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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by John Black that was first published 10th November 2020.
The Idiocy of Experts
The apparent victory of Joe Biden in the US elections has sparked wild media-led celebrations over the long hoped for end of the Trump presidency ‘idiotregnum’. While American voters may have only swapped demented for dementia, I too am hopeful that we are witnessing an end to idiocy – the final nail in the coffin of the era of ‘experts’.
After famously failing to predict a Trump victory in 2016, pollsters have again underestimated the Trump vote – predicting a 2020 ‘blue wave’ landslide that didn’t happen. That’s like slipping on the same banana skin twice. And the difference was ‘uge’. Biden was predicted to beat Trump nationally 52-42%. He beat him 50-48%. Trump was predicted to lose Florida (by 5 points) and Ohio (by 4). He won both.
You would think that after their failures to gauge support for Brexit and Trump in 2016, these professional prognosticators would have been humbled into an examination of their biases. Perhaps along the lines of ‘are we accurately recording support for right-of-centre viewpoints?’ But obviously not. This time the discrepancy is being blamed on ‘shy Trump voter’ syndrome. Given that, thanks to the media, supporting Trump has become like admitting you lust for 5-year-old girls, why wouldn’t they be ‘shy?’ But I don’t think it’s simply shyness.
We right-of-centre types are rather clever you see. As well as being wary of giving out our political opinions for the herd to deliver a verdict on, we really like messing with people.
The one and only time I have been approached by a pollster (in the street) I managed to get my political preference recorded as ‘other – fascist libertarian’. Yes, he didn’t know what I meant either.
To truly know what people think, you need to do a bit more than pay some poli-sci grad to harass them with a clip board. Pundits – overwhelmingly excessively educated and comfortably left-wing – need to leave their nice part of town and talk to those of us in less salubrious neighbourhoods. And they need to park their prejudices when they do so.
I have a strong bias myself. Against over-educated prats who think a year or two longer at university than me spent telling their professors what they wished to hear qualifies them as omniscient.
Other than how to open throat a beer bong in two point five seconds my years at university taught me one thing: ‘academic’ and ‘intelligent’ are not synonyms. The highly educated often suffer from a strange mix of hubris and incuriosity. I discovered that my history lectures were full of people who, while taking long detailed notes of the sequence of emperors of the later Ming dynasty that they would later regurgitate to perfection in exams, didn’t know who invaded England in 1066 or who the current minister of finance was. These same people were more than happy to opine on the issues of the day from their very limited data set, scorning all those non-university types who arrived at their viewpoints through practical experience rather than pure book-learning.
It’s not as if history is without examples of ‘experts’ getting it completely, utterly, hopelessly wrong.
Hitler found plenty of German ‘scientists’ to back up his unhinged ideas about racial hierarchy. Trofim Lysenko hoodwinked the Soviet hierarchy into believing what they wanted to – that genetic inheritance, just like society, was not bound by natural laws but could be transformed by human intervention. The result was a decline in crop yields (which had already been devastated by collectivisation) and more mass starvation. In a famous Time magazine piece published in 1974, more than a few scientists predicted the chief danger to humanity in the 21st century would be global cooling.
The ‘experts’ of a hundred years ago believed that eugenics was necessary to preserve racial purity, homosexuality was a mental condition and that mercury applied to your old fella could cure you of syphilis.
To argue against the arrogance of experts is not to defend ignorance or attack the scientific method. Unlike some conservatives I don’t doubt the science on climate change (I’d have to understand it first) but I do think different perspectives – economic and social – need to be considered before radical measures are taken.
Similarly with our Covid response. In an article arguing for the efficacy of lockdowns, our favourite pink-haired ‘expert’, Siouxsie Wiles, blithely passed over economic objections with the telling phrase “I’ll leave discussing economic recovery to the economists”. In other words ‘my narrow focus is microbiology; if you want an economic perspective ask another expert’. How about in arguing for a policy that affects the economy so drastically, you consider it as well?
The one undoubted boon of Trump’s populism has been a challenge to this arrogance. Throughout his presidency he confounded ‘expert’ opinion. Economic experts such as Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman predicted Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation would lead to a four-year recession; the economy boomed. Middle East experts predicted no progress could be made in the Middle East without negotiating with the Palestinians. Trump circumvented them and now several Arab nations have concluded deals with Israel that get us closer to a solution to that most intractable of world problems – peace in the Middle East.
Now with Trump cleaning out his Oval Office desk, the experts may be back. Biden has already promised to put up tax rates, get loose on immigration and implement parts of the ‘Green New Deal’ – with its job guarantees, a ban on fracking and huge government spending. And the ‘experts’ are overjoyed. Proof once again of the truth of Orwell’s famous adage – “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them”.
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