Save Us From the Technocrats

 

I listened to a podcast with John Yoo the other day. 

He’s a legal scholar who knows the Constitution like a favorite passage of scripture. As a result he gets called to these shows to explain judicial decisions and Supreme Court rulings. I like to hear his explanations because he has a way of breaking it down (dumbing it down?) for people like me. Lawyers can get into the weeds pretty quick when talking case law. John was lukewarm on Trump after the election. He's on team Trump now after looking at the last 4 years and probably concluding, 45 isn’t the monster made out in the press.

He talked about technocrats in government and it reminded me of our Tulsa mayor who seems to be one. He pushed for mask mandates and wants to set up a board to review all police incidents. Want a good idea of how technocracy works to undermine official power? Read up on the fraud known as “Trump-Russia Collusion’ for a textbook example. A group of top intelligence officials spied on a campaign to undermine the election and then drummed up some nonsense about Russia being responsible. Then set up a two year false flag operation known as the Mueller Report to ostensibly cover it up.

The Mueller Report was the result of appointed officials deciding they know better than the voters. Forgetting their proper role, which is to evaluate intelligence and make recommendations, they seized the ship and tried to arrest the captain. That’s how it plays out in worst case scenarios. But the thinking that leads to mutiny is rooted in technocratic visions of leadership.

Technocrats like models, data, consensus and lab sourced ideas: while conservatives like to grow the economy and give tax incentives to businesses. Neither vision is easy to pull off but technocrats are more likely to ignore personal freedoms at the expense of broad consensus.  Mostly the left manages cities because the right doesn’t want to. But Republicans shouldn’t give up on cities any more than they should give up on education reform. Large and small cities need reform where technocrats have failed to deliver.

Cameras are everywhere in big cities; downtowns are connected and invasive. What is the point of all the data collection anyway? I’m all for improving efficiency in transportation and garbage collection. I’m for finding out where the heaviest traffic exists and designing better roads. I’m for closing bad schools and replacing bad teachers. I'm for structural improvements and water, sewer and treatment efficiencies.  

I'm against overbearing ordinances and mask mandates. I’m against letting the homeless sleep under bridges and put up tent cities. California’s governor Gavin Newsom mentioned the health threat during his state of the state speech last year (2019). He cited typhus and syphilis, medieval diseases reappearing along with the gathering of large populations of homeless. In San Francisco they are finally getting rid of tent cities a few hundred at a time. But does Newsom, who used to be the mayor there, attribute the meteoric rise over the last few years in bad policy by the city? Since 2014 they dropped mandatory treatment for the mentally ill. Proposition 47 also decriminalized hard drugs and allowed non-violent offenders to get out of jail without any forced treatment. They incentivize homelessness and open drug use by not cracking down on it. 

So why blame the technocrats? Because decisions about decriminalizing get made in groups responsible for making policy. They have agendas based on preconceived notions about homelessness, drug use, mental illness. Most think homelessness is a problem of expensive rents, ridiculous! How many people do you know get prices out of a market and decide to live in a tent? It's not as scientific as they would have us believe. When you start from a faulty premise you get a faulty result. Also these groups (activists, professors, wonks) don't need to get votes or show proof, creating an insidious shadow government. 

What is my problem with technocracy you ask? Not the idea of using expertise to improve life, but in thinking expertise is the ONLY thing needed to solve life’s eternal problems.

 People are messy. We are selfish and mean, arrogant and irresponsible. We drink and drug and gamble and cheat on taxes, we cheat on spouses. Some even refuse to wear masks (monsters!) and disregard speed limits. Adherents to expert rule believe they can change human nature to better fit with the zeitgeist of a modern society. Not all at once, but over the course of decades (millennia?) they believe in shifting opinions enough to replace ‘outdated’ notions like individual liberty. Why? Because what they offer is so much better, just wait and see what we can build!

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (behavioral economists) wrote about changing peoples’ minds so they make the 'right' decisions in the book Nudge. The idea is to suggest slight modifications in behavior to achieve a desired outcome. When Facebook opts you in for some service you didn’t want or ask for, it’s considered a ‘nudge’. You can still opt out of course but it’s not the default. The traditional way to do this is to opt in, like when the cashier asks for your email at Macy and you tell them to get lost. Facebook does it that way because it’s more effective at nudging people to do what FB wants them to.

Governments can also design rate hikes like this too. By say, raising taxes and forcing people to go to the ballot box to vote it down. It’s a sneaky way of saying “Don’t worry you still get to vote on it”. I can’t say if that has happened yet, but I wouldn't put it past a technocrat.  

So what’s the big deal when your ‘nudged’ decision may have been best for you anyway?

 Because why should local officials get to make the call on what is beneficial to a person, a group of people? Even assuming their aims benefit the community, what makes their collective decision the correct one? Especially on issues wearing masks for instance. Naturally you’d say because of the data, but the data is all over the map. Technocrats like to pretend they’re driven by pure science and numbers but when the numbers don’t support them, or aren’t clear, they do what other cities do. Which is just old fashioned peer pressure.  

It’s impossible to understand the needs of thousands of individuals that reside in your city, health or financial. City governments are notorious for overspending and under-budgeting. They have a record in most cities of making bad choices with money. The city of Boston built a very expensive tunnel highway to ease traffic. The project (called the Big Dig) was poorly managed and ran way over budget. At least they got something useful out of it.

Technocrats are people too and come with faulty software like the rest of us. They’re greedy and power mad and use their particular expertise to influence as much as possible. Doctor Fauci is a staple of our news updates now and he’s earned a measure of respect for his years of service. But he’s said conflicting things about masks and the nature of the Covid virus going back to February. He’s entitled to be wrong of course but the shifting in positions should be a warning to anyone that thinks doctors should be the final word in health care.

No one knows all and even with our fancy way of collecting data and monitoring everything from weather patterns to heart arrhythmias, we do the best we can. Decisions from government should be limited and local, mitigating the effects of sweeping changes on millions of lives.

No more shutdowns and no more mask requirements. John Yoo would agree.