HESTIA 2021 : Expertise in the aftermath of COVID-19: Unintended consequences, opportunity costs, and uncertainty in complex societies

In response to the spread of COVID-19, political leaders around the world have adopted draconian measures to lock down economies and enforce ‘social distancing’. These measures were taken on the advice of ‘experts’ who based their prescriptions on constantly revised predictive computer models, which are themselves based on incomplete data on the spread and deadliness of the disease. But models by their nature tend to discount opportunity costs and unintended consequences from their calculations.

Time will tell how sage the drastic measures will turn out to have been. Are experts, imperfect as they are, our only hope? Or is over-specialism a danger to governance in line with the apothegm “the expert knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing?” In times of crisis, do frailties in the democratic process allow these unelected figures too much influence over fundamental political and civil rights? Even if they address a threat judiciously, is there a danger that leaders will exploit naive experts for political purposes, as journalist H.L. Mencken warned when he stated that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins”?