Here's an excerpt that sums up alot of the book:
Having people of talent run the vast federal apparatus is clearly a desirable thing. The EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ought to be under the direction of people who know what they’re doing, as surely as qualified engineers should design our bridges and historians should be the ones who teach history. But what are we to make of our modern-day technocracy, a meritocracy of failure in which ineffectual people rise to the top and entire professions (accountants, real-estate appraisers, etc.) are roiled by corruption scandals? The answer is that the professional ideology brings with it certain predictable, recurring weaknesses. The first of these pitfalls of professionalism is that the people with the highest status aren’t necessarily creative or original thinkers. Although the professions are thought to represent the pinnacle of human brilliance, what they are actually brilliant at is defending and applying a given philosophy. In Disciplined Minds, an important description of the work-life of professionals, the physicist Jeff Schmidt tells us that “ideological discipline is the master key to the professions.” Despite the favorite Sixties slogan, professionals do not question authority; their job is to apply it. This is the very nature of their work and the object of their training, according to Schmidt; by his definition, professionals are “obedient thinkers” who “implement their employers’ attitudes” and carefully internalize the reigning doctrine of their discipline, whatever it happens to be.29 In addition, the professions are structured to shield insiders from accountability. This is what defines the category: professionals do not have to listen. They are the only occupational group, as the sociologist Eliot Freidson put it many years ago, with “the recognized right to declare … ‘outside’ evaluation illegitimate and intolerable.”30 Exhibit A of these interlocking pathologies is economics, a discipline that often acts like an ideological cartel set up to silence the heterodox. James K. Galbraith has written a classic description of how it works: Leading active members of today’s economics profession … have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule—as one might expect from a gentleman’s club—this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen.… No one loses face, in this club, for having been wrong. No one is disinvited from presenting papers at later annual meetings. And still less is anyone from the outside invited in.31 Professional economists screw up again and again, and no one cares. The only real accountability they face is from their endlessly forgiving peers in economics departments across the country. Granted, economics is an extreme case, but its thoroughgoing application of the right to disregard criticism has made it a kind of fascinating anti-profession, a brotherhood of folly rather than of expertise. The peril of orthodoxy is the second great pitfall of professionalism, and it’s not limited to economics. Every academic discipline with which I have some experience is similar: international relations, political science, cultural studies, even American history. None of them are as outrageous as economics, it is true, but each of them is dominated by some convention or ideology. Those who succeed in a professional discipline are those who best absorb and apply its master narrative.32 Our modern technocracy can never see the glaring flaw in such a system. For them, merit is always synonymous with orthodoxy: the best and the brightest are, in their minds, always those who went to Harvard, who got the big foundation grant, whose books are featured on NPR. When the merit-minded President Obama wanted economic expertise, to choose one sad example, he sought out the best the economics discipline had to offer: former treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers, a man who had screwed up time and again yet was shielded from the consequences by his stature within the economics profession. Look back to the days when government-by-expert actually worked and you will notice an astonishing thing. Unlike the Obama administration’s roster of well-graduated mugwumps, the talented people surrounding Franklin Roosevelt stood very definitely outside the era’s main academic currents. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest confidant, was a social worker from Iowa. Robert Jackson, the U.S. Attorney General whom Roosevelt appointed to the Supreme Court, was a lawyer who had no law degree. Jesse Jones, who ran Roosevelt’s bailout program, was a businessman from Texas with no qualms about putting the nation’s most prominent financial institutions into receivership. Marriner Eccles, the visionary whom Roosevelt appointed to run the Federal Reserve, was a small-town banker from Utah with no advanced degrees. Henry Wallace, who was probably the nation’s greatest agriculture secretary, studied at Iowa State and came to government after running a magazine for farmers. Harry Truman, FDR’s last vice president, had been a successful U.S. senator but had no college degree at all. Even Roosevelt’s Ivy Leaguers were often dissenters from professional convention. John Kenneth Galbraith, who helped to run the Office of Price Administration during World War II, spent his entire career calling classical economics into question. Thurman Arnold, the Wyoming-born leader of FDR’s Antitrust Division, wrote a scoffing and derisive book called The Folklore of Capitalism. Just try getting a job in Washington after pulling something like that today. A third consequence of modern-day liberals’ unquestioning, reflexive respect for expertise is their blindness to predatory behavior if it comes cloaked in the signifiers of professionalism. Take the sort of complexity we saw in the financial instruments that drove the last financial crisis. For old-school regulators, I am told, undue financial complexity was an indicator of likely fraud. But for the liberal class, it is the opposite: an indicator of sophistication. Complexity is admirable in its own right. The difference in interpretation carries enormous consequences: Did Wall Street commit epic fraud, or are they highly advanced professionals who fell victim to epic misfortune? As we shall see again and again, modern-day liberals pretty much insist on the latter view, treating Wall Street with extraordinary deference despite all that went on during the last decade. This is no doubt due, in part, to Wall Street’s enormous political contributions. But anyone seeking to understand this baffling story must also take note of the widely shared view among Democrats that Wall Street is a place of enormous meritocratic prestige, on a level equivalent to a high-end graduate school. Wall Street’s veneer of professionalism is further buttressed by its complicated technical jargon, which (like other disciplines) the financial industry uses to protect itself from the scrutiny of the public.
I got familiar thru a Progressive outlet.
