Image Source
The subject for this week in our Entrepreneurship and Value Creation in Society course is Dr. Roger Koppl's lecture on expert failure and expert power, given at Hillsdale college in 2019. For me personally, I felt as though this lecture was not the most insightful, as it seemed as though Koppl just kept stringing on examples of experts and differing types of expertise and how to proceed with caution rather than blindly trusting the experts. A light in this lecture though was his pillars of how we should view experts:
Experts do not always seek truth.
Experts are not smarter than others.
Incentives skew the distribution of expert errors, even "honest" errors.
I believe that these three ideas are not necessarily hard to obtain, or a mark of genius on Koppl's part, but I do believe that it is easy for us as everyday individuals to forget these when confronted with political, academic, economic, or health authorities. Often times we tend to place these experts or people with extensive training on a pedestal, giving them more credit than what is truly deserved. These experts are still venerable, and sometimes have an augmented tendency to tend toward the to the flaws of the rest of humanity: dishonesty, ignorance, arrogance, abuse of power, etc.
Often times we see the power of experts taint the lives of ordinary citizens, an example all the too familiar in our contemporary world is the federal government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Though this example, may seem like low hanging fruit to analyze the misuse and abuse of power by experts, there are few other situations that parallel the impact that experts can have on individuals. At both federal and local levels, regulations were enforced, shutting down small businesses for months at a time at the onset of the pandemic. As a result many businesses are no longer in operation, and it can all be traced back to the decisions that were made on the part of individuals within the government. Whether the lockdowns were beneficial out of the scope of the point here -- rather I am trying to illustrate the immense power that some individuals ("experts" in the realms of health, public policy, etc.) have on the lives of every day people. Even today, nearly two years after the initial onset of COVID-19, we still see masks enforced and encouraged, despite much evidence to their effectiveness, we still see massive government subsidies and stimulus packages, we still see effects on the supply chain and overall domestic economy. These effects were long ranging, and came as a result of the decisions of experts, who society did not question, but rather trusted to get us through the uncertainty that lied in the fog of the past couple years. Maybe if we had followed Koppl's advice and looked at the experts through those three pilars, or at least realized that these experts are still capable of making mistakes in novel circumstances we would not have seen such cultural, economic, and social shifts.