This is a post on the glaring dissonance between the roles of those who advise and those who implement public policy.
Roger Federer or Virat Kohli lean on their coaches to improve their games. Traders and fund managers apply the research supplied by their institution's research divisions and finance professors. Chief Executives seek the opinions of management gurus (and consultants). Politicians seek the advise of pollsters and campaign managers. And so on.
In all these cases, there is a clear distinction between those who advise and those who actually do. The sayer and doer are different.
The advisors are informed by their knowledge of the why and what ought to be done, the concepts and theoretical frameworks of the issue. The doers are informed by their judgement of what is possible and doable given the circumstances.
Each side understand their role and acknowledge it. The sayers draw on their concepts and analytical frameworks to supply the inputs which the doers can apply in their decision making. The doers screen the inputs from the sayers by drawing on countless insights and data points from their practical experience, and thereby exercise good judgement in their decisions.
The sayers acknowledge the limitations and narrowness of their knowledge, the absence of insights and data points gathered from the experience of a lived life. This gives them an epistemic humility. Accordingly, neither coaches, nor scientists, nor researchers claim greater wisdom in the application of their outputs than their respective practitioner counterparts. Functional transgressions are rare and not favourably looked on by all concerned.
The acknowledgement of role distinction comes from their respective expertises and perspectives. The sayer's expertise is largely theoretical. The doer's is experiential, the lived experience of doing things. The sayer has the comfort and luxury of working in sanitised environments - contemplating, theorising, designing and experimenting. The doer has to respond to the issue in real-time and based on a multitude of emerging contexts and scenarios.
It's accepted that the doers will apply their judgement to the outputs of sayers and tailor their responses accordingly. It's therefore also accepted that these responses will sometimes incorporate the inputs from the sayers, sometimes modify them, and sometimes reject them. It's considered the normal course of things in their respective areas. Flawed judgements by the doers are assumed to be part of the deal.
Similarly, in the case of economy and public policy too there are advisors - economists, public policy analysts, commentators etc - and doers - policy makers and implementors within governments.
But in stark contrast to the other domains, the lines of role separation blurs disappears in the case of public policy issues. While sports coaches, finance researchers, management gurus, and consultants acknowledge the limitations of their knowledge in its real-time application by players, fund managers and chief executives, the same does not apply with respect to economics and public policy researchers and opinion makers in their engagement with bureaucrats and politicians. The sayers believe they can also be the doers and refuse to cede space to the judgement of doers (with all its inevitable risks of failure etc). The space allowed for doers to make their judgement is scarce, often even unavailable. In their view, expertise has to prevail.
This is surprising since, if anything, given their innate complexity the space for judgement should be much higher in policy making. Accordingly, policy makers and implementors face an objective function whose variables are the technical merits of the proposal, its political acceptability, its bureaucratic feasibility, and the present state of the system. In other words, policy making is the application of judgement to historical legacy, context (read society, state capability, political economy etc), and expertise. Decision-making using this objective function is invariably an exercise in judgement. It's a different matter that the judgement may occasionally be flawed.
There are a few reasons for this dissonance in the field of public policy. One, unlike other domains, which are ring-fenced and distant, policy making and implementation, being proximate and universal in their impacts, provide a much greater space and incentive for perceptions and opinions formation and advisories. Two, there is an entrenched narrative that governments are untrustworthy and inefficient, and politicians and bureaucrats are generally corrupt and incompetent, coupled with the perception of experts being competent and objective. Three, the entrenched narrative also fuels the belief that the solutions to public policy challenges are primarily about the application of technical knowledge and expertise. Finally, the public nature of the issues involved makes dissonance more salient, triggers public discussions, and attracts disproportionate media attention compared to the private nature of the dissonance between, say, a fund manager and his/her research team.
The underlying assumptions are deeply questionable. Unfortunately, they form part of the dominant narrative of our times. It'll no doubt change with time. But will come at a prohibitive cost. Changing the narrative requires counter-narratives and stories that are strong enough to dismount the prevailing narrative.
Instead of helping policy makers improve the quality of their judgement, so as to be able to exercise good judgement, the debate is focused on elbowing out non-expert judgement and applying narrow technical expertise on important public policy issues. The pandemic response and issues related to climate change and energy transition are good examples of this struggle.
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