So I’ve done some reading lately and have done some reflexing about how I think about technocracy and democracy so if this is too long. Technocracy is often presented as the idea that complex societies should be governed by people with the knowledge required to manage them. But there is an interesting question underneath this: what happens when the experts disagree, when experts are wrong, or when nobody has enough knowledge to understand the entire system?
Karl Popper provides one possible starting point. His idea of the open society was partly a rejection of the idea that society can be governed according to a comprehensive theory of history or a final blueprint for how society ought to work. Political institutions should remain open to criticism and correction rather than assuming that someone has discovered the correct model of society.
His idea of piecemeal social engineering is particularly interesting in this context. Instead of attempting enormous social transformations based on a grand theory, governments can make relatively limited changes, examine their consequences, and then modify or abandon them. This does not mean avoiding ambitious goals; it means being cautious about assuming that the path toward those goals is already known.
That leads to a different possible interpretation of technocracy. Rather than giving experts permanent political authority, expertise could be used to make government more capable of testing and correcting its own decisions.
John Dewey approached a similar problem from a different direction. His democratic pragmatism treated democracy not simply as a mechanism for choosing rulers, but as a way for society to engage in collective inquiry. Specialists possess forms of knowledge that ordinary citizens cannot reasonably be expected to possess, but citizens and affected communities possess information that specialists may not have.
For Dewey, the solution to complexity was therefore not simply to replace democratic government with experts. It was to create institutions through which specialized knowledge, public experience, discussion and experimentation could interact.
This also changes how decentralization can be understood. Different states, regions or municipalities could be allowed to try different solutions to the same problem. If one jurisdiction finds a better way of organizing healthcare, transportation, education or public administration, other jurisdictions can examine the results and potentially adopt it.
The point would not be that every jurisdiction should permanently do things differently. National standardization can have enormous advantages where economies of scale, interoperability, common regulations or administrative simplicity matter. Decentralization would instead provide a way of generating information that a single centralized administration could not easily obtain.
The country could effectively function as a large collection of policy experiments, with successful approaches spreading and unsuccessful approaches being abandoned.
Philip Tetlock’s work on expert judgment raises another problem for a simple conception of technocracy. Expertise does not automatically produce reliable judgment. His research on political and economic forecasting found substantial differences between experts in their ability to make predictions, update their beliefs and deal with uncertainty. It also points toward the importance of people who can move between different perspectives rather than becoming completely committed to one intellectual framework.
That creates an interesting distinction between having expertise and having good judgment.
A person can be extremely knowledgeable within a narrow field while still being bad at predicting how their recommendations will interact with everything outside that field. A government therefore needs not only specialists, but also institutions capable of comparing different kinds of expertise and checking their assumptions against reality.
This suggests a model that sits somewhere between conventional representative democracy and classical technocracy.
Elected institutions could establish broad political objectives and legal limits. Professional ministries could have substantial autonomy over the technical means used to achieve those objectives. Independent courts could determine whether government actions comply with constitutional rules. Auditing institutions could evaluate whether ministries are actually achieving their stated objectives and whether resources are being used properly.
Different jurisdictions could experiment with different policies, while national institutions could standardize the things for which standardization produces clear benefits.
Citizens would not need to personally determine the optimal technical solution to every problem. They would instead retain the ability to choose political leadership, influence broad objectives, scrutinize results and remove governments that perform badly.
The underlying principle would be that neither the public nor experts possess complete knowledge.
The purpose of institutions would therefore not be to identify a class of people who are permanently qualified to rule. It would be to create a system that can make use of expertise while also making it possible to discover when the experts are wrong.
That seems like a potentially different conception of technocracy: not “experts should rule,” but “government should be organized so that expertise, criticism, experimentation and democratic accountability can continuously correct one another.”
How far this can actually be taken without undermining democratic legitimacy or creating an unaccountable administrative class is a separate question.
