{"id":1531509,"date":"2025-04-21T10:20:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-21T14:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/?p=1531509"},"modified":"2025-04-21T10:20:00","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T14:20:00","slug":"the-failure-of-the-expert-class-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/the-failure-of-the-expert-class-again\/1531509\/","title":{"rendered":"The Failure Of The Expert Class… Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Failure Of The Expert Class… Again<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

This past week,\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0ran an excellent, helpful, and important\u00a0piece<\/a>\u00a0by David Zweig, excerpted from his forthcoming book\u00a0An Abundance of Caution<\/em>,\u00a0which is, at least superficially, about the coronavirus pandemic and the school closures it prompted. Zweig denies that it is about the pandemic specifically, saying that it is, rather, about \u201cthe failure of the expert class<\/a>.\u201d<\/strong> Whatever the case, Zweig is unsparing in his criticism:<\/p>\n

Without sufficient acknowledgment of the harms of school closures or adequate planning for unwinding this intervention, officials showed that their decisions to close were simply reactive rather than carefully considered. The decision makers set a radical project in motion with no plan on how to stop it. In effect, officials steered a car off the road, threw a cinder block on the accelerator, then jumped out of the vehicle with passengers still in the back. No one was in the front or even knew how to unstick the pedal.<\/em><\/p>\n

The main point of Zweig\u2019s case is that the so-called expert class was not particularly expert in this instance, which is to say that the damage it did was predictable and therefore preventable. <\/strong>Those in charge, whom we were all urged constantly to \u201ctrust,\u201d were either ignorant of existing literature warning of the consequences of the actions they were taking or arrogant enough to think that they could produce outcomes different from those previously forecast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the end, the \u201cexperts\u201d failed the nation and especially its children, who suffered disproportionately from their arrogance.<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Zweig is right, almost inarguably, and I look forward to reading his book. Nevertheless, I would take his case even a step further, suggesting that the problem is bigger than an arrogant and out-of-touch expert class. The problem, rather, is the largely unique American tradition that insists that expertise and politics must be distinct from one another, and that when they clash, the narrowness of expertise must take precedence over the girth and depth of the democratic crowd.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The COVID pandemic is not the first time that the American people have been let down and dragged down a dark road by their purportedly brilliant experts. Indeed, the defining event of the Baby Boom generation is, perhaps, the greatest (though hardly the only) example of previous \u201cfailures of the expert class.\u201d<\/p>\n

Americans\u2019 faith in experts and the expert class likely hit its zenith in the 1950s, a decade in which almost anything seemed possible. <\/strong>America had defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japanese. It had rescued Europe from its war and the post-war destruction. It was strong and tough and, of course, it possessed the brightest scientists and the mightiest weapons in all of human history.<\/p>\n

On his best-known solo album,\u00a0The Nightfly<\/em>, Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen reminisced about those days and the promise they held. For example, in \u201cI.G.Y.,\u201d he muses:<\/p>\n

Standing tough under stars and stripes
\nWe can tell
\nThis dream\u2019s in sight
\nYou\u2019ve got to admit it
\nAt this point in time that it\u2019s clear
\nThe future looks bright
\nOn that train all graphite and glitter
\nUndersea by rail
\nNinety minutes from New York to Paris
\nWell by seventy-six we\u2019ll be A. O. K\u2026.<\/p>\n

A just machine to make big decisions
\nProgrammed by fellows with compassion and vision
\nWe\u2019ll be clean when their work is done
\nWe\u2019ll be eternally free yes and eternally young\u2026.<\/p>\n

The I, the G, and the Y in the title of Fagen\u2019s song refer to the \u201cInternational Geophysical Year,\u201d which was an 18-month-long scientific exchange celebration that ran from July 1957 to December 1958. The project was meant to take advantage of a reprieve in Cold War tensions to demonstrate to the world how science could produce lasting peace and harmony. The Soviets spoiled the peace and harmony bit by launching Sputnik three months later, sooner than the Americans could launch their satellite propelled by the rockets of Project Vanguard. In a fitting twist to the utopian agitprop of the IGY project, in response to Sputnik and to Vanguard\u2019s failures, the United States turned, at last, to one of its greatest \u201cexperts\u201d on rocket design, the erstwhile Nazi Wernher von Braun.<\/p>\n

Of course, most Americans didn\u2019t know about Braun, and so their illusions about the \u201cexperts\u201d remained unshattered<\/strong>. In 1960, they elected a man and an administration that would come to epitomize the hope and the faith they placed in their experts. David Halberstam put it as follows in his classic\u00a0The Best and the Brightest<\/em>:<\/p>\n

We seemed about to enter an Olympian age in this country, brains and intellect harnessed to great force, the better to define a common good\u2026 It seems long ago now, that excitement which swept through the country, or at least the intellectual reaches of it, that feeling that America was going to change, that the government had been handed down from the tired, flabby chamber-of-commerce mentality of the Eisenhower years to the best and brightest of a generation.<\/em><\/p>\n

As the Fates and Nemesis would have it, however, it was the best and brightest who, in their arrogance and insularity, eventually shattered the expertise illusion with their debacle in Vietnam. Again, Halberstam wrote:<\/p>\n

There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, \u201cSecond-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The battle between the \u201crule of experts\u201d and the rule of the people dates, like most of the dreadful battles in our society, to the dawn of the Progressive Era and the musings of Richard Ely and Woodrow Wilson. The expert class they envisioned proved to be a disaster, just as the Best and the Brightest did\u2014and just as the health and education experts did during COVID.<\/p>\n

As I say, the problem here isn\u2019t expertise\u00a0per se<\/em>. Expertise is invaluable, obviously. Rather, the problem is the belief that expertise conveys both infallibility and moral superiority and, therefore, should\u2014always and everywhere\u2014be considered superior to the will of the people.<\/strong> Again, this is an artifact of Progressivism, and as important and insightful as books like David Zweig\u2019s may be, they will not alter the dysfunctional operation of our system until we address this original sin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nMon, 04\/21\/2025 – 06:20<\/span><\/p>\n

\u200bhttps:\/\/www.zerohedge.com\/political\/failure-expert-class-again<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Failure Of The Expert Class… Again Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness, This past week,\u00a0The Atlantic\u00a0ran an excellent, helpful, and important\u00a0piece\u00a0by David Zweig,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1531510,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1531509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","wpcat-1-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1531509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531509\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1531510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1531509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1531509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bugaluu.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1531509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}