The cult of experts

There are no more devout members of the cult of expertise than mainstream journalists. They rely on experts for guidance about what is “mainstream” and accurate and what is not. Sometimes, that’s fine. Surgeons are extremely reliable sources to explain how a heart attack happens. They’re less reliable at telling you who will have one, save in a statistical sense, and even less reliable at telling you when a specific person will have one.

That’s because prediction is hard. Experts — in politics, economics, climate — are very, very bad at telling people what will happen tomorrow, let alone next year or the next century. How many of the economists who tell us what to do now failed to see the mortgage debt crisis coming? Nearly all of them…

The cult of experts has acolytes in all ideological camps, but its most institutionalized following is on the left. The left needs to believe in the authority of experts because without that authority, almost no economic intervention can be justified. If you concede that you have no idea whether your remedy will work, it’s going to be hard to sell it to the patient. Market-based ideologies don’t have that problem because markets expect events in ways experts never can.