Genuine question. It seems like a topic that isn’t discussed in-depth often anywhere I can find online.
To be clear, I’m talking about technocracy as in policies are driven by those with the relevant skills (instead of popularity, skills in campaigning, etc.).
So no, I don’t necessarily want a mechanical engineer for president. I do want a team of economists to not tank the economy with tariffs, though.
And I do want a social scientist to have a hand in evaluating policy ideas by experts. A psychologist might have novel insights into how to improve educational policy, but the social scientist would help with the execution side so it doesn’t flop or go off the rails.
The more I look at successful organizations like J-PAL, which trains government personnel how to conduct randomized controlled trials on programs (among other things), the more it seems like we should at least have government officials who have some evidence base and sound reasoning for their policies. J-PAL is the reason why several governments scaled back pilots that didn’t work and instead allocated funds to scale programs that did work.
How do you select the psychologist, social scientist, and team of economists that fill these roles?
It may be described as that on paper, but in our reality what it seems to translate into is the tech CEOs making policy decisions, and all those that have actually been proposed are just regulation cuts that benefit their particularly company or industry and actively harm everyone else. So, yeah, thats bad.
Yeah, I agree that’s an issue. In a way, Americans are experiencing that live, today.
What about a variant of technocracy that accounts for conflicts of interest?
I dont believe in hierarchy, so you lose me there. Decentralized government with a centralized education system is probably a good combination abstractly speaking.
Valid. Why do you think education should be the exception to decentralization?
We’ve seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.
