Genuine question. It seems like a topic that isn’t discussed in-depth often anywhere I can find online.
To be clear, I’m talking about technocracy as in policies are driven by those with the relevant skills (instead of popularity, skills in campaigning, etc.).
So no, I don’t necessarily want a mechanical engineer for president. I do want a team of economists to not tank the economy with tariffs, though.
And I do want a social scientist to have a hand in evaluating policy ideas by experts. A psychologist might have novel insights into how to improve educational policy, but the social scientist would help with the execution side so it doesn’t flop or go off the rails.
The more I look at successful organizations like J-PAL, which trains government personnel how to conduct randomized controlled trials on programs (among other things), the more it seems like we should at least have government officials who have some evidence base and sound reasoning for their policies. J-PAL is the reason why several governments scaled back pilots that didn’t work and instead allocated funds to scale programs that did work.
I agree experts can be wrong and have been wrong many times throughout history.
I can also see the concerns for maintaining the status quo.
What I’m thinking of is a less extreme variant of technocracy, where academic organizations, think tanks, etc. nominate candidates according to their own criteria. That way the overall bar is raised while leaving the decision on who is ‘qualified’ decentralized among the public.
My issue isn’t that goldbug economists are promoting harmful policies during a depression. Some issues are complex, and people are fallible.
My issue is that tariffs are widely agreed to be harmful, yet we have tariffs wrecking the economy now. Tariffs arguably constrain people’s rights by reducing their freedom to purchase what they want at fair market prices.
Like, at the very least, we should be avoiding blatant mistakes that most experts agree on. The fact that we did, in fact, make a glaring mistake against the advice of basic economics means that something is broken with the system.
The American political system occasionally having a terrible choice is one of the tradeoffs for having power be changeable without bloodshed.
Because of lifetime appointments the US legal system is nearly a technocracy as you describe. It arrived at a decision in 1971 that a wide swath of the body politic was so opposed to that they essentially lost all faith the status quo. What followed was a decades long campaign to shift that pseudo-technocracy. Not a bloody insurrection.
You and I may disagree with their position, and we both dislike some of the results of their movement, but the worth of a government form is how well it responds to such discontent.
I don’t think you’ll get any disagreement that the current administration is exposing some flaws in the American political system. But the potential fixes for those flaws are numerous, while a brand new system as you propose would have its own expected and unexpected flaws.
Let’s talk about those goldbugs, since anything else urges trolls to show up. If they’re in power what stops them from declaring that their opponents are “fake” economists? How would we remove them from power?
There’s multiple ways to achieve the goals of a technocracy.
I agree with your criticism, but you’re criticizing a more extreme, centralized form of technocracy. I have criticisms of direct democracy, but I wouldn’t conclude all democratic systems are bad because of the most extreme version.
And democracy and technocracy aren’t mutually exclusive, either.
For the legal example, some states hold elections for their judges, and most require a law degree. This sets some minimum to be a judge in those areas, which is technocratic.
What if a judge claims other judges are fake? Well, the people can evaluate those claims and vote accordingly.
But at least you don’t have some unhinged individual with no understanding of the law abusing their judicial powers.
I can’t really speak to the bloodshed since I don’t know which electoral process you’re criticizing, but technocracies don’t need bloodshed, no.
For your goldbug criticism, here’s one potential example (out of many, many possible systems) that could resolve it: Academic and think tank organizations stake their reputation by nominating economists, and then the people vote on them.
Let’s say the Mises Institute nominates a goldbug economist. I highly doubt enough people would vote for them vs all the other candidates by organizations like the American Economic Association, etc. And if they do get elected, whatever chaos that ensues would harm not only the candidate’s reputation, but the Mises Institute’s reputation. People would vote them out and ignore candidates from the Mises Institute.
It sounds like you’re not proposing a technocracy, and are instead proposing a direct democracy with a bureaucratic civil service chosen by popular vote.
Which is a fancy way to have an inefficient and easily gamed democracy. As is done in Iran and Russia.
If “people vote” is a core and meaningful part of any system, that system is democratic. And inefficiencies in democracy are always and only ways to prevent the people from getting what they want.
If you don’t see how avoiding bloodshed for power changing is a fundamental advantage of democracies I think you may want to re-read your histories. The ONLY way power ever changed hands from one group to another prior to the American election of 1796 was through violence or the threat of violence.
I’m not proposing anything specific, no. I said it was an example (and I even bolded the text).
I don’t really have a stake in the specific example I gave, so I can’t really comment much else on your critique of it.