 How do you know if an expert is giving you good advice? That's a really complicated and hard question, and you don't always know. And in Escape from Democracy, we give some suggestions that might help us know when we can trust experts or at least make expertise more widely trustable. We are not arguing against experts, obviously. As you say, expertise is how we build hotels like the one that I'm in right now or airplanes like I'll be flying on tomorrow. We need those, obviously. At the same time, especially in the realm of policy expertise and economic policy being implemented over the hopes and desires of the people who are being ruled, then I think this awareness problem or suggestion is an important one. And I think it's important to have some mechanisms that, again, aren't a panacea, but at least help alleviate the problem of different motivations between the experts and those consuming expertise. So I'm Sandra Peart. I'm Dean of the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond and Economist who studied at the University of Toronto. So much happened in the 19th century and 19th century political economy. I think it's one of the most fascinating periods in economics. It was a time in which people thought about the big questions of economics, you know, why are we rich, why are we poor, how do we get out of poverty, how do we develop, how do people make good choices, how do we fix institutions so that everyone has access to the same kinds of choices and so on. There were huge reforms happening, huge economic events were happening, and just so many ideas, those of John Sir Mill, of course, on whom I've worked a lot, but Smith's ideas come into the 19th century and get worked on and made more rich and so on and put into practice in the 19th century. So it's just, and then you come to the end of the century and such huge changes both economically and in terms of intellectual thinking happen. So it's just a fascinating period. Analytical egalitarianism is something that David Levy and I have coined as a phrase to describe the idea that at least for the purposes of thinking about economics and economic policy making, people are equally equipped to make political and economic choices. And if that's the case, then the differences we observe in outcomes, so of course there are lots of different outcomes that we observe, those are not due to innate or natural differences amongst us, but instead are at least mainly the result of history, luck, education, opportunities. So that's how we talk about and use the idea of analytical egalitarianism. So the role of, we've written, David and I have written on the role of experts in policy making and as we've thought about this, it's really an extension of the notion of public choice economics. So Buchanan says, policy makers, the state can't be, we shouldn't assume that the state is this benevolent despot out there looking out for all of our best interests, but instead people who are in government are no more but also no less self-interested than we are. And what David and I have done with that insight is we've said, okay, yes, that's something that's accepted now in the economics literature, but where we haven't applied that kind of insight is to the notion of policy makers and experts who are advising them. And what we have argued is that experts who advise governments, who put policy into effect are, as Buchanan might say, no less, no more, no less, no more self-interested than the rest of us. So if we look at what experts do within society, we should be aware as ordinary people at least be aware of the fact that they may not always have our best interests at heart. The question is, do experts then have neutral and only scientific objectives? And it's possible that they do, but it's also possible that they as self-interested individuals have their own interests that they're taking into account. So their motivations are a mixture, a messy mixture of self and public interests. And we, David and I, in our work in the book on experts, we have thought it important to look at historical examples where experts actually put their own interests ahead of those they were supposedly looking after. And so we look at eugenics, for instance, or the Soviet economic growth on literature and so on. And we use those historical examples to try to demonstrate then that there have been some catastrophic effects that resulted when people simply trusted experts without being aware of or thinking about the incentives and the motivations that they face. Our notion is not so much that experts are dishonest or that they're thwarting the law. So although that, you know, clearly that happens, but we're not particularly interested in that. What we're more interested in is simply cases where experts receive a directive to, you know, put a policy into place, and then they, you know, go ahead and start doing that without any additional checks to see whether this is in fact what the people who are being ruled, you know, would agree to, so without consent. So consent is an important idea that we talk about in the book. And so there's that. And then secondly, there are situations in which experts may selectively report data, for instance, not necessarily an illegal thing to do, but they haven't made the full data array available or they haven't said that here are some additional models that we tested or, you know, thinking about, again, to go to the Soviet example, you know, finding ways to explain why the data don't actually fit the model. So, you know, saying, well, you know, yes, Soviets are, we still think the model is that Soviets are growing faster than the United States economy. However, the data don't show that and here are some reasons why, you know, the model isn't failing, but the prediction has failed. On the part of an expert, you know, finding ways to make the expert's own viewpoint actually still hold salience for the public. You could think of examples, you know, in the last few years with respect to COVID and reporting and, you know, not making the full array of uncertainty available to the public or at least known to the public by simply saying, you know, here's what we know and here's what we predict and, you know, lots of those predictions were incorrect. It's not that they're getting income, you know, as I said earlier, we're not suggesting that they're taking bribes or they're doing something illegal, but they're not, they're so struck by the goal or adhering to the goal that they're getting, you know, to go forward with implementing that as opposed to unwinding something that they see as incorrect or that people haven't agreed to or whatever. So, it's a sort of self-interest behavior, I don't know exactly how to describe what they're getting out of it, but, you know, some sort of self-worth or self-satisfaction. So, Adam Smith says, you know, everybody is motivated by things, by goods and so on, but also by fame, fame and fortune. And fame is something that we as economists don't really spend a lot of time talking about, but, you know, self-worth or, you know, something prestige would be the way we would talk about it today, but people, I think Adam Smith had an insight there that, you know, it was one that we should actually retrieve from the 18th century because people are motivated by fortune and fame, so these two dimensions, that aren't actually commensurate. It's not like you can translate fame directly into dollars. There's sort of a relationship, but it's not a one-to-one relationship. So, you know, some of the work that David and I have done has related to how to make sure that we do adhere to these kinds of expectations. So, expectations about ethical behavior and so on are ways to kind of think about constraining experts, at least to the extent that they buy in and then comply with them, buy into and then comply with such expectations. They're not, you know, codes of ethics are not, there's no panacea, and they're not a panacea, but they might be something that would be helpful. And again, it's, you know, sometimes we talk about awareness. It's having a code of ethics as a way of ensuring that people on both sides of the problem, you know, those who are consuming expertise and those who are producing expertise are aware that there are motivations that don't always align. How do you know if an expert is giving you good advice? That's a really complicated and hard question, and you don't always know, you know. And in Escape from Democracy, you know, some of the, we give some suggestions that might help us know when we can trust experts or at least make expertise more widely trustable. We are not arguing against experts, obviously, as you say. I mean, expertise is how we build hotels like the one that I'm in right now or airplanes like I'll be flying on tomorrow. We need those sort of, obviously, you know. And at the same time, especially in the realm of policy expertise and economic policy being implemented over the hopes and desires of the people who are being ruled, you know, then I think this awareness problem or suggestion is an important one. And I think it's important to have some mechanisms that, again, aren't a panacea, but at least help alleviate the problem of different motivations between the experts and those consuming expertise. And so, you know, we talk in the book about competition, for instance, you know, just having lots of expertise out there that is not always, you know, in the same tribe, so always coming from this, you know, the same sort of point of view, so different points of view. And I mentioned James Buchanan a while ago, and I'll just mention him one more time because he talked about how we have, we economists, and he included himself in this, obviously, have an ethical obligation to look at the world through different windows, use the metaphor of windows. And, you know, I don't think we do that very often as economists. We kind of have our notion that it might be efficiency, it might be, you know, economic growth, whatever, as a sort of exogenously determined goal. And then we do whatever it takes supposedly to, you know, to attain that goal. And there are many different viewpoints that we then simply, you know, aren't taking into account. We're not looking into different windows. So I think this, you know, that notion it's a little bit idealistic, but, you know, to suppose that we could all force ourselves to look through different windows or whatever, but it's something to aspire to, at least. I'm somewhat optimistic, an optimistic person, I think. And so, you know, there are ways we can improve on the margin. We're not going to have experts or policy makers or economists who just suddenly, you know, become different people. Yeah. I'm an analytical egalitarian. I think we're basically sort of the same, you know, combination of messy motives that we used to be in the 19th century and now are in the 21st century. So we have to take people as they are, all right, and then think about ways to use their expertise, put their expertise to our best use, and make sure that we're not relying. We're not unaware and relying in an unaware way in expertise that is faulty or is being driven by the expert's own self-interest and desire to obtain prestige. You know, one of the ways then, I mentioned competition earlier, but another way then to help obtain awareness and self-awareness and more neutral, less biased expertise and expert advice is to enforce transparency on the expert. So both in terms of data, selection and collection and so on make those widely available so that the results can be checked. And also then in terms of modeling. So, you know, reporting on models that have not been used as much as those that were actually used at the end, in the end, I think is a really important sort of notion for economists to embrace. So the jury system is extremely interesting in our view and one that, yes, has implications for, I think, for the broader notion of expertise and experts. It's got opposing viewpoints. Everyone knows that the viewpoints are opposed in terms of the legal system. There's transparency. Documents are made available. And the jury system is one that's randomly chose, you know, the jury, the group is randomly chosen. We, David and I have argued that the random choice of experts is actually or decision makers is actually one that hasn't had enough play in society and might be available for some other institutional arrangements. So leadership by choosing random lots and so on, which as a leadership scholar, I find that quite interesting. And it works experimentally. There's some experimental work that I've done that suggests that actually, you know, as long as people do feel that they and believe and it's belief based on probabilities that they have equal opportunity to be the leader, then random choice of leaders can actually get you some really good interesting results. I started today talking about the 19th century and, you know, John Stuart Mill is really a central figure in the 19th century. And the little book that I wrote, The Essential John Stuart Mill, caused me to revisit his ideas. And I think that his work on the harm principle really gives us a blueprint for how to think about this notion of public good, if you want to put it that way. Because as he's very famous for having said, you know, there are some actions that are other regarding and then there are some that are self-regarding. And self-regarding actions are, you know, not all that interesting, frankly, because we live in a social world. But other regarding or socially important actions are ones that sometimes impose harms on other people. And he then goes on to talk about, well, you know, what do we do about that as a society? When might there be a role for a state and when might there not be? And what's really interesting about it is he recognizes that if we constrain people from acting a certain way, from having particular choices open to them or not, that too imposes a harm on individuals. Because people need a rich array of choices in order to flourish, in order to figure out what kind of person they want to be and then try to become that person. And so if we know we're going to impose a harm if we constrain them. And so then we have to balance that or think about that known harm to, as it relates to a potential harm that might happen if, for instance, I don't wear a mask and you don't wear a mask. And then, you know, one of us infects the other with, you know, an illness. And so, you know, we've got a possible slight probability of imposing harm. But then we, on the other hand, we've got a harm that is imposed if we restrict, you know, impose a mask mandate or something like that. And so it just, it gives us a framework. He doesn't give us the answer. He doesn't say, so therefore there will not be mask mandate or there will be mask mandates. But he's giving us this framework to help us think in a very nuanced way about when we might, as a society, restrict people's liberty and when we might allow them to, you know, make their choices, even though they might harm themselves or someone else in the future. So I think Mill is a fascinating person. I'll just mention quickly, you know, his notion, his work on women and extending the franchise to women and marriage and recognizing, you know, some really important, very early recognition of the difficulty that it occurs within a marriage if a woman can own property outside of marriage. And then, of course, extending the franchise to the labor and class, what we're called the labor and classes. And then his work on the formerly enslaved people and, you know, and thinking about Jamaica and so on and talking about how it was so important that those persons in Jamaica received the same protection of law that a person in Britain would have. And so the governor air controversy and so on, all of that's in the essential mill. So look it up.