William Easterly on Technocratic Elites and Democracy

He writes,

The problem occurs when some people turn out not to share those enlightened values and insist on challenging them. Technocrats, in these situations, don’t know what to say because they can’t rely on evidence to make their case. So when technocrats are all we have to defend democracy, fights over fundamental values become embarrassingly one-sided.

The piece is mostly how the elites are right in their outlook but weak in their messaging. I disagree with a lot of it. In the past, Easterly has pointed out how elites are wrong in their outlook, in that they over-estimate the value of centralized control.

In this essay, Easterly interprets the Trump election as a revolt against elite values of equality and inclusion. However, he could have interpreted as a revolt against elite arrogance. I think that there is at least as much to be said for the latter as for the former.

16 thoughts on “William Easterly on Technocratic Elites and Democracy

  1. There is an arrogance of ignorance that is even worse, when ignorance is claimed because it allows evasion of unpleasant realities and assumption of biases without having to defend them. It is an ignorance that hides a false certainty and protects it from challenge.

  2. The problem is the detailed plans with so called measurable targets. I call BS on all of it. No past programs have worked, and all new programs are attempts to fix the unintended consequences of past programs.

    If Trump starts cutting regulations and firing bureaucrats, he will be a successful President. And our problems that these programs ostensibly address will not get worse.

  3. Why are so many otherwise intelligent people believing the narrative of someone running for office? Hillary won DC with 94%. It is not because they are super duper cosmopolitan.

    I must admit that even I was taken because I said to myself, you know Trump wasn’t really that against the Iraq war. I forgot that Hillary would vote for the Iraq war TODAY.

    • Btw, if you want to view this as a reaction against elite subversions of Democracy it’s pretty easy if you try. It would also fit the actual facts. We didn’t suddenly get more racist, we got more info.

  4. I wonder if ‘elites’ (very broad meaning, say top 5-10% by education) are reading too much into how important elite-related sentiments were as prime motivating factors in this election. Whatever happened to expectations of personal interest and welfare, that is, the general principal behind “it’s the economy, stupid”?

    Why does voting for Trump have to be some kind of ‘stick it to those bastards’ message? I think there’s quite a bit of emotional projection going on there.

    How are we supposed to tell the difference between motivations of pure (ie irrational, unjustifiable) animus towards elites, and rational dissatisfaction with the perceived failures of the governing class, justified by the personal experience of disaffection attributed to the failure and hubris of ‘elites’?

    • One theory is political triangulation: “See those hicks over there? They hate you. Oh…by the way…incidentally, it’s neither here nor there, but they all vote Republican.”

  5. “So when technocrats are all we have to defend democracy, fights over fundamental values become embarrassingly one-sided.”

    Whatever values the technocrats may be defending, those values are not democratic. Apparently, this Easterly fellow has given zero thought to what democracy means, and just assumes, for example, that forcing masses of immigrants antagonistic to the host culture, against the will of most ordinary citizens of the host country, is “democratic” because the policy can be defended under the shibboleths of “equality” and “inclusion.” No, it is not. Quite the opposite, in fact.

    It is amazing how leftist, out of one side of their mouths, exalt the supposed “eloquence” and “silver tongue” of their outgoing leader, comparing his ability as a speaker to Pericles, Cicero, Lincoln and Churchill. Out of the other side of their mouths (and forgetting that they control the entire mass media, with the exceptions of Fox and talk radio) they lament that they have a problem with “messaging.” Something does not compute.

  6. It would be a great contribution to understanding if Arnold, or someone of his intellectual perspective would essay the subject of “Elites.”

    Best if not so much from the overly broad and indefinite uses of that term in the common parlance of “punditry” (which seems to be an observation of attempts at a function); but rather in terms of identifying characteristics of the individuals so designated.

    Easterly uses the term “political elite” to identify some actors. Are they really an Elite, or are they no more than participants in a type of oligarchy that is called a “party establishment,” Whose members have been clawing and clambering to create or become part of an Elite (to replace something that is gone)?

    An in-depth essay might assay whether or not we have an “Elite” in the sense of the origin of that word. What makes up the academic elite, the financial elite, the social elite – and so on? It is not possible that we have come to one of those points noted by Pareto, possibly not so much a “fall,” but an atrophy?

    It has been noted that oligarchies produce tyranny to follow. the “public” may well sense the thousands of petty tyrannies of the Administartive State produced by the political establisment and have begun the undoing of those oligarchies. Elites may produce oligarchies, but oligarchies of petty politicians (no
    matter their technocratic reach) are not the sure source of elites. So, what will be?

  7. His definition of democracy is pretty bizarre: it seems to be “whatever the technocracy says it is”. This statement is particularly odd:

    “This is most obvious in the case of Trump, who devoted a large share of his presidential campaign not just to attacking democratic norms but also to attacking the technocratic experts who have come to symbolize democracy in the United States.”

    Not sure what “democratic norms” he was referring to, but the idea that technocratic experts “symbolize democracy” is particularly odd. So, it is fundamentally undemocratic to reject technocrats?

    I had always thought that a (representative) democracy is a government whose political leaders are chosen by free and fair elections. Apparently this is wrong: democracy is when the technocrats are in charge.

    • I define elites as people entitled with decision authority (but not necessarily responsibility). So at nest it is orthogonal to democracy.

  8. In terms of revolt of the ‘Elites’, judging by Trump’s rallies his voters responded most to:

    1) The decline of manly manufacturing jobs and communities in the Midwest.
    2) Stop all immigration
    3) It was the government fault like Bill Clinton who signed bad trade deals. He did not blame the economic elite who outsourced the jobs.

    For the most part, you don’t a problem with any of these and only become marginally against immigration due to the effects of Muslim populations and not the majority of immigrants coming from Latin America or East Asia. So it was partially against the libertarian elite as well although not directly.

    • I don’t have a problem with a billion Chinese consumer decisions being managed by their elites- the major cause of our trade problems? As a libertarian, I have pretty huge problem with that.

      The “economic elites” (I’m not even sure people think of them in those terms) respond to the incentives built into the rules of the game. I suspect people don’t hate them as much as the people who tilted the playing field for that reason.

      I doubt 1% of voters would agree with my articulation of the problems, but I think they vaguely sense it. You can’t tell credibly tell people we can’t have a border or that jobs that haven’t even finished leaving can’t come back.

  9. It’s just virtue signaling. Easterly is putting aside his analytical mind to echo the “OMG TRUMP IS THE WORST HUMAN BEING TO EVER WALK THE EARTH!!!!!!” that no doubt is still being shrieked by his colleagues at NYU.

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