On Experts and Expertise

How to build institutions that harness expertise while keeping experts in their lane is one of the most neglected questions in America.

Half of America thinks we give too little respect to experts. They believe American policy is spinning into incoherence because every John and Jane Doe now thinks a quick Google search and fifteen minutes of thought are just as good as a lifetime of experience. The other half thinks we’re in a crisis of expert failure. People with puffed-up credentials and not enough sense know a lot less than they think they do. These self-proclaimed experts demand unearned deference, seizing authority that was never theirs to take and using it to royally screw things up.

This conflict in perspective has launched a national war over the role of experts in America. One part of America cries out to “trust the experts.” The other part wants to overthrow them. Both sides are right, but framing the question wrong. The question isn’t whether we should listen to experts. It’s how to harness the expertise we need, while ensuring experts and administrators respect democracy and stay within their lane.

WHAT IS EXPERTISE?

Expertise is about how to reach a goal. Democracy is about what goal we ought to reach.

Imagine someone you love is in the hospital. A surgeon walks in and tells you that your loved one desperately needs surgery. The surgeon is an expert. He has a medical education you lack, and years of experience treating patients you don’t have. If the surgeon thinks surgery is the way to save your loved one’s life, you should probably listen. You also should let them perform the surgery instead of going onto YouTube to research how to conduct surgery for the first time by yourself.

Now imagine that after surgery your loved one falls into a coma. The surgeon comes back into the room and examines your loved one amid all the beeping machines, and proclaims it’s time to pull the plug and let them die. The surgeon explains it’s his expert medical opinion that your loved one’s life is no longer worth living. The equipment keeping them alive is expensive, the bed could go to other patients, and based on what the surgeon can see their life simply isn’t that important. Your outraged family objects, but the surgeon tells you he went to medical school so it’s his judgement alone that matters.

We all know that surgeon has absolutely no business making this decision for your family. Nothing in his credentials, education, or experience makes him a better judge of whose life is worthy than anyone else. You and your family, who love the person in that bed, have far more right to make this decision than a random doctor, even if he went to Harvard. He’s overstepping his authority, using a claim of expertise to make a decision outside his expert lane.

Expertise is a special skill in knowing how to achieve a goal. What credentials, education, and experience teach is how to accomplish something others have already done. It’s a form of copying and practice. If you want to know how to do something and get the intended results, you learn from the experience of those who have already done it. You study what they did, copy what they’ve learned, and then practice it for years until you gain an innate understanding and judgment for yourself.

No education or experience, however, can teach you what the goal ought to be. That’s a matter of values every human being possesses that education cannot teach. These questions are about what sort of society we want to live in, what we value, what policies we like, and what trade-offs we want to make. Everyone has different answers to these questions, and all are equally valid no matter where you went to school. There’s nothing you can learn in books that makes you an expert on what other people ought to want. Everyone has equal dignity as a human being to make these decisions without others overriding their decision based on what they think others ought to want.

That’s the difference between expertise and arrogance. It’s the difference between judgment and stolen power.

We deal with these questions all the time. An expert can tell you how best to fix the engine in your car. They can’t tell you whether it’s worth it to you to fix it. An expert can relate to you the events of history. They can’t tell you whether you should think the results were bad or good. An expert can tell you the likely economic impact of raising taxes. They can’t tell you whether those trade-offs are moral, fair, or worth it. An expert can only tell you how to accomplish something. They have no special claim to knowing what it is we should want to accomplish.

This distinction is rarely made, which probably is why some experts fail to understand it. It’s easy to mistake fancy credentials, social status, and economic success as badges of general wisdom instead of simply markers of skill in one narrow little domain. People who are experts in some field tend to get respect and power from it, which they mistakenly believe translates into a general right to rule. After all, they’re smarter and wiser than ordinary people because they have an elite degree and are an expert.

Our public fight over expertise claims to be about whether we should defer to experts. The real issue is when we should defer to experts, what actually counts as expertise, and when experts are stealing authority to make decisions that belong to everyone in a democracy.

THE ROLE OF EXPERTISE IN A DEMOCRACY

Navigating the proper role of expertise in a democracy is a reasonably new problem, which is probably why we’re so bad at it. In essence, we have little expertise with expertise.

At America’s Founding, any ordinary American farmer could learn and understand most of what the American government did. Back then, expertise was mostly confined to the few who read ancient history, philosophy, and medicine in Latin for royal societies. The issues that governments considered were ones any ordinary person with a basic education could grasp, and therefore participate in and argue about. Industrialization and modernity changed that. As America become more complex, by the early twentieth century government increasingly had to handle problems requiring more study and skill than the average person had time, education, or inclination to acquire.

After America couldn’t get out of the Great Depression, many believed democracy needed more expert management. It was an era of hubris, when many educated Americans were seduced by the dream of social science—a vision of neutral experts administering disorderly human societies with efficiency and order. We built the beginnings of an administrative state, with agencies staffed with experts dedicated to overseeing matters within their expertise. We clumsily grafted these new institutions onto America’s constitutional system, creating a layer that was technically part of Article I but in reality functioning as a new branch of government outside the normal separation of powers.

At first, this awkward creation more or less worked because it was small, specialized, and focused. As America grew in power and complexity, as technology has advanced, as the economy globalized, and as the administrative apparatus grew, we’ve now reached a near-breaking point in which public matters often exceed the ability of any ordinary citizen to fully understand. With private institutions governed by experts also gaining power, the problem is also spreading beyond just government. We’ve never seriously grappled with how to synthesize a necessary administrative apparatus with the requirements of democracy.

We need experts because the modern world is complicated. We also need experts we can trust. Increasingly, Americans don’t trust the experts, and for good reason. They’ve failed. They told us to trust them because they knew better, seized the authority to make decisions for us, and guided us the wrong way. If this were simply about making mistakes, however, it would be human, understandable, and fixable. When the problem is arrogance—experts extending their power outside their expert lane and substituting their values for the people’s—that’s something else entirely. For example, experts had critical knowledge and experience to help us decide how best to treat COVID. Nothing in their medical degrees or years in treating patients gave them any special insights over education or judgments about trade-off between reducing infection and harming the socialization and education of a generation of children. They had no expertise to decide whether protesting was more important than sitting with a dying parent.

It's therefore understandable when ordinary American push back. They recognize experts seizing power that isn’t theirs, substituting their private judgments for democratic decision-making, often in ways that just happen to match their worldviews and that benefit their own class. At the same time, that doesn’t mean we have no need for expertise. Ordinary Americans are perfectly capable of deciding where they want America to go. They often lack the technical knowledge to know how best to get there. Anyone can decide it’s important to bring manufacturing back to America, and that it’s even worth some economic sacrifice. Not everyone has the basis to know whether a specific and technical regime of tariffs will actually achieve that goal.

RETHINKING EXPERTISE

The question of how to build institutions that harness expertise while keeping experts in their lane is one of the most neglected in America. As our society grows more complicated, we have no choice but to rely on experts. To maintain faith and trust in democracy, we must build institutions that constrain experts from intruding on decisions that belong to citizens. I don’t blame ordinary people for getting angry at experts who royally messed up. I also don’t fully blame experts and professionals. Humans are flawed. People always think they know more than they do, mistake credentials for wisdom, and use power for their own benefit. The real source of the problem is our cobbled-together system that was never well-designed for purpose and hasn’t worked the way we intended.

There’s little to be gained from debating whether we need experts. We do. However, we must ensure experts only receive deference within the narrow scope of their actual expertise. On questions of what we should do, experts are just ordinary Americans like the rest of us. We must build better institutions that harness expertise as a tool to help us reach the future that we, the people, choose.

What do you think about expertise? Join the conversation in the comments.