A Brief History of Experts in Democracies

In Missing in Action, Pranay Kotasthane looks at how one of the initial assumption of democracies changed over the centuries. Which assumption is that? The one that most citizens knew what was happening around them. This wasn’t an unreasonable assumption in simpler times – at some level, it was reasonably true. But as the world got more and more complicated…

 

At that point, the solution was “an enlightened oligarchy of experts” who would guide and influence policy making. Further, since politicians were (and are) swayed by whatever is popular, the role of experts to act as guardrails only increased their importance. Experts thus became central to most democracies.

 

Not surprisingly, experts (often in good faith) started to differ in their opinions and advice. This led to the next logical step in the sequence:

“In a marketplace of ideas, lobbying is natural.”

Lobbying wasn’t the bad term it is today, at least not initially. Until:

“Vested interests willing to outspend others soon vitiated this marketplace.”

 

But there was a deeper problem with the concept of experts. Worse than lobbying, it lay unacknowledged. Its name? Replicability, or rather the lack of replicability in social matters and policies. What worked in one region or state or country didn’t necessarily work in other places. What worked at one time didn’t work in the future. Multiple seeds of mistrust against experts were now sown.

 

Policy making increasingly began to be seen as the preserve of think tanks, advisory committees of intellectuals, academics, and economists. Such power and influence inevitably corrupted many. The growing lack of intellectual integrity amongst these folks only added to the mistrust among the common people. The Internet in general, and social media in particular with its echo chambers and amplifiers, accelerated this trend and destroyed any trust in the experts.

 

Today, concludes Kotasthane, citizens across democracies don’t understand the entire system and they don’t trust the experts either. As the Chinese saying goes, we have moved into interesting times…