Expert Failure

Zweig intelligently catalogues a number of underlying factors that positioned the American expert class to make all the wrong decisions while trying to make the most of the crisis, putting it to the service of their political and social agendas and, not incidentally, their careers. Those problems include: over reliance on mathematical models that can be tweaked for ideological ends where empirical observation and measurement provide insufficient support for the preferred policy—or would militate against it if taken into account; the fetishization of technology in education, very nicely illustrated by Bill Clinton, ensorcelled by the apparent early promise of the classroom internet, repeating almost verbatim identical claims that had been made about radio in its infancy—and that were made about film and television as well; the moronizing effects of reflexive political tribalism—there was a time when the Trump campaign could complain, with some reason, that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were working to “undermine the public’s confidence in the coming coronavirus vaccine,” ironic as that complaint is to read today with Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the Cabinet; the related self-censorship of the media in the service of narrow partisan interests and dogmatic progressivism; and misalignment of incentives, with policymakers (disproportionately progressive-leaning) captured by special interests (notably Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions) and thence producing policy agendas that did not serve the public interest, a situation that would be familiar enough to anybody who had ever read a few pages of F. A. Hayek or James Buchanan.

About that final point: Reading An Abundance of Caution is a little bit like reading Ezra Klein in the past few years, as ladies and gentlemen of the sort who write for the New Yorker seem to discover phenomena that have been at the center of the liberal-libertarian critique of progressivism for a century or so. When it comes to housing supply, for example, Klein and Matt Yglesias have even discovered that regulation has unintended consequences! You won’t find Hayek’s essays or The Calculus of Consent in Zweig’s index, and, what’s worse, you won’t find very much evidence that the author has read such works—which he should have, given the light a century’s accumulation of economic and political literature might have shed on his subject. .

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