Parag Khanna has a new book coming out: Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State. I have not read the book yet. I am looking forwards to doing so in the upcoming months. However, I liked his previous book, Connectography, quite a bit actually. One of my principal complaints about Connectography was that the ideas in the book could have been communicated in a much shorter amount of words. Alas, such is life, most books should be articles and most articles tweets.
Mr. Khanna is a thinker who deals in big ideas. Those big ideas must be confronted because our opinions about many smaller matters will depend on how we react to those big ideas. The themes of Connectography brought out the significance of different types of unseen geography to the prosperity of the international division of labor and how it’s those de-facto connections, rather than the de-jure ones we are more familiar with, will determine the fate of our species for generations to come. I await to see what themes he offers in his new book.
However, there is a sneak-peak. With the new release, Mr. Khanna has quite the interesting interview with The Washington Post, in which he discusses many of the significant themes of Technocracy in America.
One of the themes that concerns me is the fact that Mr. Khanna seems to believe that there are clear and defined rules by which we should evaluate the success of policies when he discusses technocracy. He defines ‘a technocrat’ as being: “a meritocratic, utilitarian civil service personnel.”
The definition rings too praising for me. Mr. Khanna is already stacking the deck in technocracy’s favor based on merely how he defines the word ‘technocrat’. It doesn’t seem that there is much space in that definition for a technocrat to err and, in his hubris, to become a man of the system. There also doesn’t seem to be much space in that definition for technocrats to be illegitimate. What is one then to make of Mario Monti, who was Prime Minister of Italy from 2011-13. He ruled in an explicitly technocratic fashion, yet did not rise to his office by any meritocratic process, but was instead invited to form a government by Italy’s president.
Later in the interview, Mr. Khanna doubles-down on his definition of a technocrat as a road forwards:
This new technocracy has to be meritocratic, and it has to be utilitarian. Maybe there’s no more important word that needs to be reintroduced into the American political conversation than utilitarianism. It’s a quantitative measure of how fair and decent leaders are.
From my own reading, it seems Mr. Khanna seems to be arguing that we can simply collect the facts, put them into a utilitarian algorithm and be able to calculate how well technocrats are performing.
Alas, I don’t think that is possible. One of the problems afflicting democracy in America today is that there is no such agreement about such an algorithm. All facts exist in a shared perspective of the world. Without that shared perspective, those hard facts themselves dissolve into much softer theory-laden discussions. Hence an honest attempt to imitate successful methods in the hard sciences merely glosses over the more philosophical and humane nature of the problems at hand. Even generations after they die, historians shall debate over “how fair and decent” our leaders have been.
Mr. Khanna’s proposal would have its best chance of working in a nation in which people have basic agreement about the perspective politics should face. I am dubious that Americans live in such a nation today.
However, Mr. Khanna clearly has in mind something more of a constitutional moment than a piecemeal reform when elucidating his ideas. One constitutional reform that he certainly has in mind is the idea that the government should matter less and that technocrats should, by and large, go unnoticed, apart of the national furniture, so to speak:
I’m a technocrat in my heart of hearts. I’m much more interested in institutions and policies than in specific people. I just don’t care who is president. I really don’t. I just want to see a better structure. There’s this line we use in other fields: Bad process, bad outcome. When you have a bad process, surprise, surprise, you get a bad outcome. So I want to see a better process, as I have in all these other countries.
I do agree with the overall sentiment that Mr. Khanna expresses here. To quote John Adams, the object of constitutional design should be a government of laws, not of men. However, it is difficult to imagine personalities not mattering during a constitutional moment. America, for instance, was quite fortunate to have the statesmen it had during its own Revolution. For example, the United States could have evolved to be a vastly different nation if George Washington decided that he wanted to be king.
One enthusiasm that I share with Mr. Khanna is a fascination with Singapore and the belief that Singapore has mutated quite the efficient government. The creation of more Singapores would be a great victory for the prosperity of the human species.
Allowing people to create and to immigrate to cities that experiment with different legal régimes might be a means of lifting millions out of poverty and of discovering the best means of generating prosperity in foreign lands. Achieving prosperity is not a problem of getting to Denmark, as if the laws of political development are clearly defined.
Instead, achieving prosperity is a matter of discovering a means of becoming the best India, China, Kenya, or Indonesia. It is more a process of experimental evolution and less a process of rule-following ontogeny. More city-states would allow for more laboratories for technocrats to experiment with different ideas for how to achieve prosperity. Unlike centralized nation-states, dispersed city-states provide humanity with optionality; we can select the best and have people imitate and immigrate to them.
However, it is important to remember that Singapore is an accident of history. It is former British colony that retained Common Law post-independence that has retained its independence from surrounding nation. Hong Kong is another example of such a city-state. Moreover, both aren’t just accidents of history, they’re relics of a colonial past. The only reason that they exist is because a foreign people were able to claim both islands for themselves and impose their own law on those lands. I don’t think there is a similar path for city-state creation in the world we live in today and such thoughts can bring us frighteningly close to an imperialistic mindset.
The technocratic institutions that Mr. Khanna lauds all need to be created. Unfortunately, in their creation, it quite matters who the architect is and here is one of the central ironies of the belief that the state needs to matter less: For the state to matter less, it needs to make itself matter less—and it needs to be strong enough to make itself matter less.
The problem is, as it has been for millennia: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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