Yesterday when I appeared on The Drum, there was some sort of wunderkind, Eric Knight, spruiking his new book. (Who says the ABC does not carry adverstising?)
Now I was in the kennel in Melbourne, unable to see anything. (I call the camera there, with its little red light, Wilson. He is the strong, silent type.)
But I thought I heard Eric Knight say that we must get to the stage where we (the great unwashed masses, I guess) must devolve decision-making to the experts. I tried to interrupt but to no avail.
I THINK NOT. If it were not for the common sense of the most of us, we would be in a real pickle. After all, experts, including the Left’s beloved JMK were firm believers in the science of eugenics. (They were EXPERTS.) Knight has clearly never heard about the wisdom of crowds.
Just to prove that ‘experts’ get it wrong, the ABC (no, I am not joking) is carrying this story this morning:
Himalayan glaciers and ice caps that supply water to more than a billion people in Asia are losing mass up to 10 times less quickly than once feared, according to a new study.
Based on an improved analysis of satellite data from 2003 to 2010, the findings offer a reprieve for a region already feeling the impacts of global warming.
But they do not mean that the threat of disruptive change has disappeared, the researchers warn.
“The good news is that the glaciers are not losing mass as fast as we thought,” says Professor Tad Pfeffer of the University of Colorado‘s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and a co-author of the study.
“The bad news is that they are still losing a lot of water. There is still definitely a serious problem for the Himalayas.”
Much of that loss, it turns out, is taking place in the huge plains immediately south of the towering mountain range, where pumping from wells is draining ancient aquifers far faster than precipitation can replenish them.
Earlier estimates, also based on satellite data, mistakenly attributed much of the draining of these water tables to glacier melt-off, says Pfeffer.
Other calculations now thought to be off the mark were based on scaled-up extrapolations from lower-elevation glaciers that were more accessible to observation, but also more subject to warming trends.
I enjoyed that segment Judith.
Not least for the cpomplete lack of self-awareness of young Eric.
But I nearly cracked up with Bernard Keane’s expressing his lone libertarian view which apprently means he can self-describe himself ‘libertarian’.
Brenard allows his child to walk to and from school in Canberra.
Apparently Bernard deduces he is therefore a libertarian whilst being one of the most extreme leftwing statist political writers in Australia today.
In fact Keane has become more extreme over the past 5 years and it’s now possible now that nasty fatso Rundle from the same stable is no longer their most radical leftist
JamesK
10 Feb 12 at 10:39 am
Here’s where I say that devolving decision making to those deemed fit is a specific form of ideological fascism, and then a bunch of people say “That’s not Fascism because I like it and I’m not a Fascist.”
wreckage
10 Feb 12 at 10:40 am
Judith, what you’re criticising is the value of technocracy. (if anyone has another -ocracy that is more accurate then feel free to jump in)
When you criticise this world-view, some people – mostly its adherents – believe you’re being populist and anti-intellectual.
“Democracy is majoritarianism,” they say.
It’s true that populists would agree with you, but the technocrats are wrong. The big reason they’re wrong is that technocrats suffer from the systematic bias of having an illusion of complete knowledge. It takes a lot of work to remind oneself that there are things you don’t know – that there are, in Rumsfeld’s terminology – unknown unknowns.
Technocrats are in love with their domains of expertise, and, like all experts, see the world through those domains, and overestimate their value. The old saying ‘when all you own is a hammer the world looks like a nail’ is true here. It’s true for all of us.
This brings us to the second reason technocracy doesn’t work: it’s not distributed enough. Technocratists (if you’ll excuse the coinage) underestimate the total amount of knowledge and wisdom contained in an educated post-industrial society, just as they over-estimate the ability of technocrats to manage society and, well, the world at large.
Technocracy can get things done, of course. We have major works from the pyramids to the Snowy Mountains scheme to attest to that. But the world over – including Australia – is littered with the failures of technocratic dreams. This doesn’t just include the disaster of social engineering experiments such as China’s one-child policy or the wreckage of communism across North Central Asia, it includes disused train lines, failed technology parks, various town planning errors (witness the social housing problems in the UK or the astronomical price of housing across Australia’s cities), as well as protections against disasters that have never occurred and will never eventuate.
daddy dave
10 Feb 12 at 11:00 am
I think Infrastructure decisions should be out of the hands of cabinet.
There ought to be an RBA like body in each State which does infrastructure and public transport.
Maybe I’m just warped because I’m from NSW.
.
10 Feb 12 at 11:10 am
*being the key word in this instance.
Rabz
10 Feb 12 at 11:12 am
I agree that these decisions should be taken out of the hands of Cabinet, but not that they should be given to a body like the RBA.
We already have a perfectly good means of deciding what should be built, how it should be built and who should pay for it. It called a market. Get these decisions out of the hands of government. Government will only ever cock it up.
johno
10 Feb 12 at 11:19 am
“I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
— Adam Smith”
Funny how this was on the scroll when I moved to comment.
And who decides who are the ruling experts? And how do you actually get two or more “experts” to agree without deleting those whose opinion the “majority” don’t agree with?
Finally by definition an “expert” has a very narrow band of expertese or he would not be one. So there is no wonder that unintended consequences run amuck when decisions are made purely on the best advice of experts!
Eric needs to get a brain because it is obvious the one he has got has ceased to function.
dakingisdead
10 Feb 12 at 12:04 pm
Ah, but of course. The private bus systems are profitable, the Government owned ones are loss makers.
.
10 Feb 12 at 12:18 pm
appeal to authority – a wonderful logical fallacy.
I have a spare copy of ‘On Liberty’ at home, maybe I can send it to him.
From memory
“If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth” and if wrong “they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
sean
10 Feb 12 at 12:44 pm
But who are the experts
The Greens are supposed to be the experts on telling us what we have to do for a cleaner future
But if we listen to them the future’s not going to be all that bright
Warwick Hughes has a post http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/ featuring a paper by Peter Lang one of my favourite renewable experts “Renewable electricity for Australia – the cost”.
Peter’s conclusion is For the EDM-2011 baseline simulation, and using costs derived for the Federal Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism (DRET, 2011b), the costs are estimated to be: $568 billion capital cost, $336/MWh cost of electricity and $290/tonne CO2 abatement cost. That is, the wholesale cost of electricity for the simulated system would be SEVEN times more than now, with an abatement cost that is THIRTEEN times the starting price of the Australian carbon tax and THIRTY times the European carbon price. (This cost of electricity does not include costs for the existing electricity network).
The paper is linked to the blog post
val majkus
10 Feb 12 at 1:56 pm
There were a lot of experts in control of a dam in Queensland fairly recently. Not terribly good experts, so it turns out. Therein lies the problem.
Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.
10 Feb 12 at 2:10 pm
Having worked in Canberra for many years, I met many of the experts and technocrats who delight in telling the rest of us how we should live our lives. With very few exceptions, I was surprised that they could dress themselves in the morning let alone tie up their own shoelaces.
Then, bureaucratic stuff-ups are not due to a lack of talented experts. If you look at other countries where the best and brightest aspire to be bureaucrats (eg, France and formerly in the USSR), they manage to destroy their economies also.
As johno notes, the market – with millions of participants all acting to produce the appropriate signals and incentives – is far superior to any panel of experts.
Art Vandelay
10 Feb 12 at 2:44 pm
Fully agree, Judith. Have warned my readers repeatedly against “experts” and asked them to ASK QUESTIONS. Based on your comments, one more: http://sabhlokcity.com/2012/02/beware-the-expert/
Sanjeev Sabhlok
10 Feb 12 at 5:05 pm
The glaciers are melting – the horror !
Well, let’s have a think about what happens when the melting of glaciers accelerates. You get more water in rivers, yes more usable water for the billion people depending on it. So they have more drinking water and more water for their crops and natural environment. Oh, how terrible.
Imagine the worst case scenario if the glaciers totally melt in approximately 340 years. You would get precipitation as rain. The water will no longer be locked up in glaciers for millennia but instantly usable rain water. Again, they get more drinking water and more water for their crops. If you wish to control it’s flow you build a thing called a dam. Oh no, quick let’s destroy our industries to stop this nightmare scenario.
People from a continent with no glaciers what so ever destroying their industries to stop glaciers melting would be genuine candidates for the Darwin awards. Can I nominate the Greens (and their cohorts the ALP, unions and independents).
Le Chiffre
10 Feb 12 at 5:49 pm
Technocracy ignores the power of parallel and distributed computing. There’s not a lot of sheer horsepower (measured in neural connectivity) between an expert and an average person. Why should we expect a half-dozen experts to out-compute three or four thousand regular Joes, especially if the experts are unplugged- ie detached from the information exchange that is the economy? That’s putting six computers alone and expecting them to be more productive than four thousand networked and interacting computers.
wreckage
11 Feb 12 at 2:17 pm
That’s a nice analogy, wreckage. I’m stealing that one…
Winston Smith
11 Feb 12 at 2:31 pm