[governance] The danger of blindly trusting the technocrats

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

Equally, people with purely a policy or political background are going to be just as poor in predicting consequences.  Either due to a lack of awareness of operational reality, or a skewed perspective, or both.

There are comparatively very few people with both technical AND policy knowledge, and while the cross fertilization between these two streams happens, it doesn't happen as often as I would wish .. and at least in some sections of civil society's eyes such cross fertilization produces "tainted" people.  

You know .. suspect corporations of mens rea, suspect people who associate with or work for those corporations as being evil corporate stooges who are only working for their employer's selfish interests etc etc, one false premise built on another till a very shaky pyramid of pure hostility takes shape.

--srs (iPad)

On 26-May-2013, at 14:02, Roland Perry <roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:

> In message <018b01ce59e0$e04fde00$a0ef9a00$@gmail.com>, at 10:15:31 on Sun, 26 May 2013, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> writes
>> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/the-danger-of-blin
>> dly-trusting-the-technocrats/article12106081/#dashboard/follows/
>> 
>> Worth taking a look at (and thinking through the relevance of) the
>> underlying paper http://www.nber.org/papers/w18921.pdf?new_window=1 whose
>> central argument is that successful policy (both in terms of social equity
>> but also in terms of economic benefit) is ultimately about finding political
>> solutions rather than relying on technical ones.
>> 
>> Perhaps of equal relevance in IG as in economic policy.
> 
> Technocrats are very poor at predicting unintended consequences. That may sound like a truism, but it's often possible for a fresh pair of less rosy-spectacled eyes to spot a drawback that the original team didn't. And the "team" can be quite a big one.
> -- 
> Roland Perry
> 
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