Expert's Dilemma
From Hobson's Choice
A frequent problem of bureaucracies is that they serve a particular ideology and are obligated to suppress information subverting (or appearing to subvert) that ideology. Even in cases where the underlying philosophy is essentially correct, ideology—being an application of the philosophy to special conditions—is not applicable to all conditions. Experts are people with specialized understanding about a particular subject; by definition, expertise exceeds the general wisdom available to the bureaucracy on that particular subject. Their expertise therefore may lead them to know that the logical inference of the prevailing ideology on a particular subject is wrong, even when they share the general world view of the bureaucracy.
Hence, the expert's dilemma is that her expertise may compel her to take positions at odds with her collaborators.
Exposition
Bureaucracies are social institutions with a command structure; they are flexible, and have forms of intelligence. Hence, a bureaucracy will nearly always have an ideology, and that ideology is more restrictive than members of the bureaucracy think. Many things can cause the organization to flex, but new information about objective conditions is not usually one of them. For example, a business magazine will never publish articles that favor government-managed health care; its journalists are likely to know that government-managed health care achieves better outcomes at far lower price, but the implications would be offensive to the readers. So it will instead be mere polemics on behalf of the system currently in place. It will make up anecdotes about an unknowable person with a peculiar circumstance.
This does not mean everyone who favors a government-run health care program is a socialist. Indeed, an expert on health care administration may well be a very conservative person with a profound scorn for the public sector per se. But his expertise leads him to be deviate from conservative orthodoxy on this one point. Faced with a conflict between his ideology and what he knows to be so about this particular subject, he will probably dodge the matter with evasions. In some cases he may take a principled stand, but if the reprisals are risky, then this is rare. Yet his knowledge gives him a peculiar world view, one unique to him
External Links
- Roger Congleton, "Informational Limits to Democratic Public Policy: The Jury Theorem, Yardstick Competition, and Ignorance"
, George Mason University - Center for Study of Public Choice (Jan 2007)
