The problem with relying just on experts

It is an oft-repeated refrain that serious issues of the world should be left to the experts. So who are the experts?

Take any important public issue. On the economy, we often come across debates on whether the interest rates should be increased or not, or what fiscal policy instruments are most appropriate, or there should be some deregulation in a sector or not, or some particular industrial policy action should be initiated or not, or a non-cash subsidy should be replaced with a cash transfer, or a government provisioning of a product or service should be replaced with market-based delivery, and so on.

Similarly, there are debates about the right responses to global issues like climate change and global warming, deforestation, globalisation and trade, and so on. Then there are local issues pollution of air and water bodies, traffic congestion, unaffordable housing, high malnutrition and so on. Then there are specific policy failures like poor student learning outcomes, poor quality of healthcare, weak state capacity etc.

Interestingly, for each of these examples, there are experts with varying, often conflicting, solutions. In fact, it is not incorrect to paraphrase Newton that for every expert opinion, there is an equally compelling opposite expert opinion. 

The belief behind the conventional wisdom is that experts are objective, and offers a solution which is unique, which is correct, which is also universally accepted, and which would leave everyone better off than any alternative. However, none of these five assumptions hold when subjected to scrutiny.

But in reality, far from being objective, any expert is captive to some ideology. And there are multiple ideologies or perspectives, each of which leads to a different solution. Further, as with any ideology, there is nothing which is correct or wrong. There are only shades of grey, and that too depending on one's world views and preferences. It follows that there is no universally accepted solution. It also follows that any solution would leave at least some others worse off.

Jonathan Haidt has a good talk where he touches upon the point being made here. He refers to the 1973 book, Dilemmas in a general theory of planning, where Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber made the distinction between tame (drug or vaccine for a disease) and wicked problems (poverty or global warming).

The former is a field for experts, since the solutions are linear and technical, and to that extent objective and mostly unique. In case of tame problems, there are facts and tools, and it works the same for everyone. At the least they are not disputed.

However, in the latter, the views of experts are shaped by their moral and political values. Sample this from Nordhaus and Shellenberger,

"Experts could only define (wicked problems) in relationship to background solutions, which are themselves shaped by underlying values and a vision of a good society... As a result, disagreements over social and environmental policy cannot be resolved by experts, who in many ways make them more intractable."

And, as Haidt finds in one of his studies, there exists vast variations in the positions of people from differing ideological sides on even apparently simple moral issues.

So, given that every expert opinion on a public issue is therefore underpinned by a particular set of moral values and those values vary widely based on one's original ideological predispositions, it is only natural that there are large variations among expert views on that public issue.

The idea here is not to dismiss experts or expert opinion. Instead it is to highlight the need to recalibrate the narrative away from the unqualified belief in expert opinions. Expert opinions, of all shades, should be one of the inputs in the decision-making process. But the decisions themselves should essentially be an exercise of judgement that weighs all the factors.

Covid 19 is only the latest example of the problems in placing faith completely on experts. See this and this.

Update 1 (13.06.2020)

On the issue of the credibility of what gets put out by experts in the so-called peer-reviewed journals, Andrew Gelman has a scathing critique,

The problem with peer review is the peers. Who are “the peers” of four M.D.’s writing up an observational study? Four more M.D.’s who know just as little as the topic. Who are “the peers” of a sociologist who likes to bullshit about evolutionary psychology but who doesn’t know much about the statistics of sex ratios? Other sociologists who like to bullshit about evolutionary psychology but who don’t know much about the statistics of sex ratios. Who are “the peers” of a couple of psychologists who like to imagine that hormonal changes will induce huge, previously undetected changes in political attitudes, and who think this can be detected using a between-person study of a small and nonrepresentative sample? That’s right, another couple of psychologists who like to imagine that hormonal changes will induce huge, previously undetected changes in political attitudes, and who think this can be detected using a between-person study of a small and nonrepresentative sample. Who are “the peers” of a contrarian economist who likes to make bold pronouncements based on almost no data, and whose conclusions don’t change even when people keep pointing out errors in his data? That’s right, other economists who like to make bold pronouncements based on almost no data, and whose conclusions don’t change even when people keep pointing out errors in their data. Who are “the peers” of a wacky business-school professor who cares more about cool experiments than data management and who doesn’t seem to mind if the numbers in his tables don’t add up? Yup, it’s other business-school professors who care more about cool experiments than data management and who don’t seem to mind if the numbers in their tables don’t add up? Who are “the peers” of fake authors of postmodern gibberish? Actual authors of postmodern gibberish, of course.

His conclusion is very important,

So, the peer-review system is either the last bastion protecting us from a revised old boys’ network, or a waste of time and resources that could better be spent on post-publication review. It’s either an efficient if imperfect tool for sifting through millions of research articles published each year, or an absolute disaster. Probably it’s both.

Two observations. One, what comes out as expert opinion is often flawed. Two, gatekeepers to reputed journals are mostly censors of particular world views.