In the absence of any evidence on either side of the issue at the outset, there was no reason why unsubstantiated statements for or against the accused should have been uncritically accepted or uncritically rejected. But the statements of members of the women’s lacrosse team were not merely dismissed but denounced. #51 в контекст | | |
The Duke women lacrosse players were characterized as “stupid, spoiled little girls” in remarks quoted in The Atlanta Journal- Constitution, people who “negate common sense” according to a New York Times writer, who were “dumb” according to a writer in the Philadelphia Daily News, and “ignorant or insensitive” according to a Philadelphia Inquirer writer.17 #52 в контекст | | |
In other words, members of the intelligentsia, hundreds of miles away, who had never laid eyes on the men in question, were so convinced of their guilt, on the basis of commonly shared a priori notions among the intelligentsia, that they could assail young women who had had direct personal knowledge of the individuals in question, including their attitudes and behavior toward women in general and a black woman in particular. Despite the utter certainty and condescension in the media, devastating facts that later came out—exonerating the accused men and leading to the resignation and disbarment of the district attorney who prosecuted them—showed that it was the women on the Duke lacrosse team who were right and the media wrong. It was a classic example of the presumption of superior knowledge on the part of intellectuals with less knowledge than those whose conclusions they dismissed and denounced. Unfortunately, it was not the only example, nor even a rare example. #53 в контекст | | |
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A special occupation which overlaps that of intellectuals, but is not wholly coincident with it, is that of the expert. One may, after all, be an expert on Spanish literature or existentialist philosophy—where one’s end product in either case consists of ideas—or one may be an expert on repairing automobile transmissions or extinguishing oil field fires, where the end product is a service rendered. Obviously only the former experts would fit our definition of intellectuals. #55 в контекст | | |
Experts of whatever sort are especially clear examples of people whose knowledge is concentrated within a narrow band out of the vast spectrum of human concerns. Moreover, the interactions of innumerable factors in the real world mean that, even within that narrow band, factors from outside that band can sometimes affect outcomes in ways that mean an expert whose expertise does not encompass those other factors can be an amateur when it comes to making consequential decisions, even within what is normally thought of as that expert’s field of expertise. For example, in early twentieth century America, experts on forestry predicted a “timber famine” that never materialized because these forestry experts did not know enough economics to understand how prices allocate resources over time, as well as allocating resources among alternative users at a given time.18 #56 в контекст | | |
Similar hysteria about an impending exhaustion of other natural resources, such as oil, has flourished for well over a century, despite repeated predictions that we had only enough oil reserves to last for a dozen or so years and repeated experiences that there were more known oil reserves at the end of the dozen or so years than there were at the beginning.19 #57 в контекст | | |
With experts, as with non-profit organizations or movements with idealistic-sounding names, there is often an implication of disinterested endeavors, uncorrupted by the bias of self-interest. This is one of many perceptions which cannot survive empirical scrutiny—but which is seldom subjected to such scrutiny. Quite aside from the vested interest that experts have in the use of expertise—rather than other economic or other social mechanisms—to shape consequential decisions, there is much empirical evidence of their biases. City planners are a typical example: #58 в контекст | | |
Planners often call for visioning sessions in which the public are consulted about their desires for their regions. #59 в контекст | | |
In a typical visioning session, members of the public are asked leading questions about their preferences. Would you like to have more or less pollution? Would you like to spend more or less time commuting? Would you like to live in an ugly neighborhood or a pretty one? Planners interpret the answers as support for their preconceived notions, usually some form of smart growth. If you want less pollution, you must want less auto driving. If you want to spend less time getting to work, you must want a denser city so you live closer to work. If you want apple pie, you must oppose urban sprawl that might subdivide the apple orchard.20 #60 в контекст | | |
Quite aside from the tendentiousness of the questions, even an honest attempt to get meaningful input into a decision-making process from answers to questions that neither cost anything to answer nor even include any notion of costs in the questions, would be relevant only to a costless world, while the crucial fact of the world we live in is that all actions or inactions entail costs which have to be taken into account in order to reach a rational decision. “Rational” is used here in its most basic sense—the ability to make a ratio, as in “rational numbers” in mathematics—so that rational decisions are decisions that weigh one thing against another, a trade-off as distinguished from a crusade to achieve some “good thing” without weighing costs. #61 в контекст | | |
City planners, like other experts, are also well aware that their own incomes and careers depend on providing ideas that are saleable to those who employ them, including politicians, whose goals and methods become the experts’ goals and methods. Even where experts go through the formality of weighing costs against benefits, that can remain only a formality in a process where a goal has been chosen politically. For example, after a planning expert was ordered by a politician who wanted a rail system built to “revise rail ridership estimates upward and costs downward,” later cost over-runs and revenue shortfalls became a public scandal. But the politician was able to say: “It’s not my fault; I relied on forecasts made by our staff, and they seem to have made a big mistake.”21 #62 в контекст | | |
In other words, experts are often called in, not to provide factual information or dispassionate analysis for the purpose of decision-making by responsible officials, but to give political cover for decisions already made and based on other considerations entirely. The shifting of socially consequential decisions from systemic processes, involving millions of people making mutual accommodations—at their own costs and risks—to experts imposing a master plan on all would be problematic even if the experts were free to render their own best judgment. In situations where experts are simply part of the window dressing concealing arbitrary and even corrupt decisions by others, reliance on what “all the experts” say about a given issue is extremely risky. Even where the experts are untrammeled, what “all the experts” are most likely to agree on is the need for using expertise to deal with problems. #63 в контекст | | |
Experts have their place and can be extremely valuable in those places, this no doubt being one reason for the old expression, “Experts should be on tap, not on top.” For broader social decision-making, however, experts are no substitute for systemic processes which engage innumerable factors on which no given individual can possibly be expert, and engage the 99 percent of consequential knowledge scattered in fragments among the population at large and coordinated systemically during the process of their mutual accommodations to one another’s demand and supply. #64 в контекст | | |
The simple fact that central planners in the Soviet Union had more than 24 million prices to set22 shows the absurdity of the task undertaken by central planning. That central planning has failed repeatedly in countries around the world, among both democracies and dictatorships, can hardly be surprising because the central planners could not possibly be experts—or even competent—on all the things under their control. The fact that central planning was abandoned by country after country in the late twentieth century—even in countries with communist or socialist governments—suggests the depth and undeniability of that failure. #65 в контекст | | |
Economic central planning is just one aspect of top-down social engineering in general, but bad outcomes in other fields are not always so blatantly obvious, so readily quantifiable, and so undeniable as in the economy, though these other social outcomes may be just as bad or worse.23 While lawyers and judges are experts on legal principles, and have valuable roles to play within their expertise, both have over the years increasingly moved beyond those roles to using law “as an instrument of social change”— which is to say, making amateur decisions on complex matters extending far beyond the narrow boundaries of their professional expertise. Moreover, the consensus of like-minded experts on matters beyond their expertise has emboldened many legal experts—like experts in other fields—to imagine that the difference between their elite group perceptions and those of other people is almost axiomatically a difference between knowledgeable people and the uninformed masses. #66 в контекст | | |
Among the many examples of this attitude was a 1960s judicial conference where a retired police commissioner attempted to explain to the judges and law professors present how the courts’ recent expansions of criminals’ legal rights undermined the effectiveness of law enforcement. Among those present were Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan and Chief Justice Earl Warren, both of whom remained “stony-faced” during the police commissioner’s presentation, according to a New York Times account, but later “roared with laughter” after a law professor arose to pour ridicule on what the police commissioner had just said.24 Yet such scornful dismissal was not based on any factual evidence—and evidence subsequently accumulating over the years made painfully clear that law enforcement was in fact breaking down, to an accompanying skyrocketing of crime rates. #67 в контекст | | |
Prior to the revolution in judicial interpretations of criminal law in the early 1960s, the murder rate in the United States had been going down for decades, and was by 1961 less than half of what it had been back in 1933.25 But this long downward trend in murder rates suddenly reversed during the 1960s, and by 1974 the murder rate was double what it was in 1961.26 Yet here, as elsewhere, the first-hand observations and years of personal day-to-day experience—in this case, by a retired police commissioner—were not merely dismissed but ridiculed by people who relied instead on shared but unsubstantiated assumptions among the elite. Neither this issue nor this episode was unique as an example of those with the vision of the anointed scornfully dismissing alternative views instead of answering them. #68 в контекст | | |
