Genuine question. It seems like a topic that isn’t discussed in-depth often anywhere I can find online.
To be clear, I’m talking about technocracy as in policies are driven by those with the relevant skills (instead of popularity, skills in campaigning, etc.).
So no, I don’t necessarily want a mechanical engineer for president. I do want a team of economists to not tank the economy with tariffs, though.
And I do want a social scientist to have a hand in evaluating policy ideas by experts. A psychologist might have novel insights into how to improve educational policy, but the social scientist would help with the execution side so it doesn’t flop or go off the rails.
The more I look at successful organizations like J-PAL, which trains government personnel how to conduct randomized controlled trials on programs (among other things), the more it seems like we should at least have government officials who have some evidence base and sound reasoning for their policies. J-PAL is the reason why several governments scaled back pilots that didn’t work and instead allocated funds to scale programs that did work.
I think a technocracy would initially be relatively better, but would rapidly decline and likely end up worse.
Initially, there would be some significant number of genuinely sincere people who would be well-positioned to move into tge positions of power, and the requirement of technical expertisecwould eliminateca lot of the scumbags.
Over time though, the scumbags would figure out which hoops they needed to jump through in order to qualify for office, then they’d start co-opting that system, so that eventually, well-connected scumbags would, if anything, actually have an easier time of obtaining the necessary credentials than actual experts would.
I have no proposal for a non-hierarchical system because that’s the exact sort of collective thinking that leads to hierarchical systems.
A non-hierarchical system can’t be implemented. Rather it can only be the result ofvall the paticipants in a ststem (or vlosecenough as makes no meaningful difference) butting out of each other’s decisions.
At that point, it will and can only take whatever form it takes - whatever might the manifestation of the unconstrained decisions of all of the participants.
This is a really good response. Thank you.
I think we can have both the benefits of democracy being decentralized and resistant to systemic manipulation, and of technocracy having some minimum bar to deter ignorant individuals from harming society. There are trade-offs for sure, but currently, we the people ultimately voted for someone who openly said he’d impose tariffs (among other things).
One potential example (among many, many possibilities) is a system where academic organizations and think tanks stake their reputation to nominate candidates, and then the people vote on them.
For example, let’s say the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) nominates a pro-tariff candidate to manage economic policy. And then let’s say the people end up voting for them. After the tariffs wreck the economy, the reputation of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) will deteriorate considerably. In the next election, the people will vote the candidate out and ignore future EPI nominations.