Expertise is Overated (On Average)

The recent hoopla surrounding Brexit has shined a dusty mote through the Overton Window. The media narrative surrounding Brexit consists mostly of an expert consensus that a Brexit would be disastrous for the UK. Let's unpackage this a little bit.

First, the Overton Window of acceptable political discourse in the UK appears to share commonality with the media narrative across the pond: politics is run by experts. Like a Matryoshka doll, we unpackage this idea and find another, smaller idea: politics, and the social sciences in general, are as a boat in a predictable sea of causation and experts are the captain who steers the till.

We could stop at this adorable, smaller Russian doll; but, then, we would deprive ourselves of smaller, more adorable dolls.

A politician or political consultant gains expertise by obtaining the necessary credentials; the necessary credentials are legitimate because the social sciences are, like physics, subject to the regular concatenation of natural phenomena; and, to tie up this memeplex in a nice bow, those credentialed at the most prestigious schools for social sciences are the experts who steer the worlds economic and political policies.

Thus, we arrive at the final doll: an adorable technocrat: a Harvard grad who spent time in the London School of Economics, did a stint at Goldman and is now an unelected official of a central bank or supranational entity like the UN or EU. While the technocrat is the height of expertise, there are many who would aspire to this position, but fall short. The opinion of these people (professors of economics, pundits at popular newspapers, talking heads, bureaucrats, etc...) still carries expert weight and when the opinions of all the experts reach critical mass, we reach the black hole of the social sciences: consensus.

The alternative view to technocracy, and a view that is outside the frame of the Overton Window, is that individual humans are the subject of the social sciences. The ideas that animate human actions are currently unmeasurable and by introspection we find that our own motivations are a complicated mess of competing interests. While humans in general display trends, they remain a rather unpredictable subject in contrast to the movement of particles in a vacuum whose interactions exhibit such regularity that we refer to theories of their behavior in some cases as laws.

Gravity, electromagnetism and mechanics are enough understood to the point that our complex society relies on the laws of their behavior remaining static. If gravity changed tomorrow, or oppositely charged particles no longer attracted, we would find chaos now ruled where order once did.

Conversely, if humans in my general vicinity tomorrow decide that aviator sunglasses are posh again, a new trend in human behavior has developed in favor of an older one. The individual human actions that create the market for sunglasses will respond by decreasing the availability of Wayfarers and increase the availability of aviators. If bomber jackets came to be preferred as well, we would all look like pilots in a very brief period of time.

What does this have to do with Brexit? If I google sunglasses, I am gifted with 174,000,000 results. If I click on one of the first links to Zappos, I am offered the option of browsing sunglasses by the geometric shape of my face. There are a lot of individuals interested in satisfying my need for sunglasses and it would behoove them greatly to know what I wanted before I did. The number of participants in the market makes evident the fact that very few people are successfully predicting and monopolizing the market for sunglasses. This is basically true for most markets, and is true in general about the predictability of human action.

In short: politicians, economists and pundits do not know what the consequences of Brexit would be. If they did, they would be billionaires and likely to be uninterested in trying convince other people of what they already knew: individual human action is impossible to predict and you'd be lucky to spot a trend.