The Suicide of Expertise
Experts are losing the trust of the public. And for good reason.
Much has been made of the so-called ‘death of expertise’ over the past decade or so in American political and social life. In the Obama era, when technocratic governance was the sine qua non of the Democratic Party in power, expertise was practically deified. These public figures – never actually themselves elected, I might add – were the avatars of this newfangled government model, where the federal state, via bureaucratic micromanagement, directed the lives of the citizenry. This approach was seen as the right and proper evolution of the progressive governing style. The ordinary folks, those who, in the words of President Obama himself, bitterly clung to their guns and religion, simply did not know what was best for them – only the federal bureaucracy, staffed with credentialed experts, did. And the president himself was the masthead of this new state, with his very own constitutional law credential to back up his ideas. Never mind the fact that Obama engaged in massive executive overreach – that was totally fine, since he had a credential, after all!
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 on a wave of populist anger and resentment towards this holier-than-thou governing approach was a shock to the American political system. The repudiation of the expert class that was ascendant under Obama was nearly total. But instead of recognizing the reality that perhaps they should not have been so incredibly condescending and arrogant as to assume they could make perfect decisions for average Americans, they doubled down. The expert class did what it knew how to do: analyze the world to see exactly why they were always right and their opponents were always wrong. So we got years of “Donald Trump is a literal Russian asset,” “rural white racists and misogynists elected Trump because he was a white racist misogynist,” “Hillary Clinton lost because of social media,” and “Trump is about to end the Republic forever.” And this expert opinion crossed through nearly every field; everyone with a higher degree, no matter the topic, was encouraged to opine on the danger of Trump, regardless of whether they had any relevant experience. This in and of itself further denigrated the value of expertise among the public.
Naturally, these statements of oft-absurd opinion as fact did nothing to ingratiate the expert class with the normal Americans who questioned them. Instead, they merely bred further contempt. Bureaucrats, treated as royalty under Obama, became inconveniences under his successor. And they did not like this. As such, a wide variety of novel political techniques were conjured up to stymie the elected president’s agenda from outside – and deep inside – of the federal government. Again, this won them no converts and few fans. But there was a chance at serious redemption presented to the bureaucratic expert class on a silver platter in 2020: the global coronavirus pandemic. This was a genuine emergency and people across the political spectrum were willing to heed the advice of the experts, even if it was inconvenient for them personally. After all, what were experts for if not situations like this?
Unfortunately for all of us, the experts exceeded their writ and abused their authority almost immediately. Outdoor spaces were closed indefinitely, arbitrary limits were set on commerce, false statements around masking and airborne transmission were made constantly, children were kept out of school for years even once their hardiness against Covid became clear, and the very real possibility that this pandemic emanated from a Chinese virology lab was declared a racist conspiracy. Oh, and of course, all of these diktats were thrown by the wayside once a popular progressive cause – the George Floyd racial protests – came into conflict with them. At that point, a critical mass of the American people simply stopped caring what these experts had to say, even about something as deadly serious as the pandemic.
Now that the Biden-Harris administration has been in power for nearly 4 years, the experts have re-ascended the great heights of government that they had reached during the previous Democratic administration. The attention they received during the pandemic was intoxicating and many just could not let that fame go. The broadening of expertise ramped up in a way not seen even during the height of Obamamania. Virologists became inflation experts overnight. Then they became experts at geopolitics and the war in Ukraine. And now, they have returned to their role as the lone stewards of Democracy standing against the evil authoritarianism of Donald Trump. Each new instance of expanding expertise further diminished their perception among the general public, especially when so many of the same talking heads have reappeared across all of these vastly divergent crises.
There is a time and place for expertise, particularly when one focuses on what he is actually expert at and takes into account contrary evidence as a potential counter to his claims. It is useful to hear historian Timothy Snyder pontificate about Russia’s war in Ukraine given the fact that he has written several books on the region and its past wars. But it is nigh-on meaningless when he is given the space to talk about democracy writ large, the vagaries of contemporary American politics, or the purported Kremlin ties of a former president, especially when all of those expert opinions fit neatly into his prior worldview. Similarly, most were happy to listen to virologists discuss the threat of the pandemic at its peak, but were far less inclined to heed their universally progressive opinions on such issues as urban policing, firearms ownership, and abortion. And that brings us to the whole reason I am writing this piece in the first place: Paul Krugman.
If you haven’t heard the name, bless your soul; you’re one of the lucky ones. Krugman was a Nobel laureate in economics back in 2008 for excellent work he did decades earlier on international trade and commerce. His theories actually were useful, if highly specialized and a bit esoteric for the layperson. Since then, however, he has become a columnist for the paper of expertise, the New York Times, where he has vastly expanded his writ to pen essays about an extraordinarily wide range of topics, from tech bros and disaster relief to regional politics and criminology. He obviously writes about economics as well, but never anything unpredictable or even remotely challenging of his core political beliefs. To Krugman, Democrats are good and Republicans are bad, no matter what their ideas are or how the history and the statistical data shakes out.
Therein lies the two-fold problem with modern expertise as such: the experts believe that their subject-matter knowledge is transferable to any domain and they ignore the facts when they just happen to be politically inconvenient. A recent post by the aforementioned Nobel laureate is a case in point.
Krugman posted on Twitter/X that he was “trying to find historical models for the economic effects of mass deportation if Trump wins. One example: France, which lost many of its young men during World War I. Not encouraging.” He included a chart with his tweet, showing a massive decline in the GDP for key World War I belligerents Belgium, France, Germany, and Austria – but, curiously enough, not Britain, which saw a tiny increase. This tweet, on which Krugman turned off the ability to reply, is an exemplar of the problems with expertise outlined above. It expands Krugman’s knowledge beyond his remit and ignores contrary evidence that would be obvious to anyone without a preconceived bias on the issue.
I come at this from a perspective of expertise myself, as I have a graduate degree in exactly what Krugman is discussing: modern European history. I also largely agree with his notion that mass deportations of all illegal aliens in the US would be bad for the American economy, although I do believe that the issue is more nuanced than he does. But when you look at his post from this perspective, you realize just how absurd and false it is.
The French WWI battlefield cemetery at Douaumont, outside of Verdun. 
The Ossuary at Douaumont, completely filled with the bones of unidentified French soldiers from the Battle of Verdun.
Let’s start with Krugman’s use of a World War I comparison, something I am extremely familiar with, as I spent multiple years researching and studying the conflict, its origins, and its impact. First off, the analogizing of mass deportations to the widespread war death of millions of prime age Frenchmen is itself ridiculous. Mass deportations remove people from the economy, but in a relatively non-traumatic manner; those people are still able to work, just not in the United States. The French situation in WWI was vastly different and far more traumatic. World War I losses were disproportionately felt by the upper classes and the most productive elements of society; the men who led their infantry into battle were killed first, as were the factory workers who were conscripted into service. These were skilled workers, artisans, and business owners. And more than one million of them were slaughtered on the battlefield, not to mention the several million more who were horrifically maimed. This was a national trauma far more than it was a mere economic disruption.
Another issue with Krugman’s comparison is his total misunderstanding of the chart he posted. If massive battlefield losses alone – just like massive deportations – were enough to crater European economies, why did Britain’s GDP rise? British losses in the war were staggering, nearly approaching those of the French, and included similarly economically productive elements in society. So why did it fare better than Belgium, France, Germany, and Austria? The answer lies in the actual history of the war. The continental belligerents saw fighting take place on their own soil, both in the east and the west. France, in particular, saw the majority of fighting on the Western Front take place in its most industrialized and productive regions, absolutely decimating them for the foreseeable future. In some respects, these areas have never fully recovered. Britain fought across the map, but not on its own home territory. Therein lies the difference.
The economic problems faced by the great powers after World War I weren’t entirely about human losses, but the fact that a total war was fought on the soil of the belligerents. This is why the comparison between a potential mass deportation and the aftermath of World War I is fatally flawed. But in the quest to make Trumpian policy look as bad as possible, Krugman ignores a far more relevant example, one that severely undermines his intended point.
There is simply no need to go all the way back to 1919 and cross the Atlantic Ocean to find a suitable comparison for the economic impact of mass deportation; we have an historic example from far more recently and in the United States itself. In fact, one need not analogize at all, as the example was itself a mass deportation of Latin American migrants. During the Eisenhower administration, more than 1.3 million undocumented laborers – about one percent of the US population at the time – were deported from the US as part of what was known as Operation Wetback. One need not agree with the process or the idea of that 1955 policy to see it as a direct analog to what the Trump campaign is proposing. It was 1) a mass deportation of 2) illegal Latin American laborers carried out in 3) the United States by 4) a Republican administration. Clearly, this is far more comparable to the Trump plan than was a literal world war. So why doesn’t Krugman use this instead? The answer lies in the chart below.
As you can see, the chart, taken directly from the Federal Reserve dataset – the gold standard of American economic research, something Krugman surely knows – shows an increase of 17% in GDP per capita over the decade from 1951 to 1961. Smack dab in the middle of that period was the largest mass deportation in American history, something that, according to Krugman, should have caused severe economic problems. Instead of a major decline in economic productivity and national wealth, we saw a significant rise. The deportation years of 1955 and 1956 saw an increase themselves, with only a few slight downturns after that. If one is trying to extrapolate from history in a neutral manner, he would have to contend with this direct contradictory evidence and either find a reason that it is wrong or alter his opinions to fit the facts. Krugman is not trying to be a neutral expert, but a partisan hack. And he is succeeding.
This particular issue with Krugman is but a microcosm of the major problems with the current crop of experts: they are not recognizable as experts – neutral arbiters of fact in a particular information silo – in any traditional sense. They are purely partisan in nature, often eschewing directly contrary evidence entirely out of political expediency. This is not expertise. They pretend that their subject-matter knowledge is infinitely transferable. It isn’t. They see themselves not as serving the public, but as ruling it. This is wrong and patently un-American. Experts do not deserve respect simply by nature of their credential. They earn that respect and the trust of the public by doing their very specialized jobs in an ostensibly neutral manner.
Expertise of the classic sense is indeed dying. But those who lament this development as being wholly the fault of the broader public and populist politics are putting the cart before the horse. If expertise is dead, the mortal wounds were entirely self-inflicted.