Sorting Truth From Opinion

For John, BLUF:  An expert is someone with a brief case away from his own office.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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When the Experts Fail, Everyone Else Pays the Price

Here is the sub-headline:

What happens when the most respected authorities get it wrong and ruin lives and economies? Not much

From The Wall Street Journal, by Playwrite David Mamet, 27 November 2020.

Here is the lede plus three:

The wealthy and powerful must constantly expand their operations.  But even if they let their capital sit, they will need accountants, auditors, stockbrokers and consultants.  How will they choose these subordinates?  According to the opinions of other advisers.  Those closest to the boss will have the most influence—and they can keep it, even in failure, by flattery and deference.

This is the case with governmental power.  We are all, in a sense, fools, since no one person can know everything.  We all have to trust others for their expertise, and we all make mistakes.  The horror of a command economy is not that officials will make mistakes, but that those mistakes will never be acknowledged or corrected.

What about our allegedly market economy? Who will be held accountable for destroying it?  No doubt the destruction was carried out in good faith, but the shutdown didn’t accomplish what it was supposed to accomplish.

We have seen shameless incompetence rewarded before.

Here is how the author sums it up, after givinig us some examples from history:

The virus here is government—or at least the incompetents who advise our rulers and cannot admit the legitimacy of dissension.  Absent intervention, this virus may eventually kill the host organism

I am willing to do a small wager that, whoever wins the Presidency, a year (or so) from now people will be saying that President Trump overracted to Winnie the Flu and we didn't need to bar the Chinese or the lockdown or all of that Public Health Kabuki Dance.  If we had just followed then Candidate Joe Biden's advice and not gone overboard we would not be in the pickle that followed.  A very small wager, for the fun of it.

One of the questions we face is the role of the media in reinforcing the rule of the experts.  As a consumer we have to be shopping around, comparing sources.  Unfortunately, we can't be experts on everything, so we rely on the media to provide us access to the facts and to the experts.

But, we will always have experts.  Those who get the work done and those who think about it and provide advice from the edge.  It is the way of the world.

Regards  —  Cliff