Expertise

Peter Levine says…

“Although I acknowledge the value of expertise, we can identify several important general reasons why it is never enough and we always need citizens’ participation to tackle social problems.”

What follows is a list of three reasons why experts shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions on their own. It’s one of the best posts I’ve read on the subject, and rather than spoil it, I’ll urge you to read it all. However, there’s one issue that I’d have near the top of any such list that is missing (to be fair, the post is called Part One, so maybe Part Two is devoted to the question I’m about to raise). It’s this:

• Experts explain awkward issues satisfactorily to other experts. Their explanations are less useful to the lay-person
• Sometimes the public are given a glimpse of the experts’ explanation. More often, they see it through the dysfunctional prism of newspaper journalism
• Politicians – usually generalists -  then have to field an unsatisfactory briefing in the context of a bloody awful report in a newspaper – one that has been seized upon and further distorted by a pressure group of some kind.
• The politician then has to take the consequences of not taking the decision that the newspaper / pressure group prefers. If s/he does this successfully, they may only be substituting a very bad policy with a quite bad one (i.e. one based upon a partial understanding of the expert’s brief)
• And whatever happens, s/he has to bear any consequences of the policy’s failure

However, if more people are able to get at the expert’s advice, mash it around into something that proves to be a more accessible explanation (something that enables to politician to understand what the expert was really saying), then a more participative polity has improved an outcome. It can help to break the hold that newspapers and pressure groups have in describing problems, and this can only be a good thing, surely?

As an aside, Chris Dillow is often very good at dismissing experts in his own inimitable fashion.

Update: Before posting this, I saw that Peter has published part two of his critique of expertise. And he’s interviewed here on blogtalk radio.