Cultivate expertise

Designing good government policy is much more difficult than designing the 747. But even the 747 was not designed by people with a desire for control and a persuasive personality. The engineering community seeks out expertise, apprentices it, certifies it and recognizes it.

The concept of experts recognizes that a domain is too complex for one mind to understand it all well enough to make good decisions. Experts limit their study and activity to a subset of the problem and then work together with other subset experts to construct a total view. The 747 had wing experts, engine experts, airframe experts and landing gear experts. The landing gear experts consulted with the wing, engine and airframe experts to determine the total weight their landing gear would have to deal with. One elected representative could not know enough about everything, so would make a “just wing it” (no pun intended) guess with possible dire consequences.

You could argue that if we elected one expert representative in each area, then the following debate could arrive at good decisions. Unfortunately our democratic system does not allow for diversity of expertise, in fact the party system tends to bias the legislature toward single mindedness. If there is diversity in the legislature, the debate is not about good cooperative decisions, it is about winning, about coercion, about spin and about winning the next election.

The other thing the concept of expertise does is compartmentalizes the problem into subsets that can be analyzed indepently. The landing gear design does not need to know about wing efficiency, it only need to know the weight of the wing and how much deceleration it can withstand. An education infrastructure system does not need to know about curriculum, it just need to know the number of education spots needed in each area of a district.

Once we are geared toward expertise, we can implement certification, trainings and apprenticeship, oversight bodies and a way to reuse and spread the expertise to other areas with out re-invention. Experts need to be certified, not elected. Experts use evidence,, past successes and objective analysis, not ideology to make policy decisions. Our party system is designed around ideology, not expertise. There is no ideology or democracy in designing a working aircraft. We need a working political/social system.

Democracy has one Hugh plus factor, voters have the perception that they have a say, some control over what governs them. That perception keeps them from demonstrating, rebelling, separating or outright staging a revolution. There is little truth to the perception but voting agents have a personality that is not entirely rational but that needs to be catered to in engineering a government.

Boeing can hire enough experts and assign them the task of building an aircraft and everyone is happy with the result. A country could not replace elected representatives with hired experts to make policy decisions. Autocrats do this by hijacking a weak democracy or using force and playing the role of expert themselves.

The engineered government will have to somehow make the governed people feel that it is fair, their interests are being looked after and no one is duping them. This will have to be real, not a figment of social media.