The fact that we're not all dead of cholera, even though there are no microbiologists in Congress proves that you don't need to be a domain expert to make good policy.
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Good policy comes from truth-seeking exercises in which experts with different views present their best evidence to neutral adjudicators who make determinations in public, showing their work in explicit, written, public reasoning.
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These processes are made legitimate - and hence robust and reliable - by procedural rules. The adjudicators - regulators, staffers, etc - are not allowed to have conflicts of interest.
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Their conclusions are subject to the rule of law, with mandatory transparency and a process for appeal.
It has to be this way: there's no way that - say - a president could be an expert on all the different issues that might arise during their tenure.
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It has to be this way: there's no way that - say - a president could be an expert on all the different issues that might arise during their tenure.
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This, then, is the problem with inequality and market concentration: it merges the referees with the players. When an industry only has a handful of players, they all end up with common lobbying positions - a common position on what is truth.
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That's because the C-suites of these five companies are filled with people who've worked at two, three or four of the competitors, and are married to others who've worked at the remainder. They're godparents to one anothers' kids, executors of each others' wills.
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There's no way for there NOT to be collusion in these circumstances.
And when an industry is that concentrated, the only people who understand it well enough are those same execs, so inevitably the regulators are drawn from the industry.
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And when an industry is that concentrated, the only people who understand it well enough are those same execs, so inevitably the regulators are drawn from the industry.
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That's why Obama's "good" FCC Chair, @tewheels, was a former Comcast lobbyist, and why @AjitPaiFCC, Trump's "bad" FCC chair, is a former Verizon lawyer. Apart from @scrawford, there's not really anyone who's not from the top ranks of Big Telco qualified to regulate them.
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So many of us saw the photo of Trump meeting with all the tech leaders and were dismayed that they were throwing their lot in with him.
But we should also be aghast that all the leaders of the industry fit around one modest board-room table.
techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/don…
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But we should also be aghast that all the leaders of the industry fit around one modest board-room table.
techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/don…
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The problem with Trump's Covid-19 response is that he does not believe in a legitimate process with neutral referees. The refereeship, in trumpland, is an open-field auction, a transactional process that works best when it enriches Trump and his party.
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The problem of Trump taking charge of the epidemiological crisis of Covid-19 isn't that he doesn't understand science: it's that he doesn't believe in evidence-based policy.
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He is part of the cult of "Public Choice Theory," the belief that there is no one who can serve as referee without eventually colluding with the players for their mutual enrichment, a cynical, nihilistic philosophy that holds that there's no point in seeking to govern well.
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These people project their own moral vacuum onto all of humanity, a kind of cartoon Homo Economicus who is incapable of anything except maximizing personal utility.
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For these people, the existence of bridges that don't fall down and water that doesn't give you cholera are lucky accidents, not results of sound policy and careful truth-seeking. They reason that since they would take bribes to poison the water of Flint, so would everyone.
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Trump isn't just a non-expert, he's an ignoranamus, but that's not the problem. The problem is that he is a nihilist, someone who doesn't believe that truth-seeking is even possible.
/eof
/eof
