The Elite Thinks the Peasants are Revolting

Jeff Guo writes,

On a wide range of issues, bureaucrats believe that Americans are ignorant. For instance, over half of them say that the public knows little to nothing about government crime programs, child care programs or environmental programs.

He cites a new book that sounds interesting. A couple of my thoughts (not having read the book).

1. I do not think that the problem is so much that the civil servants under-estimate the knowledge and competence of citizens. I think that the problem is that civil servants over-estimate their own knowledge and competence.

2. In a specialized world, it is dangerous to look down on people just because they do not know your own specialty. Of course a typical citizen does not know what a government agency does. But I would argue that a typical government bureaucrat would need a lot of training to work in a modern farm or factory.

3. It is almost as if the bureaucrats are thinking, “Citizens, you are ignorant about the specifics of what we do to run your lives. That ignorance is proof that you are not competent to run your own lives. Therefore, we should have even more power to run your lives.”

9 thoughts on “The Elite Thinks the Peasants are Revolting

  1. A typical person would be ignorant of what I do. Yet, what I do is try to win a zero sum competition to manipulate a government program. The manipulations are difficult, they require lots of training, experience, and high math ability.

    If some random person came in and made suggestions of how to improve things they wouldn’t be good ones. The system is too complicated and they wouldn’t understand the knockoff effects. However, that would be the root of their wisdom. They would realize, intuitionally, that the system was complicated because it was rigged. It’s outcomes, far from being an improvement due to technocratic complexity, would be basic failures caused by starting from bad premises and assumptions and then trying to patch over them in a thousand different fixes.

    We experts are “masters of an absurdity”. The rubes know its an absurdity, even if they haven’t had the lifetime of training in the absurd.

    • Your comment made me think of a relative of mine who works in the healthcare field of rehabilitation as applied to, mostly, the elderly.

    • I work in a similar field. To add to this, I think it’s widely understood but rarely discussed that the needless complexity of so many facets of society at large that have been touched by the government is, itself, a rent-seeking endeavor.

      Is there any doubt that, if a concerted effort were made, approximately the same measurable outcomes could be achieved with vastly simpler tax, health, crime and education policy regimes?

  2. Or as Steve Keen says when noting the correlation between Private credit and unemployment is -0.93 over the past three decades, but which mainstream economists assume to be zero: It takes a lot of special training to ignore data like this!

  3. Economist with all the answers would need as much or more training to work in a modern farm or factory as the typical government bureaucrat.

    Maybe you should look at the poll who asked people if they had ever been decapitated and 4% of the respondents said yes.

  4. At least some of the bureaucrats of the past where humble before their ignorance and tried to find ways to overcome it.

    “The welfare of the cultivator may be affected for good or for evil by the actions of two distinct classes, the officials with whom he has to deal and the landholders (or their subordinates) under whom he holds his land. The two classes have at least one feature in common, that they know very much less of the cultivator’s business than he knows himself. It is true that the observant man may, in the course of time, collect a mass of information on the subject, but the process is in any case slow, the power of independent observation is comparatively rare, and thus it happens that even experienced land agents and officials may do a great deal of harm merely from ignorance and thoughtlessness. The present volume has been compiled with the object of supplying an introduction to the subject which may be of use to all who have to deal with the cultivator, not by saving them the trouble of observing for themselves, but by furnishing them, so to speak, with a framework on which they can arrange the knowledge they acquire. ”
    –The Agriculture of the United Provinces: An Introduction for the Use of Landholders and Officials
    By William Harrison Moreland 1904

  5. Arnold, we don’t say “revolting” any more. We say, “deplorable”.

    So the appropriate title should be: “The Elite Thinks the Peasants are Deplorable.

    We have to be sensitive to other’s feelings.

  6. Arnold (@1 above):

    “I think that the problem is that civil servants over-estimate their own knowledge and competence.”

    Just as likely civil servants, “experts,” and academics mistake information as “knowledge.”

Comments are closed.