Have experts really gotten worse?

An alternate theory of populist backlash

If you participated in our Giving Tuesday fundraiser incentive program, you should have received an email confirmation from Matt yesterday via Substack. If you think you should’ve received an email but did not, check your spam folder and also your Promotions tab. If you still don’t see it, email kate@slowboring.com

We’ll have a more detailed update for you soon, but our original goal was to raise $350,000 and we’re currently at more than $550,000 — including matches, the total is $785,000. Our incentive program has ended, but the campaign will run through the end of the year, if anyone would still like to make a contribution. Thank you to everyone who helped make Giving Tuesday such a success this year!

— Kate Crawford

---

Donald Trump’s political movement is clearly associated with some kind of backlash against “elites” and “expertise,” and the same is broadly true of right-populist movements around the world.

There are a number of ways to explain that, but a popular one is to argue that these movements succeed because of specific failures by elites and experts — and in particular, that the performance of these elites and experts, whoever they may be, is getting worse which is why right-populist movements have become more popular.

When I was in college, I primarily studied philosophy, so my expertise (such as it is) is in the field of butting in with niggling conceptual concerns. And I have noticed that in this space, people tend to exploit semantic ambiguity. “Experts” is not an incredibly precise term, and “elites” is even vaguer. When Sean Trende says (and Nate Silver agrees) that “it hasn’t exactly been the best century for the expert class,” I both know what they mean and also struggle to pin down precisely what the claim is. Were there, for example, individuals who made both of these bad economic forecasts?

Silver’s version, meanwhile, suggests that we “begin with the response to September 11 — the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, which were supported by bipartisan majorities. Then the financial crisis and the bank bailouts.”

Those are certainly major policy failures. But is it actually true that there is a discrete “expert class” that was collectively responsible for all of these problems? And even more to the point, while neither Trende nor Silver explicitly make an inter-temporal comparison, the implication is that in the past, experts were better. And I’m not sure that’s true.

The illusion of regress

Something I think about a lot is how, as a result of the internet and increased competition, media coverage writ large has never been better, but people perceive it as worse.

Imagine it’s 1987, and there’s a newspaper in Los Angeles.