan Sacks, John Schiemann,

Vernon Smith, the late Ion Sterpan, William Thompson, Richard Wagner,

and Lawrence Yuter

I learned a lot at the Wirth Institute’s third biennial Austrian School of

Economics Conference, “Austrian Views on Experts and Epistemic

Mono-polies,” which was held in Vancouver on October 15–16, 2010 Participants

included David Croson, Arthur Diamond, Laurent Dobuzinskis, Rob Garnett,

Steve Horwitz, Leslie Marsh, Sandra Peart, Emily Skarbek, Diana Thomas,

and Alfred Wirth I appreciate the support Alfred Wirth and the Wirth

Institute have given to this and other “Austrian” conferences

Visits to George Mason University’s Mercatus Center as the F A Hayek

Distinguished Visiting Professor helped my work on this volume by

provid-ing a stimulatprovid-ing work environment and many helpful conversations

The discussion of Berger and Luckmann in Chapter 2 draws on Roger

Koppl, “The social construction of expertise,” Society, 47 (2010), 220–6 Parts

of Chapter 3 are close to parts of Roger Koppl, “Shocked disbelief,” in F A

Doria (ed.), The Limits of Mathematical Modeling in the Social Sciences,

2017 Some parts of Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 were adapted from Roger

Koppl, “Information choice theory,” Advances in Austrian Economics,17

(2012), 171–202 The discussion of computability in Chapter 9 is close to

some passages in Roger Koppl, “Rules vs discretion under computability

constraints,” Review of Behavioral Economics, 4(1) (2017), 1–31 The

discus-sion of the ecology of expertise draws on Roger Koppl, “Epistemic systems,”

Episteme: Journal of Social Epistemology, 2(2): 91–106 Chapter 10 draws on

Roger Koppl, “The rule of experts,” in Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne

(eds.), Oxford Handbook of Austrian Economics, Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2015

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Syracuse University’s

Whitman School of Management

Politicians, partisans, and pundits were surprised and traumatized by theelection of Donald Trump as President of the United States Anger atexperts seems to have contributed significantly to his victory (Easterly2016) Brexit was led in part by Michael Gove, who exclaimed, “I thinkthe people in this country have had enough of experts” (Lowe 2016).Whatever one’s opinion of Trump or the European Union, ordinary people

in Western democracies have cause to be angry with experts The Flintwater crisis is an example

On April 25, 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan changed its municipal watersupply in a manner that produced impotable brown water (Adewunmi2017).“Flint water customers were needlessly and tragically exposed to toxiclevels of lead and other hazards” (Flint 2016, p 1) “Flint residents began tocomplain about its odor, taste and appearance” (Flint 2016, p 16) “On

1 October 2015, 524 days after the switch to the Flint River, the GeneseeCounty Health Department declared a public health emergency and urgedFlint residents to refrain from drinking the water” (Adewunmi 2017) OnJanuary 24, 2017, Michigan state environment officials indicated that leadlevels in Flint water no longer exceeded the federal limit (Unattributed2017) The journalist Bim Adewunmi says, however,“By the time I left Flint

on 22 February this year [2017], the water was still not safe enough to drinkdirectly out of the faucet, according to the politicians and charity workers

I spoke to, and the residents’ feelings on the matter had remained at asimmer about it” (Adewunmi 2017)

In March 2016 an official Michigan task force investigating the Flint watercrisis found that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality(MDEQ)“bears primary responsibility for the water contamination in Flint”(Flint 2016, p 6) The report found that the Michigan Department of Healthand Human Services and the United States Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA) shared a substantial portion of the blame (Flint 2016, p 1).The task force’s report chronicles the actions of Dr Mona Hanna-Attishaand Marc Edwards to produce change, in part by documenting importantfacts such as elevated lead levels in the blood of Flint children Noting that

“the majority of Flint’s residents are black,” Adewunmi (2017) records theopinion of many that anti-black racism contributed significantly to the crisis

In this tragedy, state experts charged with ensuring water quality insteadallowed a malodorous, polluted, and toxic liquid to flow into Flint homesand poison its people Unfortunately, the Flint water crisis is but one ofmany examples of expert failure

In 2009 two judges in Pennsylvania, Mark A Ciavarella Jr and Michael

T Conahan, pled guilty to fraud and tax charges in a scheme to imprisonchildren for money (Chen 2009) The case was dubbed “kids for cash.”These two judges were experts They were experts in the law giving theiropinions of the guilt or innocence of children coming before them anddeciding what punishments were just They took $2.6 million in “kick-backs” (Urbina 2009) from two private detention centers to which theysent convicted juveniles To get their kickbacks, they sent children to jail

In what is presumably one of the more egregious cases, thirteen-year-oldDayQuawn Johnson, who had no previous legal troubles, “was sent to adetention center for several days in 2006 for failing to appear at a hearing

as a witness to a fight, even though his family had never been notifiedabout the hearing and he had already told school officials that he had notseen anything” (Urbina 2009) Ciavarella and Conahan sent children intodetention facilities at twice the state average and seem (at least in the case

of Ciavarella) to have declined to even advise them or their parents of thechildren’s right to an attorney (Chen 2009; Urbina 2009) Their schemewent on for years before they werefinally caught and arrested

Social work provides further examples of experts causing harm toordinary persons In the United States, social services can be intrusiveand arbitrary In 2014 a woman in South Carolina was jailed for lettingher nine-year-old daughter play unsupervised in a public park that was“sopopular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking” (Skenazy2014)

Another woman reports that her children,“between the ages of 10 and 5,”were taken from her after she was widowed She chose to leave themunsupervised in the house for“a few hours” at a time while she attendedcollege classes (Friedersdorf 2014) She says officials entered her home andremoved her children without attempting to reach her, even though herchildren knew where she was:“Over the two years during which the case

dragged on, my kids were subjected to, according to them, sexual ation (which was never investigated) and physical abuse within the fostercare system They were separated from each other many times, movedaround frequently, and attended multiple schools.” She was subject

molest-to arbitrary conditions for the return of her children She reports, forexample,

I was required to allow CPS [Child Protective Services] workers into my home toconduct a thorough“white glove” type inspection According to the court order, ifany of the workers felt anything was amiss, the return of custody would be delayed

or denied I was told to sweep cobwebs and scrub the oven to their satisfaction,which I did, obsequiously

Her experience led her to conclude that the system “was not aboutprotection, but power” (Friedersdorf 2014)

After Kiarre Harris acquired the legal right to home-school her children,Child Protective Services (CPS) arrived at her door with uniformed police

in tow If early reportage is correct, the CPS workers told Harris they had acourt order to remove the children, but were unable to supply the orderwhen Harris asked to see it She declined to surrender her children withoutseeing the order She was arrested for obstructing a court order and herchildren were moved to foster care (Buehler 2017; Riley 2017) One report(Williams and Lankes 2017) cautioned that “there could be more to thesituation” and that Harris “has a history of domestic violence, includingusing a knife.” Only much later in the article, however, was the substance

of this supposed knife-wielding violence revealed: “In 2012, a womancomplained that Harris kicked, scratched and gauged her vehicle with aknife That complaint was classified as criminal mischief It’s not clear ifthat was the domestic dispute referenced in the CPS petition.” The

“domestic violence” that Williams and Lankes (2017) soberly note seems

to have been nothing more than an unsubstantiated claim that Harriskeyed someone’s car or otherwise damaged it So far, The Buffalo Newshas been unable tofind more damning evidence of past crimes or irregular-ities in Harris’s life

Even if facts clearly unfavorable to Harris should eventually emerge, itseems unlikely that her arrest and the precipitous removal of the childrenwere necessary or appropriate It seems far more likely that the removalhas been harmful to the children In this as in other cases, CPS seems tohave been arbitrary, imperious, and oppressive In a post on social mediaHarris claims that one court document includes the vague remark,

“Respondent seems to have a problem with whatever school the children

are attending.” She says the same document remarks, “Respondent recentlyposted a comment on social media ridiculing the school system and peoplewho attend school or graduate from school” (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/mother-arrested-homeschooling-children/.) The quoted contents ofthe court document seem irrelevant to the charge of neglect, and they seem

to reflect more concern for the interests of the public school system thanfor the children’s welfare

Home-schooling advocates have identified the pattern seemingly atwork in this and other cases It is, they say, “common for the [affectedschool] district to notfile families’ homeschool notices, then report them toCPS.” Once the child stops coming to class, the school marks them asabsent “Although the child is not ‘absent’ and is being instructed else-where, often the school will continue to mark them so, which is why ChildProtective Service gets involved” (Hudson 2017)

A British report on family courts (Ireland 2012) that gained nationalattention at the time of its release found grave deficiencies in the UKsystem of social services The report was funded by the Family JusticeCouncil, which is described in it as “an independent body, funded by theMinistry of Justice.” It summarized the evaluations of the psychologicalassessments submitted to Family Court in 126 cases Admittedly, thereport gives the opinions of some experts of the job done by other experts.Much of it is the credentialed casting aspersions on the non-credentialed.Nevertheless, some of the findings provide a clear indication that stateexperts have played an arbitrary, obnoxious, and intrusive role in the lives

of many residents of the United Kingdom The arbitrary nature of thepsychological assessments being made is suggested by the report’s findingthat more than 40 percent of the casefindings reviewed failed to adhere torequired procedural norms (Ireland 2012, p 21) Thus, the representatives

of the state failed to adhere to state-mandated procedural norms more than

40 percent of the time “Key findings focus on the fifth of psychologistswho, by any agreed standards, were not qualified to provide a psychologicalopinion, coupled with nearly all expert witnesses not maintaining a clinicalpractice but seeming to have become full time ‘professional’ expert wit-nesses” (Ireland 2012, p 30)

One news report (Reid 2012) provides several horror stories supportingthe view that family-court practice in the United Kingdom is abusive andharmful In one case,“after a woman was found by a psychologist to be a

‘competent mother,’ the social workers are said to have insisted on missioning a second expert’s report It agreed with the first They thencommissioned a third, which finally found that the mother had a

com-‘borderline personality disorder.’ All three of her children were taken awayfor adoption.” Reid notes two institutional facts that seem to explain why

“No other country in Western Europe removes so many children fromtheir parents.” First, there were financial incentives to remove children

“The last Labour government set adoption targets and rewarded localcouncils with hundreds of thousands of pounds if they reached them.”Although these targets had been“scrapped” by the time Reid wrote, “Socialworkers now [in 2012] get praise and promotion if they raise adoptionnumbers David Cameron is also demanding more adoptions – and thatthey are fast-tracked” (Reid 2012) Second is secrecy The 1989 ChildrenAct “introduced a blanket secrecy in the family courts,” thereby encour-aging“a lack of public scrutiny in the child protection system” (Reid 2012).People have suffered from expert error and abuse with state health andenvironmental experts, state schools, state-controlled or regulated health-care, and the criminal justice system Joan C Williams (2016) is probablyright to say that the“white working class” in America “resents profession-als,” including lawyers, professors, and teachers, in part because “profes-sionals order them around every day.” Health economics expert JonathanGruber, sometimes dubbed the“Obamacare architect,” famously said thatthe “stupidity of the American voter” was essential to the passage of

“Obamacare,” i.e., the Affordable Care Act of 2010 (Roy 2014) Expertsadvised the US government to send young Americans to die in Iraqbecause that nation had weapons of mass destruction, when in fact nosuch weapons were there Monetary policy expert Alan Greenspan, formerhead of the Federal Reserve System, reported his“shocked disbelief” overthe Great Recession in testimony before Congress He confessed that thecrisis had revealed a “flaw” in his model of capitalism (Greenspan 2008).America’s economic experts were unable to prevent economic crisis.During and after the crisis, many large organizations received bailoutswhile many ordinary Americans were left with underwater mortgages,unemployment, or both

The evils of eugenics are an important example of expert error andabuse As I will note again in Chapter 4, we cannot view such evils asentirely in our past Ellis (2008) has explicitly called for a “eugenicapproach” to fighting crime (p 258) that would dictate the “chemicalcastration” of “young postpubertal males at high risk of offending”(p 255) The experts will tell us which young men are at risk of offending

in the future and castrate them as a preventive measure The Center forInvestigative Reporting (Johnson 2013) has found that “Doctors undercontract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

sterilized nearly 150 female inmates from 2006 to 2010 without requiredstate approvals.” They seem to have been more likely to pressure inmatesthought to be at risk of re-offending: “Former inmates and prisoneradvocates maintain that prison medical staff coerced the women, targetingthose deemed likely to return to prison in the future.” A former inmatewho worked in the infirmary of Valley State Prison in 2007 “said she oftenoverheard medical staff asking inmates who had served multiple prisonterms to agree to be sterilized.” At least as recently as 2010, medical experts

in California prisons pressured women to accept tubal ligation as a ventive measure when they thought such women to be at risk of offendingagain in the future

pre-It seems fair to conclude that for many people the“problem of experts”discussed in this book is urgent and concrete

I have noted the destructive role of experts in the lives of ordinarypeople I oppose the rule of experts, in which monopoly experts decidefor non-experts I sympathize with the people over the experts, technocrats,and elites Such sympathies may seem populistic I fear populism, however,and value pluralistic democracy Because my sympathies might seempopulistic to at least some readers, I should probably explain why, in myview, populism and the rule of experts, at least in their more extremeforms, are equally inconsistent with pluralistic democracy

Populist rhetoric is often, though not always, anti-expert (Kenneally

2009, de la Torre 2013) Boyte (2012, p 300) is probably right to say that

“Populism challenges not only concentrations of wealth and power, butalso the culturally uprooted, individualized, rationalist thinking character-istic of professional systems, left and right.” Populism is usually a revoltagainst the “elites,” and that term is usually construed to include stateexperts and technocrats We have seen Michael Gove disparage experts.The official site of the French Front National has warned against placing

“the destiny of the people in the hands of unelected experts” (FrontNational 2016) The founder of Italy’s “5 Star Movement” has sharplycriticized“supposed ‘experts’” in “economics, finance, or labor” who wouldpresume to speak for the movement The party’s platform, he said, would

be “developed online” by “all of its members” and it would be “a spacewhere everyone really counts for one” (Grillo 2013)

Mudde (2004) defines populism as “an ideology that considers society to

be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups,

‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politicsshould be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people”

(p 543) Populism, Mudde explains, “has two opposites: elitism and

pluralism” (2004, p 543) Elitism “wants politics to be an expression of theviews of the moral elite, instead of the amoral people Pluralism, on theother hand, rejects the homogeneity of both populism and elitism, seeingsociety as a heterogeneous collection of groups and individuals with oftenfundamentally different views and wishes” (pp 543–4).

Bickerton and Accetti (2015, pp 187–8) describe “populism and nocracy” as “increasingly the two organizing poles of politics in con-temporary Western democracies.” They note, however, that both poles areopposed to “party democracy,” which they define as “a political regimebased on two key features: the mediation of political conflicts through theinstitution of political parties and the idea that the specific conception ofthe common good that ought to prevail and therefore be translated intopublic policy is the one that is constructed through the democratic pro-cedures of parliamentary deliberation and electoral competition.” Thus,

tech-“despite their ostensible opposition, there is also a significant and hithertounstudied degree of convergence between populism and technocracy con-sisting in their shared opposition to party democracy.”

I will argue in Chapters 6 and 7 that knowledge is often dispersed,emergent, and tacit (It is often, I will say, “synecological, evolutionary,exosomatic, constitutive, and tacit.”) This view of knowledge is consistentwith pluralistic (or“party”) democracy Knowledge is dispersed Each of ushas at best a partial view of the truth Plural perspectives are thus inevitableand good In a pluralist democracy, competing partial perspectives on thetruth have at least a chance to be heard and to influence political choices.Decisions in a political system – be it populist, elitist, or something else –that override or ignore plural perspectives will be based on knowledge that

is at best limited, partial, biased If knowledge were uniform, explicit, andhierarchical, then we might consider whether it could be best to determinewhich system of knowledge is the true one upon which all political decisionmaking should be based In this case, some might seek wisdom in theexperts while others might turn to a party or leader embodying popularwisdom, and there would be no “neutral” way to adjudicate the disputebetween them If my more egalitarian view of knowledge is correct,however, then plural democracy is more likely to be the least worst system

of political decision making Thus, my sympathy for ordinary peopleagainst elites, experts, and technocrats is not, after all, populistic

Fear of populism is justified But we should recognize that the rule ofexperts is also an “escape from democracy” (Levy and Peart 2017) If weare to preserve pluralistic democracy, all of us in the scribbling professions

of scholarship, journalism, and policy analysis should recognize that

experts often harass, harry, and harm ordinary people Examples arelegion I have given a few in this chapter Popular anger with and repudi-ation of experts should not be dismissed as irrational fear or ignorant anti-intellectualism It is all too well justified There is a problem of experts and

it matters

In this volume, I address the problem of experts I offer an economictheory of experts My theory is“economic” because it adopts the economicpoint of view (Kirzner 1976) It is not a theory of the“economic aspects” or

“economic consequences” of experts or expertise It is a theory of experts

on all fours with the theories of philosophers such as Mannheim (1936)and Foucault (1980), science and technology scholars such as Turner(2001) and Collins and Evans (2002), and sociologists such as Berger andLuckmann (1966) and Merton (1976)

In my theory, an expert is anyone paid for their opinion Here,ion” means only the message the expert chooses to deliver, whether or notthey sincerely believe the message to be true If you are paid for youropinion, you are an expert If you are not paid for your opinion, you arenot an expert More precisely, if you are paid for your opinion, you occupy,

“opin-in that contractual relation, the role of “expert.” Thus, “expert” is acontractual role rather than a subset of persons As I will attempt to show,this definition of “expert” creates a class of economic models that is distinct(though not disjoint) from other classes of economic models, includingprincipal-agent models, asymmetric information models, and credence-goods models Usually, an expert is defined by their expertise By such adefinition, however, everyone is an expert in something because we alloccupy different places in the division of labor and, therefore, the division

of knowledge It thus becomes unclear who is supposed to be an expert andwho a non-expert My definition in terms of contractual relations seems toget around that problem It also avoids the question of whether you are

“really” an expert if your expertise is false or deficient The economictheory of experts developed in this volume does not require us to judgewhose expertise is legitimate or scientific or in some other way sufficientlycertified or elevated to “count.”

I begin with the nature and history of the problem, which I discuss inChapters 2–4 There is a large literature on the problem spanning manyfields, including philosophy, law, sociology, science and technology studies,economics, forensic science, and eugenics This literature has not, however,been clearly delineated in the past While I have not attempted a propersurvey, I have attempted to delineate the literature, to identify the mainthemes of it, and to characterize what I believe to be the four main general

theoretical positions one may take To anticipate, one may take a broadlyfavorable view of experts or a broadly skeptical view And one may viewnon-experts as having in some way the potential to choose competentlyamong expert opinions or, alternatively, one may view non-experts aslacking the potential for such competence These two broad perspectives

on experts and two broad perspectives on non-experts create four generaltheoretical postures one might adopt toward experts The great majority oftheorists seem tofit reasonably well into one of these four broad categories,notwithstanding the variety of theories to be found in the literature InChapter 2 I discuss these four broad categories for the theory of expertsand provide exemplars for each

In Chapter 3 I review two important episodes in the history of theproblem The first is the emergence of Socratic philosophy and its devel-opment with Plato, Aristotle, and the Academy In this tradition, philoso-phers are experts The second episode is a mostly nineteenth-centuryAnglo-American literature on expert witnesses in the law I will argue that

in both literatures the expert is often viewed as both epistemically andmorally superior to non-experts They should be obeyed Such lionization

of experts and expertise is common today as well and is, in my view,inappropriate and unfortunate

All such arguments seem tofind their original in Socratic philosophy.This origin was recently invoked by one defender of experts againstpopulism, British celebrity and physics expert Brian Cox Commenting

on Gove’s disdain for experts, he has said, “It’s entirely wrong, and it’s theroad back to the cave” (Aitkenhead 2016) With this clear allusion toSocrates’ cave, Cox is telling us that it is unphilosophical to challenge theexperts He goes on to suggest that experts are superior, being unsullied byparochial interests:“Being an expert does not mean that you are someonewith a vested interest in something; it means you spend your life studyingsomething You’re not necessarily right – but you’re more likely to be rightthan someone who’s not spent their life studying it” (Aitkenhead 2016) As

we shall see in Chapter 3, this view of experts as better and wiser is clearlyexpressed in the Socratic tradition of philosophy, and again in the railings

of nineteenth-century “men of science” against the challenges and posed indignities they experienced when testifying in court

sup-Finally, in Chapter 4 I review several recurrent themes in the theory ofexperts and discuss how they have been addressed in the past Thesecommon themes are power, ethics, reflexivity, the well-informed citizen,democratic control of experts, discussion, and market structure I havetried to give at least some indication of what choices or strategies might be

available for addressing each theme within the context of a theory ofexperts Part I of this volume provides, then, a kind of map of the territoryoccupied by the literature on experts.

The economic point of view I adopt in this volume is, I think, easilymisunderstood I have, therefore, included a discussion of importantsupporting concepts from economics This discussion is found in Chapters5–7 My theory of experts builds on a theory of the co-evolution of thedivision of labor and the division of knowledge Vital to this theory is theidea that the division of labor and division of knowledge are not planned.They emerge unintendedly from the dispersed actions of many people whohave not all somehow pre-coordinated their plans The system was notplanned, but it somehow coheres and functions anyway This notion of

“spontaneous order” may seem quite strange For this reason, I suppose, it

is easily misinterpreted It may seem to be a kind of scientific mysticism, to

“reify” markets, or to be in some other way absurd or mysterious I havetried to dispel this sense of strangeness in part through a purposefully sillyexample of spectators standing up together in a sports stadium Mywillfully silly example shows, I hope, that there is nothing absurd ormysterious in the idea of spontaneous order The idea is surprising, butnot strange

I also consider more serious examples of spontaneous order, includingthe division of labor We should not think of the division of labor as driven,somehow, by a grand purpose It embodies no unitary hierarchy of values.The division of labor has no purpose and serves no particular hierarchy ofends It is, rather, the emergent and unplanned result of a variety ofpersons pursuing a variety of potentially inconsistent goals We canget along, so many of us so well, precisely because we do not have to agree

on values Believers buy Bibles from atheists and the system bumps alongtolerably well, all things considered

In Chapter 5 I also consider the perhaps more fraught ideas oftition” and “competitive” markets I have called my approach to theproblem of experts an “economic theory of experts.” It may not besurprising, therefore, that I take a comparative institutional approach inwhich expert error and abuse are more likely when experts have monopolypower and less likely in a “competitive” market for expert opinion I putthe word“competitive” in scare quotes, however, because it easily createsmisunderstanding It may seem to invoke the incoherent idea of a market

“compe-in which“anything goes” and there are, somehow, “no rules.” As I attempt

to show in Chapter 5, any such notion of a rules-free market is incoherent.The“free market” of economic theory is always “regulated” by some set of

rules, and the questions are what rule sets have what consequences,whether a given set of rules can be improved, and how best to determine

or update the different rules governing different markets The words

“competition” and “competitive” can easily suggest something very ent than I have in mind, but I have no satisfactory substitute for them.Therefore, I will use them and hope that the clarification I have attempted

differ-in Chapter 5 will mdiffer-inimize misunderstanddiffer-ings

There can be a problem of experts only if different people know differentthings Thus, the division of knowledge must be at the center of a theory ofexperts The first clear statement of a general problem of experts, that ofBerger and Luckmann (1966), built on a clear statement of the division

of knowledge.“I require not only the advice of experts, but the prior advice

of experts on experts The social distribution of knowledge thus beginswith the simple fact that I do not know everything known to my fellow-men, and vice versa, and culminates in exceedingly complex and esotericsystems of expertise” (p 46) One’s theory of experts is likely to go wrongunless it embodies and reflects a theory of social knowledge that is at leastapproximately correct What is the nature of the knowledge that guidesaction in society? How is such knowledge produced and distributed? And

so on In Chapters 6 and 7 I argue that knowledge is often dispersed,emergent, and tacit I will impute this view to Hayek (1937), although

I have also learned from Mandeville (1729), who adopted a more radicallyskeptical and egalitarian view of knowledge than Hayek If my broadlyHayekian (or perhaps Mandevillean) view of knowledge is about right,then knowledge is not hierarchical, unitary, explicit, and bookish It is,instead, generally emergent from practice, often tacit, and embodied in ournorms, habits, practices, and traditions The human knowledge that sus-tains the division of labor in society is better represented as a vast web ofWittgensteinian language games than as some more organized and codifiedentity such as Diderot’s Encyclopedia In Chapter 6 I review the history ofthought on the division of knowledge from Plato’s Apology to Mandeville’sFable In Chapter 7 I continue the history to the present and suggest thatthe notion of dispersed knowledge is still not widely understood

I describe my theory of experts in Chapters 8–11 I call the theory

“information choice theory” for two reasons First, it underlines the factthat experts are economic actors who must choose what information toconvey Second, it highlights the relationship to the economic theory of

“public choice.” Like public choice theory, information choice theoryassumes people are the same in all their roles in life Thus, experts areneither more nor less honest or selfish than non-experts I identify three

key motivational assumptions for an economic theory of experts First,experts seek to maximize utility Thus, the information-sharing choices ofexperts are not necessarily truthful Second, cognition is limited and erring.Third, incentives influence the distribution of expert errors These motiv-ational assumptions, together with a broadly Hayekian view of dispersedknowledge, support a theory of experts and expert failure in which“com-petition” tends to outperform monopoly Expert failure is more likely whenexperts choose for their clients than when the clients choose for them-selves And (again) expert failure is more likely when experts have anepistemic monopoly than when experts must compete with one another,although the details of the competitive structure matter, as we shall see.Finally, in Chapter 11 I discuss how to design piecemeal institutionalchange to improve markets for expert advice.

My theory of experts points to an epistemic critique of what is variouslycalled the “military-industrial complex,” the “national-security state,” orthe“deep state.” For reasons I explain in Chapter 12, I will adopt the label

“entangled deep state.” I sketch this critique in Chapter 12 My critique ofthe deep state formed no part of my original intent in writing this book,but it emerged organically from my efforts and belongs, I think, in thevolume Unfortunately, my program for designing incremental reformdoes not seem to suggest how to reform the entangled deep state Coinci-dentally, events in the early days of the Trump administration have causedthe term“deep state” to be used more frequently in the popular press Ithas become a cliché in very short order Instead of “military-industrialcomplex,” we may now read of the dangers of the American “deep state.”The“entangled deep state” is a threat to pluralistic democracy It is thus

an issue of great importance My critique, however, will be epistemic.Rather than showing how the entangled deep state contradicts or threatens

my values, I will show that it produces expert failure

In contrasting“competition” with “monopoly” in the market for expertopinion, I take a comparative-institutions approach to the problem I askwhich institutional arrangements tend to encourage and enable experterror and abuse and which institutional arrangements tend to discourageand diminish expert error and abuse We have already seen an example ofthe importance of institutions We have seen that expert abuses in Britishfamily courts are at least partly attributable to the combination of secrecy

of court proceedings andfinancial incentives for the removal of children.The institutional structure of social services in the United Kingdom leads

to needlessly high rates of expert error and abuse in the form of arbitraryand inappropriate removal of children from their families A different

institutional arrangement could produce fewer miscarriages of justice Byemphasizing comparative institutional analysis, my theory is structurallysimilar to the works of many predecessors, including William Easterly andVincent Ostrom.

Easterly (2013) rightly rails against the“tyranny of experts” in ment As I shall say again in Chapter 4, he repudiates the “technocraticillusion,” which he defines as “the belief that poverty is a purely technicalproblem amenable to such technical solutions as fertilizers, antibiotics, ornutritional supplements” (p 6) Easterly says, “The economists who advo-cate the technocratic approach have a terrible nạveté about power– that asrestraints on power are loosened or even removed, that same power willremain benevolent of its own accord” (p 6) Poverty is about rights, notfertilizer.“The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage

develop-of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage develop-of rights” (p 7).Easterly thus adopts a comparative institutional approach to the problem

of experts Where experts have power in a technocratic model, there isscope for abuse and bad results easily emerge If, instead, the poor are givencivil and political rights, better outcomes will likely emerge Top-downplanning cannot match undirected economic development

Ostrom (1989) adopts a comparative institutional approach to publicadministration He criticizes the administrative state Strauss (1984, p 583)identifies four “significant features of modern administrative government,”and I take those features to define the “administrative state” Ostromopposed The gist of it is that the US federal government includes acomplex bureaucracy that is at least somewhat protected from democraticprocess and exists as a separate – though not homogeneous or unified –power base The President is “neither dominant nor powerless” (Strauss

1984, p 583) in their relations with the administrative agencies of thefederal government

The terms “administrative state” and “deep state” identify distinct, butoverlapping, phenomena The term “administrative state” has generallybeen used in the context of regulatory agencies and has not usuallyincluded the military or the intelligence agencies Moreover, the “deepstate” has usually been construed to include nominally private actors such

as defense contractors The two terms have been distinct, but overlapping.They have recently come into popular use with vague, inconsistent, andoverlapping meanings

Ostrom’s critique of the administrative state challenges the traditionalview in public administration that sees the state as a unitary actor In thetraditional and still dominant view put forward by Wilson (1887), Ostrom

explains,“There will always be a single dominant center of power in anysystem of government; and the government will be controlled by thatsingle center of power” (1989, p 24) In the Wilsonian vision Ostromidentifies, strict hierarchy is the only possible form of government “So far

as administrative functions are concerned,” Wilson explains, “all ments have a strong structural likeness; more than that, if they are to beuniformly useful and efficient, they must have a strong structurallikeness Monarchies and democracies, radically different as they are

govern-in other respects, have govern-in reality much the same busgovern-iness to look to” (1887,

p 218) In this view of things, trained experts must be protected fromdemocratic pressures Wilson avers that “administration lies outside theproper sphere of politics Administrative questions are not political ques-tions” (1887, p 210) Wilson acknowledges some role for democracy, butthe core of governance is technical decision making that only experts arecompetent to perform:“Although politics sets the tasks for administration,

it should not be suffered to manipulate its offices” (Wilson 1887, p 210).The principle of central bank independence illustrates the idea that thetechnical decision making of experts should be protected from democraticinterference Today, this sort of thinking informs not only politics and

“administration,” but also law, medicine, journalism, and education.Against this hierarchical view, Ostrom cites the basic institutional fact of

“overlapping jurisdictions and fragmented authority” (1989, p 106) acterizing American federalism If“Individuals who exercise the preroga-tives of government are no more nor no less corruptible than their fellowcitizens” (1989, p 98), then such fragmentation may produce better resultsthan the unitary government imagined by Wilson Ostrom defends poly-archy against hierarchy In so doing he proposes a radical change inperspective for the theory of public administration

char-My theory of experts expresses a vision similar to that of Ostrom (1989)

As I will show, my views on experts are congruent with those of otherscholars upon whom I have drawn, including Levy and Peart (2017),Turner (2001), and Berger and Luckmann (1966) It is nevertheless true,

I think, that the dominant view in the literature on experts is morehierarchical than that of Ostrom (1989), as illustrated, perhaps, by Cole(2010) and Mnookin et al (2011) Like Ostrom, I propose moving awayfrom the mistaken idea that only hierarchy is coherent and workable andtoward the idea that polyarchy generally produces better results I rejecthierarchical views such as that of Wilson (1887) in favor of polyarchy

As with Ostrom, my preference for polyarchy over hierarchy is aconclusion of the analysis and not its starting point Moreover, the

preference for polyarchy follows only if we add a norm of beneficence to

my value-free analysis If the theory is more or less right, however, no veryspecific normative assumption is required to infer the desirability of poly-archy A general good will toward other humans is all that is required If

I am mistaken to prefer polyarchy to hierarchy, the error is to be sought,presumably, in my value-free scientific analysis rather than my morals.Unfortunately, it is possible to be beneficent toward some and malicioustoward others All men are created equal, but we can have perfectlypolycentric political order with liberty for some and tyranny for others.The United States during slavery and South Africa under apartheid aresalient examples One may point out that restricting the liberty of somenarrows society and reduces the general level of benefits it provides even tothose not in the tyrannized group But powerful members of the tyranniz-ing group may derive special benefits from oppressing others Large slave-holders in the American South grew rich by stealing the labor of thepersons they owned (Fogel and Engerman 1974) We must choose betweenthe “love of domination and tyrannizing” (Smith 1982, p 186) and thematerial and spiritual benefits of amity and free exchange among equals

My analysis in this book is more thoroughly epistemic than Ostrom’s, butthe theory of public administration and the theory of experts both addressthe question of hierarchy vs polyarchy Do we get better results withhierarchy or polyarchy? How best can we coordinate the dispersed know-ledge of many persons to produce good social results? The Wilsonian vision

of expert rule through hierarchical administration is based on a hierarchicalvision of knowledge Knowledge is uniform, explicit, and integrated in theWilsonian vision To coordinate human actions, it holds, we must bringthem into harmony with the hierarchy of knowledge, and such knowledge isembodied in experts But if knowledge is not hierarchical, if it emerges frompractice, sometimes in tacit form, then only polyarchy can coordinate actionwell If knowledge is dispersed and heterogeneous, administrative hierarchyand the rule of experts will give us bad outcomes

Like Ostrom, I wish to challenge the administrative state In Chapter 12

I will note that the administrative state is inconsistent with the rule of law.Unfortunately, the term“rule of law” is often used to mean something like

“vigorous enforcement of legislation” or “cracking down” on supposed badactors In this volume, however, it is a term of art in law with a verydifferent meaning The“rule of law” is central to the liberal ideal of liberty.The leading interpreter of the rule of law, A V Dicey, described it bysaying:“It means, in the first place, the absolute supremacy or predomin-ance of regular law as opposed to the influence of arbitrary power, and

excludes the existence of arbitrariness, of prerogative, or even of widediscretionary authority on the part of the government” (1982: 120) (SeeFallon 1997 on the meaning of“rule of law” and Epstein 2008 on “Why themodern administrative state is inconsistent with the rule of law.”) Mises(1966) invoked the rule of law when contrasting hegemonic and contract-ual bonds in society.“In the hegemonic state there is neither right nor law;there are only directives and regulations which the director may changedaily and apply with what discrimination he pleases and which the wardsmust obey” (p 199).

The administrative state abrogates the rule of law and is in this senselawless It should be dismantled But it is impossible to predict the conse-quences of constitutional innovations (Devins et al 2015) Thus, any dis-mantling of the administrative state should be piecemeal It is not clear how

to unwind it, and precipitate measures may replace a bad thing withsomething worse In particular, if the administrative state is replaced byparty rule we will have moved even further away from pluralistic democracy.Party rule would strip away the necessity of supporting policy decisionswith rational analysis In the administrative state, rational support for theexperts’ decisions is often more ceremonial than substantive Nevertheless,the façade of objectivity and neutrality does provide at least some check onarbitrariness and inconsistency Under party rule, the arbitrariness andinconsistency of state decision makers would likely be even worse thanunder the current administrative state Decisions would be overtly political.They would reflect supposed judgments that this person or group is loyal

or good whereas that group or individual is disloyal or bad, that this way ofproceeding reflects the inner nature of the nation or its people whereasother ways are foreign and bad Such“arguments” are built on a supposedfealty to the ruling party and its values Such justifications of arbitrarydecisions are immune to rational criticism They allow similar cases to betreated in dissimilar ways Anyone challenging the wisdom or legitimacy of

a given policy choice thereby reveals themself to be evil or a servant offoreign interests Populist movements seem to carry with them the danger

of replacing the administrative state with party rule

It is hard to guess whether“deconstruction of the administrative state”(Rucker and Costa 2017) in America would produce party rule orincreased liberty Gloomy prognosticators would do well to rememberthe embarrassing spectacle of Stuart Hall (1979), who mistakenly warned

of the “authoritarian populism” of Thatcher’s government, which “hasentailed a striking weakening of democratic forms” (p 15) Hall went sofar as to suggest that Thatcher’s government was a kind of semi-fascism,

which, “unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of theformal representative institution in place” (p 15) Hall’s harrowing alarmmay now seem exaggerated.

If Chicken Littleism is a consummation devoutly to be unwished, someconsiderations are nevertheless discomforting As the American publicgrows more aware of abuses of both the administrative state and the deepstate, the legitimacy of traditional constitutional structures may be lost.These traditional structures include legislative and judicial checks onexecutive power In such an environment, limits on state power may befurther reduced, and a move to one-party rule is not unthinkable

The danger I am warning of is not the product of one political party orone elected official America’s two major political parties have both givengreater support to elite privilege and state interests than to the rule of law

or the interests of the people (Greenwald 2011) They have both ated in restricting political competition, thereby reducing political plural-ism (Miller 1999, 2006) Political pluralism and the rule of law havetherefore become increasingly alien concepts in American politics Theproblem is not that this politician or that party seeks evil The problem isthat the rule of experts is incompatible with the rule of law and pluralisticdemocracy The rule of experts progressively weakens the rule of law andpluralistic democracy, making it ever more likely that any democraticoverthrow of the system will exclude as unknown and unimaginable bothpluralism and the rule of law

cooper-As administrations and parties change, the risk of a turn to party rulepersists unabated We are not doomed to travel the road to serfdom(Hayek 1944) We can choose to strengthen the rule of law, embracedemocratic pluralism, and repudiate party rule Until we do, however,the dangers inherent in the twin evils of the administrative state and theentangled deep state will persist Those dangers arise from the logic of thesituation, rather than one political party or one elected official

My interest in the problem of experts emerged from my interest inforensic science and the problem of forensic-science error That startingpoint may have helped my thinking The problem of experts in forensicscience presents itself free of some potentially distracting issues present inother areas such as climate science and monetary policy The problem ofexpert error in forensic science cannot be attributed to Wilsonian progres-sivism All parties, whether “left,” “right,” or something else, agree thatforensic-science error is a bad thing The fact that forensic science has notbeen associated with any political party or program may have helped me tosee the problem of experts relatively unclouded by ideological bias It also

freed me from the necessity of judging the theories putatively used byexperts Forensic scientists judge matters of fact that are independent of thetheory they use to evaluate evidence Whether the defendant shot thevictim is not a matter of perspective or theoretical framework Jones did

or did not shoot Smith This theory-independence allowed me to considererror and the influences on error without pretending to second-guess theexpert’s theory I think this fact may have helped me to see in clearer focusthe influence of social context, including incentives, on the decisions ofexperts Finally, forensic science has, unfortunately, been a rich source ofexamples of expert failure

Although my interest in experts arose from the relatively narrow context

of forensic science, my analysis of it applies broadly I noted above that itpoints to an analysis and critique of the entangled deep state The“intelli-gence community” is a group of experts who seem clearly to be defendingtheir power and prerogatives as experts Whether these experts are cynical

or sincere, their knowledge claims and their corresponding claims to powerand autonomy are an undemocratic invitation to expert failure

It may be that my more radical view of knowledge adds support to what

I have called“Humean status quo bias” (Koppl 2009; Devins et al 2015).Vernon Smith (2014) has noted that“the language ‘regulation’ or ‘deregu-lation’” is “unfortunate language.” I expand on this important point inChapter 5 Economists of the“Austrian” school have warned of the “perils

of regulation” (Kirzner 1985) I strongly agree that regulation has the verysort of perils Kirzner warns of The epistemics of this volume strengthensKirzner’s warning But deregulation too has epistemic perils Beware theperils of deregulation We may call a general resistance to political andinstitutional change “Humean status quo bias.” Hume remarked that “aregard to liberty, though a laudable passion, ought commonly to besubordinate to a reverence for established government.” My position issimilar to that of Charles Lindblom (1959), who argued in favor of

“muddling through.” Devins et al (2015, 2016) take up a similar position

“against design.”

I have noted that liberty does not imply equality But the reverseentailment is valid: Equality implies liberty The cliché that we may beequally slaves under collectivism is wrong We cannot all be equal unless

we are all equally free It is well understood, I think, that in a controlledsystem the powerful are more likely to serve their own interests than thegeneral interest In that case, however, we will not have equality There will

be no equality of income, status, or rights between those who commandand those who must obey Something similar is true of a “regulated”

system even under the most perfect democracy If the system is lated,” then state experts will, ex hypothesi, decide many things Non-experts will have to obey the decisions of experts And if these expertscannot avoid the“synecological bias” I describe in Chapter 10, then many

“regu-of those expert decisions will be bad for the non-experts on whose behalf(putatively) they were made Given synecological bias, the experts’ deci-sions will be bad even if they have zeal and good will My discussion ofexpert failure in Chapter 10 may help to make the point that monopolyexperts are not on a footing of equality with non-experts Only when each

of us is free of the rule of experts can we be equal If you get to choose for

me, we are not equal

Mises (1966, p 196) has expressed the point forcefully:

Where and as far as cooperation is based on contract, the logical relation betweenthe cooperating individuals is symmetrical They are all parties to interpersonalexchange contracts John has the same relation to Tom as Tom has to John Whereand as far as cooperation is based on command and subordination, there is theman who commands and there are those who obey his orders The logical relationbetween these two classes of men is asymmetrical There is a director and there arepeople under his care The director alone chooses and directs; the others – thewards– are mere pawns in his actions

Under the rule of experts, knowledge is imposed on the system ledge should instead emerge from the system If knowledge is imposed onthe system, it is imposed by someone who imposes upon and thereforedominates others The persons imposed upon are not in a relation ofequality with those imposing a knowledge scheme on society The view

Know-of emergent knowledge I develop in this volume shows that we need notimpose a unitary scheme of knowledge on society We can let knowledgeemerge andflourish without attempting to control or systematize it If weare to be free, we must let knowledge emerge freely And we cannot be freeunless we are free of the domination and tyrannization of those who wouldimpose a uniform system of knowledge on others In other words, wecannot be free unless we are equal

The disposition to impose knowledge on the system arises from the veryact of studying society In examining human society, we may easily forgetthat we too are humans in society We see society as an anthill and people

as ants We gaze down upon the anthill as if we were higher beings AlfredSchutz described what we might call the“anthill problem”: The theoreticalperspective requires us to imagine ourselves above the system even though

we live within the system I don’t think Schutz meant his description of theanthill problem as a warning against hubris among social scientists, but he

should have Schutz compared the agents in our models (“personal idealtypes”) to “puppets” whose strings the theorist pulls The puppet’s “destiny

is regulated and determined beforehand by his creator, the social scientist,and in such a perfect pre-established harmony as Leibnitz imagined theworld created by God.” The very act of theorizing society puts you in aspurious godlike position.“What counts is the point of view from whichthe scientist envisages the social world” (Schutz 1943, pp 144–5) Thepermanent and ineradicable crisis of social science is the theorist’s dualrole as godlike observer and equal participant

Is There a Literature on Experts?

INTRODUCTION

Experts have knowledge not possessed by others Those others, the laity,must decide when to trust experts and how much power to give them Wehope for a “healer” but fear the “quack,” and it is hard to know which iswhich Experts may play a strictly advisory role or they may choose forothers Psychiatrists, for example, may have the legal power to imprisonpersons by declaring them mentally unfit There is, then, a “problem withexperts,” as Turner (2001) has noted When do we trust them? How muchpower do we give them? What can be done to ensure good outcomes fromexperts? What invites bad outcomes? And so on

Different people know different things, and no one can acquire a able command of the many differentfields of knowledge required to makegood decisions in all the various domains of ordinary life, including career,health, nutrition, preparing for the afterlife, voting, buying a car, and decid-ing which movie to watch this evening Each of us feels the need of others totell us things such as which medical therapy will best promote long-termhealth, which religious practices will produce a happy existence after death,which dietary practices are most likely to postpone death, which schools aremost likely to launch our children into good careers, what hairstyles are themost fashionable, and which car will be the most fun to drive In our worklives, too, we rely on the expertise of others Corporate managers require theopinions of experts in many areas, including engineering, accounting, andfinance Investigating police officers require forensic scientists to tell themwhether there were“latent” fingerprints at the crime scene and whether anysuch prints“match” those of the police suspect A civil attorney may seekexpert opinion on the risks of using a product that harmed their client And

reason-so on We rely, in other words, on the opinions of experts We rely on

experts even though we are conscious of the risk that experts may give badadvice, whether from“honest error,” inattention, conflict of interest, or otherreasons The “problem of experts” is the problem that we must rely onexperts even though experts may not be completely reliable and trustworthysources of the advice we require from them.

The problem of experts has been recognized in some degree and in someform, however vaguely, from an early point in the history of Westernthought But it has emerged as a distinct problem only quite recently.The earliest explicit treatment of a general problem of experts may beBerger and Luckmann (1966), who link the problem to the division ofknowledge in society “I require not only the advice of experts, but theprior advice of experts on experts The social distribution of knowledgethus begins with the simple fact that I do not know everything known to

my fellowmen, and vice versa, and culminates in exceedingly complex andesoteric systems of expertise” (p 46)

The problem of experts originates in the“social distribution of ledge” that Berger and Luckmann emphasize I will examine the socialdistribution of knowledge in Chapters 6 and 7 The basic idea, given earlier,

know-is simple enough, however: Different people know different things Thedivision of labor entails a division of knowledge No one would deny thishumble truth As we shall see, however, there seems to have been onlylimited clear awareness of the division of knowledge in Western thoughtbefore F A Hayek (1937) elevated it to a central theme of politicaleconomy The idea has even been denied or decried by skilled scholars.And few thinkers have been willing and able to recognize the implications

of dispersed knowledge as understood by Hayek As we shall see, Hayekdrew our attention to the ways in which dispersed knowledge is embedded

in practice rather than in books, formulas, and rational thought

In Chapter 6 I will discuss the surprising fact that the modern literatures

on the problem of experts to be found in sociology and in science andtechnology studies can be traced to a source only rarely cited in thoseliteratures, namely, Hayek’s 1937 article “Economics and Knowledge.”

It would be difficult or impossible to recognize a general problem ofexperts without a clear and explicit recognition of both the existence andthe importance of the division of knowledge in society We should not besurprised, therefore, that it was only after Hayek’s articulation of theproblem of dispersed knowledge that we had a clear and explicit recogni-tion of a general problem of experts

Nor is it likely that one could clearly see a problem of experts in a societylacking a relatively high degree of Weberian rationality Weber’s meaning

is contested I will therefore define “Weberian rationality” as the practice ofapplying procedures of counting, numerical measurement, and consciousdeliberation to a large number and variety of choices in human life, thetendency to articulate ends pursued, the further tendency to apply anefficiency criterion to the choice of means to achieve those ends, and adisposition to seek constancy, harmony, and order among the ends pur-sued (See, generally, Weber 1927 and Weber 1956) Modern corporateenterprises, of course, exhibit a high degree of Weberian rationality Thissort of rationality contrasts with Marco Polo’s representation of thirteenth-century business practices (See any standard edition of his memoir, which

is usually entitled The Travels of Marco Polo in English.) The particulars ofhis story cannot all be trusted, of course, and it is disputed whether eventhe broadest outlines are factual It is nevertheless notable how little carefulcalculation seemed to have entered his business dealings as described in hisfamous narrative His business venture was an adventure Presumably, theuncertainties of the venture would have overwhelmed any attempt atcareful calculation And, importantly, double-entry bookkeeping was notyet available to him (Marco Polo’s adventure is dated 1271–95, whichprecedes any plausible date for the“first” example of double-entry book-keeping See Yamey 1949, p 101; de Roover 1955, pp 406–8 and 411;Edwards 1960, p 453.) Without double-entry bookkeeping, good calcula-tions would be difficult or impossible

In a world of low Weberian rationality there will be priests, soothsayers,physicians, jurists, and other experts But it seems unlikely that any thinker

in such a world would very clearly anticipate the “problem of experts”considered in this book Only when a large variety of choices are made atleast in part through Weber-rational processes is it reasonably possible for

a social observer to recognize a general problem of experts

Earlier thinkers may not have been in a good position to identify ageneral problem of experts They did produce, however, some analyses thataddressed questions of expertise Sometimes experts are viewed favorably,especially by writers putting themselves forward as experts We can alsofind complaints against experts Aristophanes, for example, mockedAthenian oracle mongers (Smith 1989) In Henry VI, Shakespeare has Dickthe butcher exclaim,“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Theline may have alluded to Wat Tyler’s Peasant Revolt of 1381, whosepartisans “expressed a particular animosity against the lawyers and attor-nies” (Hume 1778, vol 3, p 291), perhaps because “they had deliberatelyadvised the barons to reinstitute servile labor as the just and traditionaldue” (Schlauch 1940) The physicians in Molière’s L’Amour médecin are

incompetent fops more likely to kill than heal DeFoe (1722) contrastsskilled physicians with the“Quack Conjurers” (p 33) brought forward bythe plague He laments“the foolish Humour of the People, in running afterQuacks, and Mountebanks, Wizards, and Fortune tellers” (p 42).

Only very recently has Western thought produced any clear and ent statements of a general problem with experts Nor have we yet had acommon discussion of the problem of experts Scholars producing similarand complementary analyses do not seem to be aware of one another Wecan nevertheless identify a literature on experts stretching back to antiquitywith the aid of a simple classification This simple classificatory schemehelps to us identify works that are relevant to a theory of experts even whenthey do not include a clear and coherent statement of a general problem ofexperts Indeed, as we shall see, the literature includes theoretical treat-ments of experts in specific domains In some cases the only problem withexperts seems to be that nonexperts are not sufficiently obedient

coher-In this and the next two chapters, I will discuss many past thinkers But

I will not attempt to provide anything approaching a complete survey ofthe literature on experts There are importantfigures I will not mention atall, such as Scheler (1926), Szasz (1960), Tetlock and Gardner (2015), andConrad (2007) There are others, such as Jurgen Habermas (1985) andJames B Conant, who will be mentioned, but given, perhaps, insufficientattention Rather than attempting a survey of the literature on experts,

I have tried to show that there is a literature on experts This literature isspread across severalfields, including philosophy, science and technologystudies, economics, political science, eugenics, sociology, and law I believethe simple taxonomy provided in the next section creates a commonframework for comparing different theoretical treatments of experts Itmakes them commensurable

A SIMPLE TAXONOMY

Theories will differ according to how they model experts and how theymodel nonexperts Sometimes experts are modeled as disinterested, neu-tral, objective, “scientific,” incorruptible, and so on Call such experts

“reliable.” They are reliable because nonexperts can rely on them toprovide good guidance Sometimes experts are modeled as interestedparties who may act on local, partisan, or selfish motives, or as subject tounconscious biases, or as corruptible, and so on Call such experts“unreli-able.” They are unreliable because nonexperts cannot always rely on them

to provide good guidance Nonexperts may be modeled as rational,

reasonable, active, skillful, or otherwise competent Call such nonexperts

“empowered.” They have, potentially at least, the power to form a able estimate of the reliability of experts or, perhaps, to override or ignorethe advice of experts or decisions made for them by experts Nonexpertsmay be modeled instead as unable to reason well, subject to the supposeddictates of“culture” or “ideology,” or otherwise passive and causally inert.They lack the potential to competently judge or to choose among expertopinions Call such nonexperts“powerless.” They do not have the power toform a reasonable estimate of the reliability of experts or to competentlyoverride or ignore decisions made for them by experts This taxonomygives us four categories for a theory of experts: reliable-empowered, reli-able-powerless, unreliable-empowered, and unreliable-powerless Anytheory of experts can befitted into this humble taxonomy

reason-Technicalfields such as psychometrics give the word “reliable” a nical meaning from statistics that I am not invoking here Kaye andFreedman (2011, p 227) say,“In statistics, reliability refers to reproduci-bility of results A reliable measuring instrument returns consistent meas-urements.” Thus defined, reliability is distinct from validity “A validmeasuring instrument measures what it is supposed to” (Kaye and Freedman

tech-2011, p 228) These scientific definitions are important in many contexts,including assessments of the quality of forensic-science evidence Theword “reliable” may also have, however, the broader meaning I invoke inthis chapter

My taxonomy does not touch all dimensions It does not address how orwhether the theorist models themself Does the theorist model themself as

an “expert”? Does the theorist express sympathy for some parties overothers? And so on And it may be difficult to classify a theory in which thereliability of experts or the power of nonexperts is endogenous Neverthe-less, any theory will contain a model of the expert and a model of thenonexpert, and we can usually classify the experts as generally“reliable” or

“unreliable” and the nonexperts as generally “empowered” or “powerless.”Table 2.1 represents my simple taxonomy

American progressives such as Wilson (1887) tended to view experts asreliable and nonexperts as powerless Nonexperts were expected to followthe dictates of the experts and little weight was given to the idea of resist-ance or of feedback from the nonexpert to the expert

Socrates and the philosophers of the Academy belong in the powerless” category I discuss this group in Chapter 3, where I attempt todefend at some length the claim that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle putthemselves forward as experts who should be obeyed In other words, they

“reliable-wanted the rule of experts As we will also see in Chapter 3, expertwitnesses in law have often adopted views that place them as well in thereliable-powerless box.

Eugenicists such as Francis Galton (1904), Karl Pearson (1911), and

J M Keynes (1927) tended to fall into the category reliable-powerless The

“innate quality” of the population (Keynes 1926, p 319) was to be served and enhanced Eugenicists often sought to achieve this end in part

pre-by denying the benefits of child rearing to some individual members of thatcommunity, with eugenic experts deciding who would be denied

Keynes’s letter to Margaret Sanger of 23 June 1936 indicates a “shifting”

of his views Keynes said,“In most countries we have now passed definitelyout of the phase of increasing population into that of declining population,and I feel that the emphasis on policy should be considerably changed, –much more with the emphasis on eugenics and much less on restriction assuch” (Keynes 1936) This “shifting” may seem ominous Singerman (2016,

p 541) says, however,“Eugenics contained many different ideologies andpolicies, and Keynes was among many enthusiasts who never endorsedforcible sterilization or other state violence.” Presumably, Keynes favored apopulation policy that was in some way interventionist, neither laissez faire

Table 2.1 A taxonomy for theories of experts

Nonexperts are powerless Nonexperts are empowered Experts are reliable Theories in this box tend to

view experts favorably.

Some theorists in this group have argued in favor

of experts deciding for nonexperts in at least some areas such as reproduction.

Theories in this box tend to view nonexperts as dependent on experts, but reasonably able to ensure that experts serve the interests of nonexperts.

Experts are

unreliable

Theories in this box tend to view the thinking of both experts and nonexperts as determined by historical or material circumstances.

These circumstances may

be oppressive to both experts and nonexperts, but experts tend to be in a position of dominance over nonexperts.

Theories in this box tend to view experts as posing a risk to nonexperts in part because experts may place their own interests above those of nonexperts Mechanisms may exist, however, to protect nonexperts from the errors and abuses of experts.

nor dictatorial Singerman notes that Keynes“never advocated any specificpolicies in print” (2016, p 541) In private conversation, he has wrylycommented that Keynes seems to have taken the attitude that “eugenicpolicies will be extremely important tomorrow.” Singerman’sresearches seem to carry us only up to about 1930 The potentially omin-ous letter to Sanger is consequently beyond the scope of his inquiries.Overall, however, current evidence does not seem to support the claim thatKeynes specifically favored or advocated forced sterilization And yet thenumber and“innate quality” of the population was in some unarticulatedway to be a matter of state policy.

A great variety of policy positions in economics may be described as

“Keynesian.” And Keynes’ own views on economic policy are contested Itseems fair to interpret Keynes, however, as an advocate of the rule ofexperts in both economic policy and population policy Singerman (2016)links Keynes’ policy preferences in these two areas, which might at firstseem to be unrelated:

After the catastrophe of the Great War, Keynes continued to link ethics andeugenics as he sought to construct a moral society A crippled continent facedunemployment, starvation, and revolution, so achieving a world of good thingsand good states of mind was possible only through technocratic management ofpopulation and economy At the same time, this very mechanism for building anethical society itself required attention to the nature of population as well as thenumber The creation of both the caste of technocratic managers and the educateddemocratic citizenry who would follow them demanded active– if always ambigu-ous– measures to address the biological characteristics of those citizens By theend of the 1920s, Keynes judged the immediate pressure of overpopulation to havereceded He could begin to foresee how material progress could positively combinewith biological science, to produce individuals both taught and shaped to makegood use of the absence of want

(Singerman, p 564)

For Keynes, economy, population, and morality are all subject in somedegree to state planning And state planning in these three areas is linked:The success of planning in any one area depends on successful planning inthe other two This vision of planning in three interlocking domains seems

to limit the scope for human agency Our choices must be right andrational Eugenic experts will act to produce a future population that makesright and rational choices as judged by those experts today The realauthors of future moral choices are today’s eugenic, moral, and economicexperts, especially Keynes This mechanistic vision exalts the knowledge ofone man and one mind, while mortifying the freedom and creativity offuture generations

It is, unfortunately, necessary to make a kind of disclaimer on Keynes

and Keynesianism Some readers may mistakenly believe (whether angrily

or gleefully) that I think Keynes’ views on eugenics somehow taint ordisprove Keynesian economics I repudiate such callow logic Although

I reject the sort of economic policies usually associated with Keynes (Koppl

2014, pp 129–39), I have profited from his economic theory and drawn on

it in my own work (Koppl 2002) It is not my opinion that Keynesianeconomists of any sort secretly wish for eugenic policies or otherwise failsome moral test Nor do I think that Keynes’ eugenic opinions somehowprove that policies of economic“stimulus” are bad or ineffective

Mannheim (1936, 1952) is an important figure in the powerless box As Goldman explains (2009), Mannheim“extended Marx’stheory of ideology into a sociology of knowledge.” Marx lacked a clearunderstanding of the division of knowledge in society and tended to viewthe cultural and ideological“superstructure” as caused by the base withoutcausally influencing the base The material forces of production cause thebourgeoisie to think in one way and the proletariat in another Truefreedom of thought outside the revolutionary vanguard will not exist untilthe workers’ paradise has arrived Mannheim was subtler than Marx onthese points, but in most cases the thinking of a social class or of a

unreliable-“generational unit” is “determined in its direction by social factors”(1952, p 292)

Mannheim seems oblivious to the division of knowledge and its lution with the division of labor For example, he describes the “mentalclimate” of “the Catholic Middle Ages” as “rigorously uniform,” notwith-standing some differences between clerics, knights, and monks (1952,

coevo-p 291) But the “mental climates” of cobblers, courtiers, and concubineswere all very different from one another, as were those of sailors, saints,and sinners; pages and popes; blacksmiths, beggars, and bandits; gold-smiths; maidens; widows; weavers; tillers; jugglers; jewelers; minstrels;masons; hunters;fishers; and tillers The “mental climate” of “the CatholicMiddle Ages” varied within in each such social role, between places, andover time It varied, importantly, with one’s place in the division of labor

In another passage Mannheim says:“The real seat of the class ideologyremains the class itself even when the author of the ideology, as it mayhappen, belongs to a different class, or when the ideology expands andbecomes influential beyond the limits of the class location.” By exemptingscience and his own ideas from the category of “ideology,” Mannheimplaced his theory, in a sense, above the system and not in the system (Hedid not “put the theorist in the model,” to use language developed in

Chapter 4.) From his seat above the system Mannheim proclaimed boldlythat“man’s thought now perceives the possibility of determining itself”(Mannheim 1940, p 213).

Foucault (1980, 1982) also belongs in the “unreliable-powerless”category The individual is oppressed by a “discipline,” which is (1) aknowledge system (“régime du savoir”) such as medicine or psychologycombined with (2) a communication system such as academic journals andthe popular press and (3) some elements of more direct power, such as theability to write prescriptions or to imprison someone declared “insane.”The victims of such “disciplines” may resist, and some generally do Butthey resist only from a position of subjugation that they cannot easilyescape They are trapped in part because the knowledge system definesreality for the oppressed person, which makes it hard for the oppressed torecognize that they are indeed oppressed Some high school students may

be rebellious, while others see nothing to rebel against In any event, theschool’s “discipline” gives power to the teachers, the administrators, and,importantly, the overall system, but not to the students putatively served bythe system

Foucault (1982) has expressed a special interest in “the effects ofpower which are linked with knowledge, competence, and qualification:struggles against the privileges of knowledge.” For Foucault suchstruggles“are also an opposition against secrecy, deformation, and mys-tifying representations imposed on people” (1982, p 781) Foucault’slinking of power and knowledge is suggestive and points to the possibilitythat experts may have pernicious power His refusal to view power asextrinsic to the social fabric or exclusive to a small oppressing minority isalso suggestive Power is, somehow, in the daily fabric of social life andinextricable from it

Jürgen Habermas probably also belongs in the “unreliable-powerless”category of Table 2.1 Turner says that for Habermas, “There is anunbridgeable cultural gap between the world of illusions under whichthe ordinary member of the public operates and worlds of‘expert cultures’”(2001, p 128) (Turner cites Habermas [1985] 1987, p 397.) Schiemann(2000) challenges Habermas’s distinction between communicative andstrategic action

Merton (1945) and Goldman (2001) are probably best placed in the

“reliable-empowered” category For Merton, experts are indispensable andmostly reliable, notwithstanding their potential to place special interestsabove the general interest Because“intellectuals in the public bureaucracy”are in a position of “dependency” to the democratically elected policy

maker, there is a relatively high risk of the“technician’s flight from socialresponsibility” through excess deference to the policy maker’s goals(p 409) There is a relatively low risk of expert abuses such as imposingthe expert’s values on others.

Adopting the perspective of veritisitic social epistemology, Goldman(2001) examines the problem of “how laypersons should evaluate thetestimony of experts and decide which of two or more rival experts is mostcredible” (p 85) He reviews some strategies for nonexperts to evaluateexperts and places his discussion in the context of the philosophicalliterature on testimony Unlike many other philosophical analyses of theissue, however, Goldman gives some attention to the social context oftestimony He notes, for example, that novices may be able to make reliablejudgments of interests and biases (pp 104–5) Goldman might havereached a more optimistic position if he had given even greater attention

to social structure I will note presently, for example, the importance ofcompetition in the market for expert opinion

Goldman neglects ways that details of context can matter When twocompeting experts present alternative interpretations of a given issue, thetruth may hinge on factors a novice is capable of judging In DNAprofiling, for example, the judgment about whether the genetic informa-tion in the crime-scene sample matches that of the suspect’s sampledepends in part on the interpretation of an “electropherogram,” which isnothing more than a squiggly line In some cases, novices will be able to seefor themselves whether the two squiggly lines have peaks at the samelocations In such cases, modularity in expert knowledge allows novices

to make reasonable judgments without acquiring all the specialized ledge of the contending experts

know-Goldman notes that the power of nonexperts is generally enhanced bythe existence of competing experts whose exchanges the nonexpert canobserve (2001, pp 93–7) His overall conclusions are “decidedly mixed, acause for neither elation nor gloom” (2001, p 109) He thus views laics asneither utterly powerless nor fully empowered

Finally, Berger and Luckmann (1966) are best placed in the empowered category, as are Stephen Turner (2001) and Levy and Peart(2017) These thinkers recognize that experts may be unreliable andgenerally oppose giving experts an unchecked power to decide for others.And in one way or another they recognize the ability of nonexperts tochallenge the authority of experts Turner, for example, insists that “We,the non-experts, decide whether claims to cognitive authority are to behonoured” (2001, p 144)