Michael Greve has a nice discussion of how the economy and much of the government has been outsourced to panels of experts who are not particularly expert:
How is this working out? Not so well, in my judgment—not for the pubchoice reasons of old, but for more Hayekean reasons.
For starters, it’s obvious that the experts don’t have a clue. The
Fed’s pronouncements anno 2007, to the effect that everything was firmly
in hand, are the stuff of legend, and its models have proven lamentably
inaccurate in predicting even short-term economic performance. As for
the experts’ climate change models about the planet’s behavior a century
hence, right.
Even so, expert government proceeds on an implied premise of
omniscience. The intergovernmental committee that decides, under and
pursuant to the Endangered Species Act, whether the One-Eyed Toad shall
live or die is called, only semi-ironically, the “God Squad.” (That
would have been a terrific title for IPAB, but it’s already taken.) The
squad’s reasoned decision-making is one step up from shooting dice. We
can live with that, even if the toad cannot. However, expert ignorance
increases with the scale, scope, and complexity of the experts’ mandate;
and when we’re taking about the U.S. economy or the planet, that’s
biggish. Still, we’re supposed to believe that there’s nothing wrong
with the attempt to predict and manage these systems—nothing, that is,
that can’t be fixed by an econometrician in the Fed’s basement or
perhaps the Mann Brothers’ Earth Band (Michael with the hockey stick and
Manfred with the keyboards).
Hard to say, from where I sit, what’s worse: the dark suspicion that
the experts may actually believe their own models, or the fact that
they’re putting on a game face in public and, in so doing, impede a
serious discussion over what the institutions can and cannot do.
