The Technocratic Gaze
This essay forms Part 2 of this newsletter from January 28, 2021, though it is not necessary context, you can just read the first paragraph below and you’re all caught up.
In The Redditors Send Their Regards, I wrote about how retail investors loosely organized on a Reddit forum called Wall Street Bets tried to execute a market maneuver previously performed only by billionaire institutional investors. In the time since, it’s become clear that financial regulations designed to protect retail investors were responsible for shutting down their participation in the market. This gave their opponents, the hedge funds, enough room to stabilize their positions. A week later, hundreds (if not thousands) of retail investors lost hundreds (if not tens of thousands) of dollars.
Some protection.
From a top-down (let’s call it technocratic) perspective, there are great reasons for regulations like capital requirements, which ensure that brokers like Robinhood have enough cash on hand to allow retail investors to access their money and to protect the brokers from collapse during volatile market swings (like, say, those caused by exuberant internet trolls).
But in practice, these regulations protected a brokerage that gets 40% of its revenue from two hedge funds—Citadel and Two Sigma—by selling them data about their users’ trades. They protected the hedge funds from the Redditors’ short squeeze. And they justified Robinhood’s removal of retail investors from the market at a critical time.
In other words, the rules designed to protect them were leveraged to ruin them. The message sent by Robinhood, the hedge funds, and—most critically—the financial regulators, was clear:
From the technocratic perspective, though, everything worked out exactly as it was supposed to. At the time of this writing, GameStop’s share price has settled at $60 (down from an all-time high of $483 last week). There was no great market collapse. The storm passed. Rationality and sober analysis won. The retail investors were successfully protected. Mission accomplished.
“Technocracy” is a fuzzy concept, but here’s a definition from economist Glen Weyl:
“By technocracy, I mean the view that most of governance and policy should be left to some type of “experts”, distinguished by meritocratically-evaluated training in formal methods used to “optimize” social outcomes. Many technocrats are at least open to a degree of ultimate popular sovereignty over government, but believe that such democratic checks should operate at a quite high level, evaluating government performance on “final outcomes” rather than the means of achieving these.”
A lot of ink has been shed the past week arguing about the merits of technocracy. Curtis Yarvin, in response to Glen, helpfully points out that “this so-called ‘technocracy’ is exactly how all modern governments work.” Scott Alexander, while not explicitly defining the term himself, provides the following justification of technocratic decision-making:
“We don't trust any individual human to make an unbiased decision. So we design some mechanism that's as unbiased as possible, and give it to lots of people so they can check that it's unbiased (in a way that you can never check whether someone's intuition is unbiased). Then we make decisions via the mechanism.”
In the case of capital requirements, that would mean that we create a mechanism—the SEC—that has a strict mandate of market stability and investor protection against fraud. They then pass regulations to advance that goal by relying on the latest and greatest empirical findings from economists. They establish these capital requirements based on their understanding of risk and volatility, as shown in the academic literature. The SEC, though, is an independent agency, because—in true technocratic style—we believe that market regulation should be insulated from everyday politics. This mirror’s Weyl: we’re open to some tweaks from Congress, as we saw after 2008, but democracy is too fickle and irrational to trust with decisions like this. Best to leave it to the experts, and to shield them from the rubes.
The SEC is not the only “independent” agency of the United States government that we keep protected from political influence (that is, from democratic accountability). Other examples include the Consumer Product Safety Commission (responsible for developing product safety standards), the Federal Communications Commission (responsible for regulating the internet and the airwaves), and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Interestingly, the Administrative Conference of the United States (itself an independent federal agency that is “dedicated to improving the fairness, efficiency, and effectiveness of federal agency processes and practices through consensus-driven applied research”) admits that “there is no authoritative list of government agencies” but concludes that there are “at least” 61 independent agencies (along with eight “quasi-official agencies” and sixteen “international organizations”).
Each of these is surely run by technocratic principles. We should hope so, anyway, because they’re clearly not run by democratic ones.
Per Scott Alexander, technocratic decision-making is mechanistic:
“Why would anyone ever want mechanism? Why would we want to use formalisms? Human decision-making is so versatile and so good at taking account of outside-the-system problems that limiting ourselves to mechanical models would pointlessly cripple us, right?
I'm a fan of doing things formally. My answer to the above challenge is: mechanism is constraining on purpose. It's constraining in the same sense that tying yourself to the mast so that Sirens don't lure you to a watery doom is constraining. Mathematical formalism is a trick for securing a system against bias and corruption.”
Technocracy, in other words, is preferable to crude democracy because it protects crucial policy questions (like, say, capital requirements) from bias and corruption.
Huh.
Sarcasm aside, is that what we’re after, here? A system free of bias and corruption? Sure, I can agree those are negative drags on society (at least in the abstract), but what are we willing to sacrifice to avoid them? Equality? Fairness? Freedom?
I want to look at this problem from a different view. To get there, we first need to eject ourselves from the technocratic one. This is not easy for those with rationalist or meritocratic ideals (so, most of us), but we can borrow some tools from other disciplines. A well-known feminist critique of media is that so much of it is presented through the “male gaze”, and it’s become a useful tool for analyzing the potentially misogynist construction of a creative work. In the same vein, we can repackage the Seeing Like a State analysis and consider the “technocratic gaze” as a useful tool for analyzing the potentially dehumanizing implications of the rationalist value system.
Where the Seeing Like a State critique explains how technocracy can lead to horrible outcomes, the technocratic gaze critique explains how technocracy can undermine the legitimacy of the solutions it proposes.
We see that clearly with financial regulations, and it’s even more clear with the pandemic response.
“Trust the science” and “trust the experts” are the mantras of the technocrat. In the context of a pandemic, this seems obvious. Epidemiologists have spent their whole lives studying how viruses spread and how to contain them. Their expertise is exactly on point and, if the scientific method means anything at all, they have beliefs and methodologies that are free of bias and corruption and ready to be deployed to save the world.
During the summer of 2020 and still to this day, the science and the experts are clear: lock it all down. All of it. Sure, the science may not be conclusive—these are complex systems and unprecedented times, after all—but, regardless, in science we trust.
Different jurisdictions trusted the science to differing degrees, creating a real world science experiment regarding the efficacy of lockdowns. It was inconclusive. In San Francisco, which had one of the stricter lockdowns in the country, more people died of overdose than COVID. In Japan, which didn’t formally lockdown (though many Japanese, like people everywhere, voluntarily sheltered in place and curtailed economic activity), suicides outpaced COVID deaths.
Governments around the world, looking at the pandemic through the technocratic looking glass, relied on epidemiologists and public health experts to devise binding policy for their people. Science must be kept separate from politics, right? One is objective and unbiased, the other is subjective and emotional. The subjective must be subordinate to the objective, right?
Let’s reconsider pandemic policy, slowly zooming out from the technocratic gaze.
Imagine an alternate world, one where COVID is just as deadly, but we also have definitive, technocratically-satisfying evidence that lockdowns result in loss of five years of quality life per person in America. The epidemiologists, concerned as they are about the spread of the virus and preventable death from COVID, advocate for the full lock down. Workers, concerned instead with the collective loss across society of five years of economically productive life, advocate for no lockdowns.
How do we consider this problem?
We could view this through the technocratic gaze, and do the math. With lockdowns, we lose five years of life multiplied by 300 million Americans. Without lockdowns, we lose 1 million lives, which we can translate into X number of lost years of life. We solve for X, and if that’s less than 1.5 billion (300 million multiplied by five), then the decision is made for us.
That’s one way to solve the problem, but is it a satisfying one?
We’re trading lives against lives, but we have many more things to consider that sit outside easy quantification—whose lives? How do we value lost years of quality life? How about unevenly distributed impoverishment and lowered quality of life? What if it disproportionately impacts some communities? And on and on.
I have some friends who are nurses, doctors, and public health officials. They’re great people. Fair, reasonable. Are they more qualified than anyone else to make these tradeoffs? I’m not sure they are. Does a medical doctorate or a masters in public health qualify you to make moral decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions of people?
Because that’s what we’re dealing with here: moral decisions. Not a scientific one. Not a math problem, not a decision that is more or less informed by one person’s expertise in epidemiology, or medicine, or Bayesian statistics, or anything else. Those things give you frameworks for problem-solving, but it’s another thing entirely to impose your problem-solving frameworks on the people who will live or die by your decision, especially if they disagree with you.
There’s no hard and fast law of the universe that allows us to scientifically determine the answer to those questions. We can make arguments and try our best to persuade each other, but we can’t conclusively “prove” whether equality is more important than freedom, whether happiness is more important than security, and by what metric and to whose benefit. We each may have well-reasoned, well-supported, persuasive and justified reasons for answering those questions in entirely different ways.
So, who can we trust to make these decisions? Ethicists might raise their hands, but they’d be wrong, because “ethicist” is a made-up job. Ethicists are just people who are particularly good at coming up with well-reasoned, well-supported, persuasive and justified reasons to answer those questions in a particular way. But that just proves that they’re good at that, not that they’re “right”—and what happens when I find someone else who is just as persuasive?
By now, you’ve hopefully seen these questions through a different looking glass. As we exit the technocratic gaze, and adopt a bottoms-up rather than top-down view, we can see technocracy for what it is: a value system, like any other. They put the elimination of bias and corruption ahead of messy democratic principles. They put a scientifically ascertainable “truth” ahead of human desire. And (at least as it’s played out during the pandemic) they put certain lives (whole, elderly) ahead of other lives (quality years, young). These are not “objectively correct” choices. They are moral claims.
As with the pandemic, so too with financial regulations. The technocratic gaze we apply to markets—that they should serve the interests of efficient capital allocation, and elevate those expert elites that uphold those interests—blinds us to the bottoms-up view of the market participants, those who care not about efficient capital allocation but about maximizing the resources they have so they can maximize the one, singular life they have to live.
When we see social and economic lives as something to be regulated by expertise, our primary problem solving tool is to find experts and ask them to help us. We identify the experts with the most direct scientific subject matter expertise, we look through their eyes, and we let them call the shots. In a pandemic, that means letting epidemiologists and public health experts make moral decisions for us all—which blinds us to the bottoms-up view of people whose businesses are ruined, whose mental health suffers, whose futures darken.
All this begs the question: if not technocracy, then what? Am I proposing we simply ignore the experts? Is democracy—messy, subjective, emotional, biased, corrupt democracy—really the solution here? Sure, one-person-one-vote is a deeply cherished principle, but shouldn’t the vote of sophisticated investors count more when we consider financial regulations? Shouldn’t the vote of epidemiologists count more during a pandemic?
Yes and no. Technocrats, like democrats, are making a claim to authority and power. They are saying to the rest of us non-experts, “by the power I hold by virtue of my position, I decree that this is what we should all do, and your role is to do what I say, and if you disagree, you are putting the rest of us at risk and must be sanctioned.” In a democracy, that authority and power is legitimized through free and fair elections. In a technocracy, that authority and power is legitimized by credentials and demonstrations of expertise.
But expertise is not self-justifying. As any seasoned trial lawyer knows, you can find expert testimony to support almost anything you want. You have your experts, I have mine. Sure, yours might have better science and so a tighter relationship to the “truth” than mine, but mine are famous and loud and jurors love them. Which expert would you rather have on your side?
Because expertise is not self-justifying, experts need to do a much, much better job of justifying themselves to the rest of us if they want political power in a free society. Like any other claimant to political power, they must earn the trust of their subjects.
We’re busy people with busy lives. Not all of us can stay on top of every last bit of research coming out regarding the coronavirus. Not all of us can look into every last financial regulation and evaluate whether it makes our investments more or less risky. We want to trust the science, to trust the experts, to trust the technocrats.
From the top-down view, technocrats are simply ordering society according to the wisdom of their expertise. From the bottoms-up view, though, technocrats are asking their fellow citizens, with their own wants and needs and desires, to trust them. They are making tremendous, costly changes to our lives—telling us who we can visit, what holidays we can celebrate, what jobs we can hold, what markets we can participate in, whether or not we get access to a life-saving vaccine.
That’s a pretty big ask.
Trust in the technocrats is lost, though, when expert financial regulators adopt rules like accredited investor laws, which “protect” investors by barring them from some of the most lucrative, highest upside investments.
Trust is lost when national security experts lie to the UN that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or that Iran has been “weeks away” from a nuclear bomb since at least 2010.
Trust is lost when over 1,000 public health experts—the same people who want us to “trust the science” and their prestigious credentials—sign an open letter saying “we do not condemn these gatherings [the summer Black Lives Matters protests] as risky for COVID-19 transmission” and then, a mere two sentences later, “This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly against stay-home orders.” Does the science really say that the virus cares about the motivating cause of large outdoor gatherings, that the human intention behind a behavior is really relevant to how risky that behavior is for COVID-19 transmission?
Technocracy relies on trust as its source of legitimacy. Trust, that the institutions that educate these people only issue credentials to those who meet exacting academic standards. Trust, that they earn their unelected positions based on their merit and good judgment. Trust, that their decrees to the rest of us are free of bias and corruption. When none of those things are true, it doesn’t matter if the technocrats “have science on their side”—they are illegitimate rulers.
A core responsibility of any government, of any ruling class, is to maintain the trust of its subjects. Everything is easier in a high-trust society. A democratic government must maintain trust in its democratic institutions and processes. A technocratic government must maintain trust in the expertise and judgment of its experts.
Unfortunately, there’s no special expertise, no fancy degree, no special mathematical formula for making yourself more trustworthy as a ruler. They have to earn our trust, just like everyone else.
Thanks to Eli McNutt for helping me think through these ideas.