Experts are Idiots, Experts Agree
and they never learn
One of my favorite jokes is to qualify a ridiculous idea with “experts agree.” That’s because our media like to bolster an opinion piece masquerading as news with appeals to the experts. And I don’t like it.
I don’t like it because I am opposed to the rule of the educated class. Mostly I am opposed because I believe that the educated class is responsible for all the horrors of the 20th century, from World Wars to totalitarian genocides to administrative government to the ideological colonialism of the left. How dare the Commies colonize Russia and China (and almost India) with their genocidal politics-is-everything!
And the basis of educated class rule is that “we are the experts; shut up peasants.”
It is telling, I think that the “barista proletariat” helped elect Mamdani in the mayoral primary in New York City. Telling, because all along, leftism and its crazy economic policy has been an educated-class thing, from Rousseau and Marx down to the Frankfurt School and critical theory and their adepts like Foucault and Derrida.
They had these brilliant ideas that they wanted to impose on the rest of us, because expertise.
OK. Intellectuals are often dumb or something. But it is outrageous that any educated person should vote for a guy proposing government food stores and rent control. If an educated person has not ingested just a little bit of microeconomics, enough to know that government-run business cannot work, and price control cannot work, then our education system is utterly failing to prepare our kids for real life. (Hey, maybe it’s deliberate!)
What is interesting to me is just as the young educated class is swinging left with the Democratic Socialists of America and AOC and Mamdani, the tech bros are swinging right. The keypoint that I like to take up is the tech bro visit to the Biden White House in May 2024 where Marc Andreessen and others learned that the Autopen proposed to do AI with “two or three large companies” and direct government regulation and control. That’s when the tech bros knew they were voting for Donald Trump.
That’s because the tech bros live in the culture of venture capital and the start-up. They believe that the way you approach the future is by financing a bunch of young kids with good ideas. You waste millions on failed startups. But you make billions on the startup that succeeds. Yeah. So it’s just like a casino. Everybody places their bets, but only a few win the jackpot.
Do you see how that is completely opposed to the Autopen culture of “we will direct traffic, because experts?”
Now I have my Four Laws:
Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises).
The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek).
Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler).
Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).
Plus, Activism cannot work because shouting slogans cannot solve anything.
These are not new ideas. These are not hard ideas. You do not need to be a genius to understand this. And yet in America we have these people who have gone through the education system from K through grad school and they don’t understand my Four Laws.
Why is this? Well, I think it’s because the educated class is all about going to school and getting credentials and teaching the kids the approved curriculum. And, of course, the curriculum just happens to advocate All Power to the Experts.
Let’s write the history of the last 200 years like this. The educated class rose to power on the strength of its new ideas and its political agenda to take power away from the old feudal lords and give power to the rising middle class. At the same time the ruined agricultural system was being replaced, under the radar, by the industrial revolution that nobody saw coming and nobody understood until, after the fact, chaps like Adam Smith came up with a theory to half explain explain it with a two level notion of prices in use value and exchange value. Then, in the marginal revolution of 1870, three guys all at once said: prices are prices: that’s all.
I’d say that the educated class theory evolved into the ideology of socialism and planning and the administrative state and expertise. It led to Soviet Russia and Maoist China and the monster welfare state run by politicians handing out free stuff to their supporters.
But the under-the-radar system was a continal overturning of the old with the new. Horse and carriage for railways, railways for motor cars, coal for oil, mechanics for electronics, jet planes, reusable rockets. Everything was a surprise, from some nobody developing the oil industry to some nobody inventing the steel industry, to some nobody inventing the Otto Cycle, to a couple of guys building a powered airplane, to a patent clerk inventing relativity. And on and on.
Now I believe that these two ways of organizing the world issue from two instincts in all life. On the one hand is the need to stick with what works — expertise — and not rock the boat. On the other hand is the need to invent and adapt. People that have thrived under the current system want to keep it going. But there is also an instinct in humans to try something new. The world changes, and we need to adapt to the changes.
But how do we know when the old ways aren’t working any more? We don’t; that’s why it’s a good idea to have bright people coming up with new ideas, just in case.
How do we know which new ideas will work? We don’t; that’s why it’s a good idea to have venture capitalists funding all kinds of people with good ideas to find out which one has a good idea that works.
The point about expertise is that it is always based on yesterday’s idea and yesterday’s men. It works until it doesn’t.
And I’d say that the old expertise beloved of the educated class is past its sell-by date.
Thing is, when you are one of the experts you can’t believe the evidence shows that your tried and true expertise doesn’t work any more. So it’s best if the experts don’t have the power to impose their expertise on the rest of us.
Because in the end, the experts will turn out to be wrong.