I don't think the point here is wrong, but I think the line that is being drawn between "technocrats" and "political appointees" is too sharp.
The article makes the point that sometimes a political appointment may be made on an aptitude basis rather than a social basis, so we should lump them together. But this is just a problem of trying to impose a taxonomy on reality, which is not going to be productive.
The vast majority of technocrats in government service are political appointees chosen for their domain expertise. As an example, the board of the Federal Reserve consists entirely of subject matter experts, and saying that they are not technocrats when the very substance of their job is attempting to apply technocratic solutions to economic problems.
I think the overwhelming majority of people (although not me) feels that the Fed is better off run by technocrats -- why would you trust, for example, a bunch of Senators with that job, when they may have no formal training or experience in economics? The argument of people like Matt Stoller that we would be vastly better off by a Fed that was run directly by a congressional committee sounds terrifying to people who imagine that the Fed is too important to be relegated to rank amateurs. But the essential observation of most anti-technocrats is that the technocrats are bad at their job. Having Congress legislate and investigate where they can, and get out of the way where they can't, is generally a more robust policy than letting them defer to subject matter experts in areas where governmental action is relevant.
> The vast majority of technocrats in government service are political appointees chosen
"Vast majority" seems like an exaggeration. But your point is exactly the first thing that came to mind, particularly when the author said that we should study the phenomenon of technocratic power. People do study it; that's how we get terms like regulatory capture.
The Department of Defense employs two million people, and literally none of them are empowered to start a war.
There are a lot of experts in munitions and logistics and everything else and job is to inform and execute the decisions made by the political parts of the government. Their counterparts elsewhere in the Civil Service do the same.
It seems kind of obvious to me that a democracy has to have this structure: if the technocrats were directly setting high-level policy, what would the political appointees even do? Likewise, you need more implementers than steer-era.
Broadly speaking the problem with technocrats isn't always their expertise within their domain, but the ripple effects of their policies outside of their domain. The technocrat's policies might meet all of their metrics and be arguably correct within their area of expertise.
Economic policies might seem sound in terms stock market metrics, but could be disastrous for consumers. Health policies might make sense from the perspective of public health metrics, but could be terrible for the economy.
> Having Congress legislate and investigate where they can, and get out of the way where they can't, is generally a more robust policy than letting them defer to subject matter experts in areas where governmental action is relevant.
Isn't this exactly what the technocrat solution is? The technocrats go about their business as best they can. Congress can (and does, sometimes) intervene with new or updated laws whenever they deem the technocrats are not appropriately serving their function.
The issue (in the US anyways) is really that congress has completely abdicated their duty and deferred all work to either the presidency/judiciary and/or the technocrats/bureaucrats. Eliminating/curtailing the technocrats/buraeucrats doesn't make Congress work better, it just pushes them to cede more of their power to the other branches of government and thus even further into the autocratic hellscape.
By "get out of the way where they can't" I mean that the government should simply forfeit its authority and say that this is a realm of commerce or activity where there is no need for government intervention. Not that they should "get out of the way" by creating technocratic bodies.
I agree wholeheartedly that congress has completely abdicated their duty and actively refuses to wield power directly. Regarding deferring to the president, there are two approaches to that, one is to create rule-making bodies that are associated with the executive, and the other is to directly legislate to make clear what things are illegal.
The former approach is flawed for many reasons, but most notably because a regulatory body will always focus its efforts on "pre-crime"; to try to guarantee that it is structurally impossible to commit a crime, rather than trying and convicting individuals or organizations with crimes. Once this process is captured, it serves only as a moat for existing players in the space, to prevent new organizations from arising that offer innovation in that space by forcing them to structure their businesses in the "industry-standard" way. And they will spend the remainder of their time trying to create structures within their realm to enforce legibility.
The latter approach (laws -> enforcement) is fine. It allows discretion around the margins and forces accountability for causing harm, or, in some narrow cases, from dangerous recklessness in areas that have a great deal of potential harm in the tails.
"Why can't the political appointees and the technocrats be formally separated in the same way as the executive, the legislative and the judiciary? "
In the UK, this is formally the case. The Civil Service is below the line, Ministers and 'political advisers' are above it. Civil Servants are legally barred from standing for election and have a duty to be politically neutral. However for this reason the Civil Service can't " keep [the politicians] in check" because that would be antidemocratic.
They are supposed to at most act as an intelligence-upgrade to the politicians.
It's pretty clearly established at each agency which positions are turned over when a new administration gains power and which are protected as non-political, and this interacts with the formal rules (e.g., you need cause to fire non-political positions but not political ones).
Perhaps the author of the post is arguing that there should be stronger checks and that in practice the political influence extends below the nominal line, but he's wrong if he thinks this is somehow ignored by statute.
Even if the authors was mistaken on this point, the rest of the post is still useful and interesting. These are mostly just people blogging in their spare time; doesn't seem sensible to smear the community for a minor mistake like this.
This seems to just be amateur idle musing, masquerading as political philosophy.
> the technocratic Plimsoll line phenomenon is a fact of life. As such it can become a subject of research.
Well:
1) it’s not a ‘fact of life’, as described. It’s a very simplified, Western-centric view that assumes certain things about rule of law and the nature of political accountability and maps loosely onto some organizations, yet doesn’t even manage to address the US or European systems it seems to be drawing its understanding from. In this model is the Supreme Court a technocratic or political institution?
And 2) what makes the author think this isn’t an area that has been extensively studied already? Political science has a rich literature with sophisticated work on the relationship between the administrative state, and democratic and anti democratic institutions.
Seems a little bold to just wade in and claim to have noticed a universal rule of government... was this written by a programmer?
It's easy to criticise, but I'd be interested to know 1. Some key ways in which this model breaks down outside of the West, 2. A good summary of the literature you mention?
It doesn’t break down outside the west - it doesn’t even understand how this dynamic plays out in the west.
Look at the terms of reference here: “Why can't the political appointees and the technocrats be formally separated in the same way as the executive, the legislative and the judiciary?” - I mean, this is laughable. It asks why something can’t be done that manifestly is done in many government systems. It takes as a given though that executive, legislative and judiciary separation is always practiced, which is a little like assuming you have the right to remain silent when arrested everywhere in the world.
As an example of the kind of system that this simple dividing line with politicians on top and technocrats below breaks down, look at the role of organizations like the military in Pakistan, Turkey or Thailand - or of theocratic bodies in countries like Iran.
For the kicker, consider the reporting in this Axios article about the relationship between the Trump whitehouse and the Pentagon bureaucracy: https://www.axios.com/off-the-rails-trump-military-withdraw-... - and map that to a simple horizontal line with politicians on top and technocrats below.
As for a literature survey - I mean, bureaucracy or ‘administration studies’ is practically a sub-field of political science. It’s probably the subject of a lecture in most intro level undergrad classes, and I’d expect a decent political science program to have one or two upper level classes on the subject. Comparative politics might be a fruitful topic to search on. There are journals. This is not untrodden material.
Tbf I don't have time to dog into journals on the subject, we're browsing hn here after all and short summaries are appreciated. But since penning that comment I'm feeling a little more educated by https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
>Seems a little bold to just wade in and claim to have noticed a universal rule of government..
This is, for better or worse, the way the 'rationalist' community operates. The maximum amount of reading on any topic not directly related to computers or electronics is one or - for the truly enlightened - two pop-polsci or pop-phil books. That's all you can expect. Sometimes it extends more generally than just computing, for instance, Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist. But the spirit is the same - almost unlimited license to opine on any topic with the minimal amount of background knowledge possible in order to properly secure the status of being an ignorant (on the topic) person's smart person.
That's not to say it's entirely bad. Sometimes outside perspectives are good in that they challenge us to think in a new way about things. They ask questions with some thought that a domain expert may have trouble answering. They don't work in any particular established framework of the topic, so situating their theoretical commitments because less relevant to the topic at hand (which can also be a good thing).
They love to write and make their opinions known. That's also not a bad thing. But it doesn't inspire confidence. If you're knowledgable about a field and you see one of their posts that's either on a theory that's been covered a century ago (and refuted) or a theory that is fundamentally at odds with the discipline, it makes you skeptical. You start to think "if they're wrong about this, then what else are they wrong about?". These bloggers have all heard of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It's just too bad they don't realize it applies to them just as much, if not more, than to the journalists they typically decry for having no background knowledge on a topic. Every bold and poorly-argued claim you used to see in undergrad theses is now published in blog form - the only difference is these people never had a supervisor to look over their shoulder and question them.
I wrote about this phenomenon as practiced by "hacker bloggers" a little more than a year ago in this comment[0], though I think I was being a little too harsh back then, and ironically, also speaking beyond my field of knowledge.
> the gripes that many Europeans have with the European Union seem to be mostly focused on the legibility rather than on the actual performance of the institution
This is so wrong, I can find you a 100 million euro of miss allocated funds, mostly in grands to technology project under the umbrella of the Horizon project.
These projects are not directly validated by members of the administration instead they pay consultants to do these work.
Politicians, bureaucrats and management consulting, it is at least 3 layers of plausible deniability.
Funny how many project I know that have an EU flag on the bottom of their website followed with, "this project was funded in part under grand proposal X", and right after that, "this project does not in any way share or from represent the opinion of the EU commission".
This kinda describes something I've always internally thought of as the "talkers-to-typers ratio" at companies I've worked at. Back in the early IT/dotcom days, the "appointee class" were primarily on their phones or in meetings, talking. The technocrats were at their computers, typing. I don't think that's as bright a red line these days, obviously, but I've still kept that name in my head and check in on the ratio every now and then when I'm taking a company's pulse or looking to join a new company.
> In any case, the point I am trying to make is that in every state, in every business or organization there's a certain horizontal line separating political appointees on the top from the technocrats on the bottom.
> ...
> One way or another, the line seems to objectively exist. It's hard, for example, to think of an organization where the political appointees are at the bottom of the hierarchy and the technocrats on the top.
This is an almost tautological realization. When people talk about "politics" in this context, they mean in the sense of (pulling from OED) "actions concerned with the acquisition or exercise of power, status, or authority." Who are the people at an institution who have the power, status, and authority? Well, it tends to be the ones interested in actions concerning it. There's nothing that says such people can't be subject-matter experts. But if you lock yourself in the proverbial basement and ignore the power structure, then you're less likely to take an active role in it.
"For the purpose of this article, technocracy, bureaucracy and meritocracy are the same thing: It's a class of people who got their jobs based on their capabilities. The counterpart is the political class, the people who get their jobs based on their political views and/or their loyalty."
It seems to me that this basically begs the question of whether "merit" is an objective measure in a politicized society. Beyond that immediate critique, it is rather sloppy to equate facility with a domain of techne (technocracy) with facility in an organizational setting (bureaucracy), and a political system (meritocracy).
Alphabet Inc. is a nascent form of global technocracy. CIA is an established above-the-law bureaucracy. Meritocracy is a political system, with CPC possibly a legitimate du jour [overt] example. (We do have the equivalent of CPC and meritocracy in the West but it is entirely occult (in the strict sense of the word) and behind the curtain ala Wizard of Oz.)
[p.s.]
To address any possible misunderstanding regarding my comment and view point in context of the operative political regime in the (so called) Western world, note that it is informed by a historical scope that by necessity starts at the Reformation in Europe. I am of the opinion that a political perspective that is framed by contemporary personalities and events is hopelessly myopic and distorted.
In what manner does Alphabet Inc. represent technocracy? What do they rule over? Do you mean that they have a great deal of indirect power over the lives of the people who use their products?
"nascent: "(especially of a process or organization) just coming into existence and beginning to display signs of future potential: the nascent space industry."
It's hardly an original thought that we are living through major changes in societal order: a transitional period. Google and its parent company appear to be the avant-garde of an emerging societal type. We may live to see the day that individuals are born to corporate parents, schooled by that corporation, live in that corporation's cities, and end up working for that corporation. But unlike the industrial cities of the eponymous bygone era, these will be cities of technocrats, "mind workers". This will likely occur in conjunction with diminishing role of nation-states, and a more robust, overt, and assertive global governance that will play the (political/"spiritual") role of, say, Catholic Church, in the Middle Ages' Europe.
This is an amazing start… that goes nowhere. The author says we can analyze the Plimsoll line and then doesn’t except for one case in Google based on personal experience. It would be very interesting to see an analysis of boards of directors, executive boards, etc. But I also see people’s points that it’s not much of a “line” in reality. Take Craig Federighi, Apple’s SW VP. It’s obviously a mix between “appointee” (knowing the right people) and “technocrat” (demonstrated skill working in software engineering). Same with government. Saying the “political class” is appointed based on “political affiliation” is not quite right. How do you distinguish Nancy Pelosi from the average California democrat? Political expertise and experience, which is technocratic acc. to the article. Even someone like Trump, there is a certain “skill” there in public manipulation and sheep-herding. I’d gladly read a more in-depth second take.
23 comments
[ 326 ms ] story [ 2137 ms ] threadThe article makes the point that sometimes a political appointment may be made on an aptitude basis rather than a social basis, so we should lump them together. But this is just a problem of trying to impose a taxonomy on reality, which is not going to be productive.
The vast majority of technocrats in government service are political appointees chosen for their domain expertise. As an example, the board of the Federal Reserve consists entirely of subject matter experts, and saying that they are not technocrats when the very substance of their job is attempting to apply technocratic solutions to economic problems.
I think the overwhelming majority of people (although not me) feels that the Fed is better off run by technocrats -- why would you trust, for example, a bunch of Senators with that job, when they may have no formal training or experience in economics? The argument of people like Matt Stoller that we would be vastly better off by a Fed that was run directly by a congressional committee sounds terrifying to people who imagine that the Fed is too important to be relegated to rank amateurs. But the essential observation of most anti-technocrats is that the technocrats are bad at their job. Having Congress legislate and investigate where they can, and get out of the way where they can't, is generally a more robust policy than letting them defer to subject matter experts in areas where governmental action is relevant.
"Vast majority" seems like an exaggeration. But your point is exactly the first thing that came to mind, particularly when the author said that we should study the phenomenon of technocratic power. People do study it; that's how we get terms like regulatory capture.
The Department of Defense employs two million people, and literally none of them are empowered to start a war.
There are a lot of experts in munitions and logistics and everything else and job is to inform and execute the decisions made by the political parts of the government. Their counterparts elsewhere in the Civil Service do the same.
It seems kind of obvious to me that a democracy has to have this structure: if the technocrats were directly setting high-level policy, what would the political appointees even do? Likewise, you need more implementers than steer-era.
Economic policies might seem sound in terms stock market metrics, but could be disastrous for consumers. Health policies might make sense from the perspective of public health metrics, but could be terrible for the economy.
Isn't this exactly what the technocrat solution is? The technocrats go about their business as best they can. Congress can (and does, sometimes) intervene with new or updated laws whenever they deem the technocrats are not appropriately serving their function.
The issue (in the US anyways) is really that congress has completely abdicated their duty and deferred all work to either the presidency/judiciary and/or the technocrats/bureaucrats. Eliminating/curtailing the technocrats/buraeucrats doesn't make Congress work better, it just pushes them to cede more of their power to the other branches of government and thus even further into the autocratic hellscape.
I agree wholeheartedly that congress has completely abdicated their duty and actively refuses to wield power directly. Regarding deferring to the president, there are two approaches to that, one is to create rule-making bodies that are associated with the executive, and the other is to directly legislate to make clear what things are illegal.
The former approach is flawed for many reasons, but most notably because a regulatory body will always focus its efforts on "pre-crime"; to try to guarantee that it is structurally impossible to commit a crime, rather than trying and convicting individuals or organizations with crimes. Once this process is captured, it serves only as a moat for existing players in the space, to prevent new organizations from arising that offer innovation in that space by forcing them to structure their businesses in the "industry-standard" way. And they will spend the remainder of their time trying to create structures within their realm to enforce legibility.
The latter approach (laws -> enforcement) is fine. It allows discretion around the margins and forces accountability for causing harm, or, in some narrow cases, from dangerous recklessness in areas that have a great deal of potential harm in the tails.
In the UK, this is formally the case. The Civil Service is below the line, Ministers and 'political advisers' are above it. Civil Servants are legally barred from standing for election and have a duty to be politically neutral. However for this reason the Civil Service can't " keep [the politicians] in check" because that would be antidemocratic. They are supposed to at most act as an intelligence-upgrade to the politicians.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_appointments_in_th...
It's pretty clearly established at each agency which positions are turned over when a new administration gains power and which are protected as non-political, and this interacts with the formal rules (e.g., you need cause to fire non-political positions but not political ones).
Perhaps the author of the post is arguing that there should be stronger checks and that in practice the political influence extends below the nominal line, but he's wrong if he thinks this is somehow ignored by statute.
I am tempted to grumble that, once again, the rationalists are ignorant of the ways the world actually works.
> the technocratic Plimsoll line phenomenon is a fact of life. As such it can become a subject of research.
Well:
1) it’s not a ‘fact of life’, as described. It’s a very simplified, Western-centric view that assumes certain things about rule of law and the nature of political accountability and maps loosely onto some organizations, yet doesn’t even manage to address the US or European systems it seems to be drawing its understanding from. In this model is the Supreme Court a technocratic or political institution?
And 2) what makes the author think this isn’t an area that has been extensively studied already? Political science has a rich literature with sophisticated work on the relationship between the administrative state, and democratic and anti democratic institutions.
Seems a little bold to just wade in and claim to have noticed a universal rule of government... was this written by a programmer?
This almost seems like the raison d'être for LessWrong.
Look at the terms of reference here: “Why can't the political appointees and the technocrats be formally separated in the same way as the executive, the legislative and the judiciary?” - I mean, this is laughable. It asks why something can’t be done that manifestly is done in many government systems. It takes as a given though that executive, legislative and judiciary separation is always practiced, which is a little like assuming you have the right to remain silent when arrested everywhere in the world.
As an example of the kind of system that this simple dividing line with politicians on top and technocrats below breaks down, look at the role of organizations like the military in Pakistan, Turkey or Thailand - or of theocratic bodies in countries like Iran.
For the kicker, consider the reporting in this Axios article about the relationship between the Trump whitehouse and the Pentagon bureaucracy: https://www.axios.com/off-the-rails-trump-military-withdraw-... - and map that to a simple horizontal line with politicians on top and technocrats below.
As for a literature survey - I mean, bureaucracy or ‘administration studies’ is practically a sub-field of political science. It’s probably the subject of a lecture in most intro level undergrad classes, and I’d expect a decent political science program to have one or two upper level classes on the subject. Comparative politics might be a fruitful topic to search on. There are journals. This is not untrodden material.
This is, for better or worse, the way the 'rationalist' community operates. The maximum amount of reading on any topic not directly related to computers or electronics is one or - for the truly enlightened - two pop-polsci or pop-phil books. That's all you can expect. Sometimes it extends more generally than just computing, for instance, Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist. But the spirit is the same - almost unlimited license to opine on any topic with the minimal amount of background knowledge possible in order to properly secure the status of being an ignorant (on the topic) person's smart person.
That's not to say it's entirely bad. Sometimes outside perspectives are good in that they challenge us to think in a new way about things. They ask questions with some thought that a domain expert may have trouble answering. They don't work in any particular established framework of the topic, so situating their theoretical commitments because less relevant to the topic at hand (which can also be a good thing).
They love to write and make their opinions known. That's also not a bad thing. But it doesn't inspire confidence. If you're knowledgable about a field and you see one of their posts that's either on a theory that's been covered a century ago (and refuted) or a theory that is fundamentally at odds with the discipline, it makes you skeptical. You start to think "if they're wrong about this, then what else are they wrong about?". These bloggers have all heard of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. It's just too bad they don't realize it applies to them just as much, if not more, than to the journalists they typically decry for having no background knowledge on a topic. Every bold and poorly-argued claim you used to see in undergrad theses is now published in blog form - the only difference is these people never had a supervisor to look over their shoulder and question them.
I wrote about this phenomenon as practiced by "hacker bloggers" a little more than a year ago in this comment[0], though I think I was being a little too harsh back then, and ironically, also speaking beyond my field of knowledge.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22101989
This is so wrong, I can find you a 100 million euro of miss allocated funds, mostly in grands to technology project under the umbrella of the Horizon project.
These projects are not directly validated by members of the administration instead they pay consultants to do these work.
Politicians, bureaucrats and management consulting, it is at least 3 layers of plausible deniability.
Funny how many project I know that have an EU flag on the bottom of their website followed with, "this project was funded in part under grand proposal X", and right after that, "this project does not in any way share or from represent the opinion of the EU commission".
> ...
> One way or another, the line seems to objectively exist. It's hard, for example, to think of an organization where the political appointees are at the bottom of the hierarchy and the technocrats on the top.
This is an almost tautological realization. When people talk about "politics" in this context, they mean in the sense of (pulling from OED) "actions concerned with the acquisition or exercise of power, status, or authority." Who are the people at an institution who have the power, status, and authority? Well, it tends to be the ones interested in actions concerning it. There's nothing that says such people can't be subject-matter experts. But if you lock yourself in the proverbial basement and ignore the power structure, then you're less likely to take an active role in it.
It seems to me that this basically begs the question of whether "merit" is an objective measure in a politicized society. Beyond that immediate critique, it is rather sloppy to equate facility with a domain of techne (technocracy) with facility in an organizational setting (bureaucracy), and a political system (meritocracy).
Alphabet Inc. is a nascent form of global technocracy. CIA is an established above-the-law bureaucracy. Meritocracy is a political system, with CPC possibly a legitimate du jour [overt] example. (We do have the equivalent of CPC and meritocracy in the West but it is entirely occult (in the strict sense of the word) and behind the curtain ala Wizard of Oz.)
[p.s.]
To address any possible misunderstanding regarding my comment and view point in context of the operative political regime in the (so called) Western world, note that it is informed by a historical scope that by necessity starts at the Reformation in Europe. I am of the opinion that a political perspective that is framed by contemporary personalities and events is hopelessly myopic and distorted.
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-mountain-view-new-cam...
It's hardly an original thought that we are living through major changes in societal order: a transitional period. Google and its parent company appear to be the avant-garde of an emerging societal type. We may live to see the day that individuals are born to corporate parents, schooled by that corporation, live in that corporation's cities, and end up working for that corporation. But unlike the industrial cities of the eponymous bygone era, these will be cities of technocrats, "mind workers". This will likely occur in conjunction with diminishing role of nation-states, and a more robust, overt, and assertive global governance that will play the (political/"spiritual") role of, say, Catholic Church, in the Middle Ages' Europe.