Government Technocrats Produce Bad Policy, Inflate Government and Undermine Democracy

[Theodarzna]

The notion of progress comes from an interbreeding of Left-leaning social theory, Darwinian biological ideas and Marxism. It holds that, as there is progress in biology given the perpetual evolution of successful organisms which adapt to suit the changing demands of their environment, so too is there progress in human society as it develops from one state to another, better one. This is an echo of Marxist theory, which sees the organisation of political units as proceeding in a more or less staggered fashion towards the rule of the proletariat as each system of social organisation leads inexorably to a preferable next. It is relevant that both of these approaches are intrinsically atheistic, in that they reject the concept of fixity in the nature of man. The eternal doctrines of a church rely upon the fact that human nature, and therefore right actions, are unchanging. In contrast the progressive believes that humanity can become better as time goes by and that, as such, morality is and should be constantly in a state of evolution and change. The progressive viewpoint, in other words, embraces change as both desirable and necessary for successful societies and rejects the notion of omnipotence and of the permanent right answer in so doing. I would argue that the doctrine of progress is the single most powerful idea in Western political thought at present.

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The prevalence of academics and civil service career specialists in positions of influence is extremely important for public policy. For a start, it explains the disconnection between public and political perception of problems. An academic takes two approaches to winning an argument – either they appeal to numeric evidence as a proof, or they appeal to other authorities as a validation. This feature of academic life has translated directly into political life where ministers cite either the opinions of institutions or survey data as proofs for their policy. This approach is fundamentally incapable of delivering responsive governance or of understanding the people governed because it cannot engage with the moral and emotional prisms through which normal people think. Again, it is also an intrinsically atheistic point of view as it must assume that everything which matters can be measured and that the intangible is entirely incidental.

To see why this doesn’t work, take immigration. The institutional common knowledge is that immigration is a very good thing. This can be confidently asserted by numbers – immigrant communities in the UK have, on the whole, higher employment ratios that the indigenous population, they enter the workforce at a young age thus reducing the dependency ratio, they make substantial spending and investment contributions to UK PLC, they make up a large portion of the workforce in our most export facing industry – financial services. To say all this, however, misses a large part of the point. People will die for their country, they bond with it, or at least some of them do, on a deep level that is a stranger to the rule of workplace ratios. Those who object to immigration do so because, to paraphrase Christopher Caldwell, they ask if a country can be the same with different people in it, and if not, they wonder whether something they love is being taken from them. My point is not that one is right and the other is wrong, but rather that the language through which the government communicates with the governed is indecipherable to them thanks to academic capture and is therefore fundamentally causative of a democratic deficit.

The second problem caused by academic and career capture is that the complexity of the world and of policy making must be reduced to a model. No model can accurately predict either human or market behaviour, and many rest on fundamental assumptions which immediately render them nonsensical when given any real world application. People are rather good (or some of them are anyway) at absorbing and interpreting and weighting the myriad different pieces of information that they encounter and converting these into action. Yet, wisdom such as this is hard to measure. On the other hand, those who have spent their whole lives working or studying one particular, non-technical area (political science, many forms of economics) feel a powerful incentive to entrench their position as decision makers within that discipline. To do so, they must codify that discipline and render it in models – this way it is something that has to be studied, rather than something which can be felt; in this way, outsiders who are perhaps more gifted are excluded.

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TL;DR... Ideas that would provoke derision were they placed in layman’s terms are passed into law cloaked in the language of the academic and carrying the sword of progress. Technocrats, by their very nature, have no real concern for the consequences of their theoretical ideas and solutions and are incapable of grappling with losses that are not strictly tangible. More over, because Technocrats come from an elite class they are biased in favor of that classes interests and more importantly with perpetuating their own relevance by masking issues and problems in complexity.

[Kapadons]

I just came here to say - Welcome back, Theo. Trust your break was satisfying.



Carry on.

[Theodarzna]

The debate between “Remainers” and “Leavers” over the United Kingdom’s referendum on 23 June 2016 about European Union membership focused on several themes. I list what I think are the four most important: the first being democracy and sovereignty; the second being alleged good or bad economic consequences; immigration; and finally, cultural ties and cosmopolitanism. Here I argue that this referendum illustrates a central debate in political philosophy about the relation of the individual to the state.

In the referendum itself, a slim majority, 52% to 48%, voted for the UK to leave the EU, the so-called “Brexit”. It’s worth adding that the EU and its constituent parts should be distinguished from a number of other European supranational bodies, such as the Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. I was undecided about the vote. In the end, I did not vote, although I leaned slightly towards Remain, thinking the potential economic downside of Brexit outweighed the democratic and accountability deficit of the UK’s remaining in the EU.

There are compelling considerations on both sides. Sadly, the last two weeks have seen outbursts of anger from some Remain voters: working-class voters demonized and libeled, even called “monkeys”; old people told they should not be allowed to vote; a democratic referendum being dismissed with demands for another referendum — maybe there ought to be endless referenda until the demands of one side are met?

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Of course the ultimate irony is that its typically the Left that stands against Democracy now, even whilst having cloaked itself in the banner of Democracy for over a century now, they have thrown it away very quickly. In general you can see this both in the UK and the US. The Democrats themselves are often proud to embrace "Technocracy," and even in my own state one Senatorial candidate of note will even proudly call herself as such.

How Ironic that its the lefties who now hate voting and voters.