Engineering and politics.

Expect some wind to be generated about whether engineers need more oversight by politicians (as in the 5:11 and 5:14 comments at this Althouse post) or politicians need to defer more to engineers and other experts (as implied by the 6:24 reply by "Revenant").  We’ve heard this debate before in other contexts.  He’s putting politics before science, for example.

Perhaps you’ll be surprised to know it, but I am not a believer in technocracy.   At the end of the day, politics has to have the upper hand — or at least the legitimate political process, if not the pandering that sometimes accompanies it.  Ultimately, politics is about answering the question "What ought we to do?"  What are our priorities?  How ought we allocate resources?  What behaviors ought we encourage and what ought we to discourage, and which means of influence ought we consider too harsh?

Experts — economists, engineers, scientists, physicians — who have relevant knowledge to this or that policy have limits.  They cannot answer the "what ought we to do question" with any special expertise.  Their expertise helps them tell us that this action will likely result in that outcome, and that this outcome will likely result in that situation; or what was the trigger that made such-and-such happen, and what we might do to prevent it from happening again.    It is important information, and the answers to one question lead to another, but one answer they will never lead to is an ought answer.  Ultimately, value judgments don’t come from expertise.   And so deferring to experts to make value judgments is not appropriate.  Value judgments belong in the political process, in the voting in and voting out of elected officials, in the sphere of public debate.

Let’s put it simply:   Some of the people who graduate from engineering school, medical school, elite research programs, heck, theology PhDs — like some of the people everywhere — are class-a-number-one selfish jerks who can’t figure out that one ought to tip a good waitress more than ten percent.   Nothing about an elite education can make a person more compassionate, more able to decide what outcomes are genuinely right — or most right when resources constrain us to a few choices.

And yet what is necessary for well thought out value judgments is something that not everyone has:  clarity and reason and compassion.  Does that mean that they’re best made by a kind of elite?  No — because clarity, reason, compassion are within everyone’s reach, if we only take care to form them in ourselves and in the people in our charge.