 The commodification of social design is extremely dangerous. I'm Rob Johnson, President of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Expertise is a service that is provided by someone, whether they have training or unusual talent, and illuminate or explain with the intention of improving things for humankind. There were times during the New Deal where people were quite distressed, and Franklin Roosevelt's administration came in with a different perspective on what to do, and people found the experience that came from those insights to broad and prosperity, though not completely, they didn't do much for people of color in those times, but they were moving forward and people then gained higher regard for government. It's often the case that expertise exists in tension with the personal prestige or the personal financial compensation of the so-called expert, and then the question becomes, are you illuminating things for the public good, or are you marketing things for power? And when that suspicion arises, there is very, very treacherous terrain because there may be complex processes in society where we need expertise, but nobody trusts that people are truly working for the common good. They think they're bag men, they're working for their own personal self-aggrandizement or wallet. People are pretending people with high levels of mathematical and statistical skill will pull on the rocket scientists, could come to private sector firms, and they could manage the mathematics and statistics of what the risk of the portfolio was. And the suggestion, of course, was that governments who monitored or investigated or curtailed the freedom of the financial firms were merely inefficient. But when the great financial crisis happened and we spent over $800 billion in the United States alone to bail out the people who had made the mistakes, it created demoralization. The belief in or faith in expertise in private sector finance was ill founded and contributed to the unleashing of things that really needed protection, meaning the people needed protection from the violence of the financial sectors. The idea that expertise was co-author of the financial crisis led to a place where the loss of trust and faith in governments created an appetite for authoritarianism. The fear was growing, starting probably around the time of 9-11. Then you had the technology bubble and bust. We then migrated to the great financial crisis. Underpinning all of this was the development of China, the globalization, the keeping money offshore. That concentration of wealth and power heightened even further the anxiety and the uncertainty that permeates large portions of society. The commodification of social design is extremely dangerous. I don't care how smart you are playing with the tools. The future is not known and unknowable. That different vision creates a different basis for how you regulate and protect society from the side effects of reckless finance. The despondency that comes with that feeds the yearning for authoritarian reaction. There's a whole lot that can be lost.