Capitalism, Socialism, and Technocracy

An alternative to the Hobson’s choice may be called “exitocracy.” In such a regime, exit would be preferred to voice when possible. This would enable people to experiment, as Dewey advocated, but without attempting to understand or predict the ideas and behavior of millions of anonymous others, as technocracy expects us to do. Exit is not a panacea for social problems, but it may be a superior remedy to those offered by technocracy, which make exacting epistemic demands. An exitocracy would facilitate exit by creating a robust private sphere, enabling capitalist competition to provide alternative solutions to people’s personally experienced problems, and an equally robust program of socialist wealth redistribution to enable people to pay for these solutions. Public goods, though, would still have to be provided in traditional technocratic fashion. This raises the question of whether the critique of technocracy is best seen as institutional or, instead, as cultural.

Lippmann and Dewey

During the 1920s, Walter Lippmann expressed his growing doubts about the epistemic capacities of the journalistically informed mass public, and John Dewey published three responses to these doubts—none of which grappled with the interpretive problems that Lippmann saw as the barrier to an adequate understanding of modern society. Rather than lamenting the mass public’s lack of knowledge, as Dewey did, Lippmann was mainly worried about the inevitably biased stereotypes by means of which journalists and their readers winnow down overabundant knowledge into coherent interpretations. Dewey’s hopes for a new form of journalism, his faith in ordinary people’s knowledge of the problems afflicting them, and his ideas for a new social science failed to confront this problem of interpretation. However, Lippmann’s own solution, early in the debate, was an epistocracy of statisticians, which also failed to confront the interpretive problem he had identified. The debate ended, then, with neither engagement nor resolution.

Public Ignorance and Democratic Technocracy

It is usually thought that the “typical voter’s” well-documented ignorance of public affairs is explained by the low incentive to inform oneself about them, given the high odds against one’s vote making a difference. This theory cannot withstand either logical or empirical scrutiny. A better theory is that citizen-technocrats are unaware that they need much information if they are to make intelligent technocratic decisions, due to a tacit acceptance of a simple-society ontology—according to which social problems are straightforwardly diagnosed and solved by people with good intentions. A politics organized around good intentions, however, is unlikely to recognize unintended consequences, let alone prioritize knowledge of them. The upshot of this chapter, then, in conjunction with Chapter 5, is that we face a Hobson’s choice between rule by well-informed but doctrinaire epistocrats and rule by open-minded but ignorant citizen-technocrats.

The Pathological Pressure to Predict

The premier technocrats of our age, neoclassical economists, are poorly equipped to balance homogenizing forces against heterogeneous ideas, as economists altogether ignore agents’ ideas. They do so by attributing to agents the automatic ability to act optimally, effacing the agents’ need to interpret their circumstances and thus the possibility that the ideas on which their interpretations are based will be mistaken. An error-free agent—meaning, for practical purposes, one whose interpretation of her circumstances matches that of the economist—is an agent whose actions the economist can conveniently predict. Similarly, attempts by economists of information and behavioral economists to render economics more realistic overlook ideational heterogeneity and the fact that ideas must form interpretations before they can guide actions. Thus, the agent depicted by these types of economist remains predictable despite the information asymmetries and putative irrationality identified in these literature. Even the recent shift toward empiricism in economics relies on an undertheorized positivism that, again, ignores the causal force of ideational heterogeneity. Nontechnocratic research in social psychology, however, suggests that the neglect of people’s ideas is not unique to economists, posing a wider cultural problem for technocracy—but also the hope that ideational changes might lead to a judicious form of technocratic governance.

Technocratic Naiveté

An epistemological critique of technocracy may seem unnecessary if one believes that the causes of social and economic problems, and their solutions, are self-evident. However, this belief must confront the fact that technocrats frequently disagree with one another about the causes of and solutions to social and economic problems. One might respond to the fact of technocratic disagreement, however, by impugning the genuineness of technocratic disagreement: if the truth is self-evident, debate about it must be disingenuous. This response becomes untenable once we specify exactly the types of knowledge that a legitimate technocracy needs, for we then see that most of this knowledge is outside of anyone’s immediate experience and must be mediated to technocrats by fallible human interpreters. Moreover, unintended policy consequences may be counterintuitive, not self-evident. This chapter does not demonstrate that unintended consequences do plague technocracy, but it shows that they might.

Technocracy and Interpretation

The Lippmann-Dewey debate might have gone better had Dewey appealed to his evolutionary epistemology, according to which human intelligence evolved in such a way as to allow it to predict the outcomes of our interactions with the natural environment. This would have allowed Lippmann to suggest that the modern social environment is less predictable than the natural environment, shifting attention to his tacit social ontology. Insofar as the social environment is determined by human action, action by interpretation, and interpretation by ideas; and insofar as ideas are heterogeneous, non-random, and inaccessible to observation, as Lippmann held; it follows that technocrats may be unable to predict behavior reliably. Consider, in comparison, intellectual historians’ interpretations of the behavior of well-documented individuals: such interpretations are much easier to get right then are predictions of the behavior of anonymous others in the future, predictions of the sort that technocrats must produce. Yet intellectual historians inevitably disagree among one another, entailing that some or all of their interpretations are wrong.

Introduction

As technocracy has spread, critical analysis of it has stagnated. In part, this is because the critics take an external perspective on technocracy, condemning it for being anti-democratic. This perspective discourages critical theorizing about whether technocrats possess the knowledge that, from an internal perspective, qualifies them to rule: knowledge of the costs and benefits of public policies designed to address people’s social and economic problems. However, once we thus recognize technocracy as an inherently epistemic enterprise, we discover that there is a democratic version of technocracy: ordinary citizens often assume that they, too, know the costs and benefits of policies aimed at solving social and economic problems. Indeed, we discover that much of modern mass politics revolves around competing claims about these costs and benefits. An internal critique of technocracy, then, will have to challenge the knowledge claims of both “technocrats” in the ordinary usage—epistocrats—and those of members of the mass public, or “citizen-technocrats.”

Afterword

The socialist element in exitocracy suggests that the left should endorse it in preference to technocracy. For technocracy blocks people’s use of the exit mechanism to solve social problems individually, and we now have reason to think that this is likely to reduce human well-being, at least until the advent of an intellectual revolution that enables a judicious technocracy to arise. But the grip of technocracy on the left is ideationally determined and is, therefore, unlikely to change—unless the left itself experiences a cultural revolution.

Epistocracy and the Spiral of Conviction

The pathological responses to the pressure to predict stem from social-scientific ideas that efface agents’ ideational determination. Thus, these responses are vulnerable to a cultural shift toward the recognition of ideational determination. In contrast, there would seem to be little hope of escape from the spiral of conviction. This is the tendency of increasing levels of knowledge to correspond with increasing dogmatism. The theory of motivated reasoning explains this correlation by suggesting that people irrationally—but in some sense deliberately—buttress their beliefs against disconfirmation, using greater knowledge as “ammunition” in the self-confirmatory endeavor. The theory of the spiral of conviction instead attributes dogmatism to the inadvertent buttressing that confirmatory information gives to the interpretations that screen in such information by rendering it legible and plausible. Economists’ reaction to discordant evidence about the cause of the financial crisis suggests that the spiral of conviction can afflict influential scholars and epistocrats in the real world, with potentially dangerous results.