Tyler Cowen has recently authored an article considering the implications of William F. Buckley’s famous quip that he would rather be governed by the first two-thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two-thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University. In that article, “Sometimes the people need to call the experts”, Mr. Cowen argues that there are some aspects of government in which we should prefer the first two-thousand people in a phone-book and other aspects in which we should prefer Harvard University.
Sola dosis facit venenum, only the dose makes the poison. Mr Cowen is right in arguing that technocracy and popular politics aren’t all-or-nothing affairs, but aspects of politics that must be matched to the problem at hand. However, Mr. Cowen’s framing of the issue obfuscates many of what I believe to be the most salient aspects of the problem at hand. The world is shaking from a populist insurgency and I don’t think a good way of framing the issues involved is a thought-experiment of fine-tuning government between some happy medium between the binary of technocracy and populism.
I found the most incisive part of the article was when Mr. Cowen argued:
when it comes to the nuts and bolts of governance, typically I would prefer to be ruled by the Harvard faculty, even recognizing the biases of experts. They understand the importance of applying expertise to complex problems, and they realize many issues do not respond well to common-sense fixes. The citizenry usually cannot make good decisions, or for that matter expert appointments, when technocracy is required.
To begin with, there is the real-world competency angle. For any expertise that is traded for money on the free market, there is a feedback mechanism that ensures that consumers actually value the expertise being offered. That feedback mechanism is the market process. An exert, say a dentist or a mechanic, can only maintain his business if he proves that his expertise maps to real-world competency. No real-world competency, no customers. Profit and loss provides a feedback mechanism that, by and large, ensure that the expertise being offered on a market maps to competency at doing the tasks.
Mr. Cowen seems to trust in an invisible hand working in academia to select the best experts. I am not nearly so trusting Academia certainly does select for very smart people who are able to frame problems as clever models and who are then able to solve those models. (This mode of thinking has even infected philosophy with all of its trolley-cart thought-experiments.) However, what is the guarantee that such talent will map onto real-world competencies? Does being able to solve for a general equilibrium model necessarily bring one enlightenment about the nature of the economy? Probably to some degree, but how much is that degree? I am very doubtful of the mapping of academic success onto real-world competency.
To begin with, there is the real-world competency angle. For any expertise that is traded for money on the free market, there is a feedback mechanism that ensures that consumers actually value the expertise being offered. That feedback mechanism is the market process. An exert, say a dentist or a mechanic, can only maintain his business if he proves that his expertise maps to real-world competency. No real-world competency, no customers. Profit and loss provides a feedback mechanism that, by and large, ensure that the expertise being offered on a market maps to competency at doing the tasks.
Mr. Cowen seems to trust in an invisible hand working in academia to select the best experts. I am not nearly so trusting Academia certainly does select for very smart people who are able to frame problems as clever models and who are then able to solve those models. (This mode of thinking has even infected philosophy with all of its trolley-cart thought-experiments.) However, what is the guarantee that such talent will map onto real-world competencies? Does being able to solve for a general equilibrium model necessarily bring one enlightenment about the nature of the economy? Probably to some degree, but how much is that degree? I am very doubtful of the mapping of academic success onto real-world competency.
However, the problem is not just that I’m doubtful. I might be wrong, after all. The problem is that there are no impartial feedback mechanisms for selecting out the best expertise, or to even ensure that the so-called ‘expertise’ is competent at its real-world task. The praise of other Harvard PhDs does not strike me as an impartial feedback mechanism.
Along these lines, I think that Mr. Cowen articulates his argument through the old-fashioned lens of “who should rules?” Instead, I think that we should articulate our thoughts about populism and technocracy in institutional terms that pays attention to the fragility of the system in question to bad rulers. In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper notably argue along these lines when he wrote that we should “replace the question: Who should rule? By the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” (p.121) In “Of the independency of Parliament,” David Hume suggested a maxim when considering political questions: “ that, in contriving any system or government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave.”
Popper and Hume wanted us to think about the robustness of institutions to their rulers and therefore to their experts. I’d like to go further: I’d like to consider whether institutions can be antifragile to bad experts, that is can the variation introduced by bad experts actually improve a society? I do think that is a possibility. What we need is a more decentralized system that allows for more experiments in technocracy and allows for unsuccessful experiments to actually fail. That way, the real-world competency of technocrats can be proven in the field, so to speak, in a way that provides social evolution with the chance to select for the best experts.
So yes, I do agree with Mr. Cowen that maybe we need to call the experts. However, I think that the institutions surrounding technical expertise in government today have fragilized society. Experiments in government requires a more antifragile system, a system that is benefited, not harmed, by variation.
President Donald Trump’s administration will certainly be a brave experiment in government. The tragedy will be that the United States is so centralized that if President Trump fails, so too will the entire nation. The nation is too sensitive to variation in those that rule it. What is needed is a nation in which President Trump’s administration can fail without being the apocalypse predicted. That requires more freedom, more subsidiarity, and, ultimately, a more antifragile society. ‘Freedom’ here doesn’t merely mean the freedom to succeed. It also means the freedom to fail, and for your ideas to go extinct with your failure.
Framing the issue as one of technocracy versus populism attracts attention away from the institutional question we should be asking: How do the institutions select the experts? No one should reasonably be denying that expertise is necessary in running a successful administration. However, we should be doubting whether the experts we currently have have enough real-world competence to actually do so. And we should also be thinking about whether the institutions those experts inhabit are too fragile.
Sola dosis facit venenum. Maybe the populist insurgence’s insistence on real-world competency might make our institutions less fragile.
Thoughts on the Minimum Wage
In The New York Times, Arindrajit Dube, a celebrated expert on the economics of the minimum wage, has commentated on the recent study from the University of Washington on the effects of Seattle’s increased minimum wage. In short, Mr. Dube argues that the study’s conclusion that there were big job loses is much more opaque than public commentary would have one believe. I agree with his general sentiments: Empirical claims about something as complex as the minimum wage can only be evaluated at the level of the overall literature, not a single study. By itself, the UW study proves nothing. One study can never prove a broad empirical point. Only a broad population of studies can do so.
However, it is not Mr. Dube’s general argument that draw my interest, but his conclusion:
To me, this is quite the startling admission: That the minimum wage will throw some people out of work. After all, “throwing lots of people out of work” implies that “throwing few people out of work” is a marginal improvement that is acceptable for public policy. I entirely disagree. Let me quickly go through my reasoning:
We can be reasonable confident that among those people who can no longer find jobs will be among the least advantaged in society. For instance, the people who are going to be priced out of the markets are not the children of the rich who can afford to be sent to unpaid internships to build their resumés. Instead, they are going to be the children of the poor who have no way to build their resumés, as there are very, very few unpaid internships for, say, being a clerk or plumber. There may even be a few poor people of working age whose skills simply do not add enough at the margins to be employable at the minimum wage. Whatever the scenario, I think that it is very unlikely that the marginal effects of increasing the minimum wage do adversely affect some of the most vulnerable in society, for among the most vulnerable will be people whose skills cannot add a lot of value to a business at the margins. They will be at the chopping block first, in the name of economic efficiency.
Moreover, the economic profession have not been able to agree about how much benefit is accrued to society as a result of minimum-wage policies. It is telling that the economics profession has not been able to agree about the effects of an increase in the minimum wage in its literature.I don’t think we should blame this problem of measurement on politics. Instead, I think that we should see the labor market as being so complex and so adaptive that any attempt at measuring the effects of this variable are fraught with difficulty and are also going to reflect local circumstances that will frequently vary from local to local. So, the average effects of the minimum wage are uncertain and we should expect them to always be uncertain, given the limits of measuring complex systems.
To me, combining these two considerations lead to the crux of the minimum-wage debate: The minimum wage harms some of the least advantaged people in society for uncertain benefits to others who are more advantaged. How can we pretend that's just? Economic policy is not only a matter of average effects, but also of justice and of who pays the costs at the margins. Contra Mr. Dube, I don’t believe throwing a few people out of work is good enough. Those people also deserve the right to sell their labor and thereby improve their lives by virtue of a natural right to self-preservation. A just minimum-wage policy throws nobody, let alone some of the least advantaged, out of work; hence justice calls for a $0.0 minimum wage.
Posted by Harrison Searles on 07/27/2017 at 02:54 PM in Commentary, Justice, Political Philosophy | Permalink | Comments (0)
Reblog (0) | | |