Mihir S Sharma: The war on 'experts'

Across the world, economists and other experts are now distrusted - and their intellectual pliability doesn't help

Across the world, experts are a threatened species. In the United States, the presidential campaigns of both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have consciously avoided using the advice and endorsements of acknowledged experts in foreign policy or economics; Mr Trump thinks he is smart enough to do all the thinking, and Mr Sanders' campaign has not-so-subtly implied that most economists are corporate or establishment shills. In the process, both have made unrealistic and contradictory promises — their numbers just don’t add up. But primary voters didn’t seem to care, sweeping Mr Trump to the nomination, and crowning Mr Sanders monarch of the Democratic left.

Meanwhile, the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, has spoken out repeatedly against economists and others in universities who are deviating from a proper Marxist line.

In India, too, we have developed our own form of this disease. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has recruited but sparingly from outside. The only location where it appeared that outside experts would be welcome, the former Planning Commission – now the NITI Aayog – largely floundered around looking for a role until it was taken over by former secretary of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, Amitabh Kant. Mr Kant is, by any measure, a smart and energetic man, but as a member of the Indian Administrative Service is of course by definition a generalist.

Few other outposts of expertise survived the 2014 transition. The National Security Advisory Board no longer exists. The Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council has been disbanded. And no technocrat has been inducted into Mr Modi's team the way that Nandan Nilekani was into Manmohan Singh's.

Indeed, there is a definite climate of distrust of the sort of expertise that tries to analyse problems from first principles; this is a government of PowerPoint, not principles. Deeper, strategic analysis is seen as a distraction from getting the job done.

The fear that the government did not seem to value expertise – that it prized loyalty above competence – is part of what underlay the shocked reaction to the de facto ouster of Raghuram Rajan. The Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament Subramanian Swamy was kind enough to take credit, given that he had run a campaign portraying the central bank governor as not being Indian enough. This fit nicely into the general portrayal of academics as hopelessly “anti-national”.

But perhaps the most obvious example is the United Kingdom’s referendum on whether it should exit the European Union. In the run-up to the voting, one of the leaders of the “leave” campaign – Michael Gove, now a candidate for leader of the Conservative party, and thus for prime minister – declared that the British people had “had enough of experts”.

This is worrying enough when it is said by a random politician, but doubly so when the speaker is one of the most senior members of the Cabinet — and spearheading a campaign urging people to vote in a referendum that would make one of the most momentous decisions in post-War history. Most worrying of all, perhaps, is the fact that Mr Gove followed it up by comparing economists warning of the consequences of “Brexit” to Nazi propagandists.

So: in the US, experts are shills for corporations. In India, they’re anti-nationals. And in Britain, they are Nazi propagandists. This is not a happy situation.

I do not intend to make excuses for the people who spout these opinions. That the world is being seized by know-nothings is hardly good news, and nobody should defend this climate of anti-intellectualism.

But I would certainly argue that it needs a response more substantive than the ones being currently brought forward. The response of global finance to Brexit is particularly instructive — because it will certainly reinforce the beliefs that many people already hold about the spinelessness and vacuity of much “expert” opinion.

You must remember the context: that few were willing to believe that the Leave campaign had a reasonable chance of winning the referendum, even when polls showed the two sides neck and neck. The “experts” gave Leave a 20-25 per cent chance of winning, tops. Indeed, in the City of London on the evening of the referendum, everyone was muttering around me about various targeted in-house polls that investment banks or specialised research bureaux had commissioned. Armed with the advance knowledge of these polls, the big boys would work all night and make a killing — or so it was feared.

The reality was quite different. So unprepared was the City of London for the actual result that it kept the pound high in advance. And, as a result, when the news came in, the pound crashed – the largest single-day fall in the half-century it has been freely tradeable. “Experts” were further discredited.

Faced with evidence that they, in the globalised bubble of London, had so badly misjudged the climate of opinion in England’s depressed north, how did the expertosphere respond? Well, sadly, not in any way that would inspire confidence that they know what they're doing. I was in a sequence of meeting rooms and conference halls in the shell-shocked City of London over the past week; and it was a profoundly dispiriting experience.

Firstly, there was denial. Shortly after the results of the referendum sank in, most chose to flatly disbelieve that Brexit would indeed happen. The politicians wouldn't allow it, we were told. But, as is shown by the departure of Boris Johnson from centrestage after he appeared to abandon some of the positions he espoused during the Leave campaign, any politician who ignores the verdict of the referendum might not have much of a career left.

Secondly, there was misdirection. Many – especially libertarians – claimed that Brexit would benefit the economy because it would mean extensive deregulation, given Britain was freed of the shackles of Europe. But this ignores the fact that, politically, this was not a vote for deregulation and less certainty. It was the opposite.

Finally, and most shockingly, there was spinelessness. Frankly, the pinstriped pillars of the City of Capital were sounding like JNU jholawallas. Everywhere, globalisation was being attacked. In the middle of one conference, when someone pointed out that trade had helped lift millions out of poverty, one of the speakers dismissed that, with a very British expletive.

These are the people who have sung the praises of globalisation for decades. They have grown fat off it. They did not bother to share the benefits with their own poor. Now, when the time comes for others to benefit – such as India’s millions – they wish to turn the clock back, scared into guilt and babbling excuses by a single vote.

Unprincipled cowardice of this sort is not the response to the anti-intellectual currents sweeping the world. No, if anything, it is a cause.
m.s.sharma@gmail.com
Twitter: @mihirssharma