Tom Nichols is a professor and academic specialist on international affairs, who laments that a culture of anti-expertise and anti-intellectualism has captured the US. Sheri Berman is a professor of Political Science who is much more critical of the experts and their failures. The two partook in a Persuasion debate organized by Yascha Mounk, where they argued about why people distrust and dislike experts, how valid the populist critiques of experts are, the track record of experts, how expertise has been politicized, and how the experts can do better.
The following is an attempt to summarize the debate in a way that captures all the major points and disagreements brought up, yet still reconciles the two positions. My aim is to have written something here that both Sheri and Tom would largely agree with.
Why do people hate the experts?
A common characteristic of populist politicians is to paint experts and elites as corrupt and overly powerful, only to turn around and install even more corrupt and power-hungry replacements once they’re in power. But this shouldn’t blind us to the real and important criticisms that can be levelled at the experts. Populist critiques of the establishment can be taken seriously without deciding we should never trust experts and throw out the elites.
In Western governments, a lot of power has been given to unelected technocrats. This is in direct tension with democracy because citizens have no influence or control over these technocrats. Experts aren’t accountable to voters, and it isn’t clear if they’re accountable to anyone at all.
These unelected technocrats are very distant – in attitudes, in demographics, and sometimes even in literal geographic distance – from the average voter. They’re highly educated, live in coastal regions, went to certain schools, come from certain backgrounds, and are just very different culturally from the average citizen. This makes people distrustful of them and resentful of the power they hold over them. This isn’t an entirely wrongheaded sentiment either – the further away experts are from the people they’re meant to be serving, the less likely they are to properly represent their interests.
All these are valid critiques of our experts. But much of the populist critique is much more asinine and bad-faith.
A key reason people hate the experts is simply their own narcissism. People don’t simply have a healthy skepticism of experts – they believe that they are smarter than them and know better than they do. The average person doesn’t care about informing themselves and fall prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
One could argue that this is just a perennial problem of democracy that we’ve always had to live with, but there is empirical evidence that narcissism is on the rise, meaning this is a problem that’s gotten worse over time. While political ignorance may not be lower than it used to be, people are now overly confident and lack humility about things they know very little about.
The public also has unrealistic and incompatible demands of experts. They want the experts to make everything better, but they do not like being told what to do. They ask for things like the ACA without Obamacare and a bigger defense budget that won’t increase the deficit, then get angry when Washington fails to give them all these things.
This leads people to feel like the experts don't do anything useful, because they take everything the experts do for granted. The past several decades have seen increased prosperity, peace, and technological innovation. These didn’t come from nowhere – they came from the hard, but often behind the scenes, work of experts across various fields.
It’s also important to note that at least some of the public’s disdain of experts doesn’t have anything to do with the experts at all. Levels of trust have declined in every aspect of social and political life, from the media to Congress to our institutions. And this distrust manifests itself in partisan ways, as we live in increasingly polarized times. If we’re trying to figure out why people distrust experts without taking these outside factors into consideration, we may be missing the forest for the trees.
How good are the experts?
To answer this, we first need to figure out who the experts are. An expert is someone who has become very knowledgeable about an area through careful study. These experts need to be differentiated from the following:
Elites, who are people with a lot of power (and possibly money) that may enlist the experts to advise them, but ultimately call the shots. They have no real expertise in any area of study.
People who are paid to give customers or the public advice that will serve business interests.
People who are put in front of the cameras by the government or the media and labelled an expert, when they actually know very little.
Once you ignore the people in the above categories to focus on real experts within their fields of expertise, the expert track record is quite good. But there are three real and public expert failures that often get brought up:
The failure of experts to predict the fall of the Soviet Union. This came as a shock to everyone.
The Iraq WMD intelligence failure: in the CIA, there were systemic failures of information, corruption, and chain of command. There were outside experts who’d come to different conclusions and were against the war, but on the inside it was a huge mess.
The 2008 financial crisis: while the real experts weren’t the ones giving the financial advice that would lose people their homes, they didn’t see the crash coming either. Very few economists saw or understood the looming systemic effects and the disaster they would bring.
In these failures, one might argue that the public wasn’t any better than the experts. The people didn’t see the fall of the Soviet Union coming either. The people were itching to go to war with Iraq in 2003 (an often forgotten and glossed over fact) and just wanted the experts to give them an official reason to. And it was the people who greedily took dubious advice from financial consultants.
But this is a rather weak defense of experts: the whole reason we decide to turn to the experts and trust them is that we expect them to be better than the general public. While they may have done better with, and are still doing better with, other questions, these were three questions of immense importance where the experts failed spectacularly.
The politicization of experts
The pandemic is another recent case study of expert failure. Experts insisted in March that the public should not be buying or wearing masks, and then abruptly reversed direction a month later. They chastised those who protested the lockdown and then gave their blessing to those protesting George Floyd’s murder. In doing so, they destroyed their own credibility and lost a lot of trust and goodwill with the public.
The primary issue here is that the experts overstepped their bounds. Experts are not meant to act as policy makers or policy advisers. Experts should say “Here’s what I think is true”, not “Here’s what you should do”. An epidemiologist has no training in economics: they can provide their expert opinion on how the disease would spread with or without a lockdown, but other experts should be chiming in on the economic costs of a lockdown, and a policy maker should be weighing those and other considerations to make a final decision.
It was wrong of the experts to try to instruct the public on what is and isn’t okay to protest. And it was wrong of the experts to knowingly give the public faulty information and advice, even when they thought it might lead to a greater good.
The politicization of experts is a perennial problem but it’s also getting worse. Back in the 80s, the liberal intelligentsia may have been unwilling to criticize communism because they were worried about helping Regan, but it was a known bias that could be worked with. In the past few years, as tribalism has intensified, so has this politicization. There is a lack of willingness for both experts and elites to criticize their own side, which has led to increased politicization. This makes it harder for the public to trust the experts, even when there seems to be consensus among them.
How the experts can be better
As mentioned above, experts should stay within their domains of expertise and focus on just saying what they think is true. They should not be using their expertise as a talisman to tell people what they should do.
They must also be more willing to admit their mistakes. However understanding or not the public may be when a mistake is admitted, they will be much angrier and less trusting when the experts flip around their advice and pretend they’d never said otherwise. This unwillingness is understandable, as experts are terrified of the public, who always seem ready to hang them for any real or perceived fault. The public has to play their part by developing a tolerance for experts making predictions that are probabilistic, nuanced and potentially wrong. But the experts also need to keep their own egos in check – they are not entirely blameless here.
Allowing for a diversity of opinion within each field is also crucial for experts. If all the experts think a certain way, they will miss things. And in a politicized field, even if some experts think differently, their input may not be welcome. People with knowledge need to be empowered to go against the grain and say what they think everyone else is missing.