On not being an expert

Gove: I think the people in this country have had enough of experts, with organizations from acronyms, saying … that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong. Because these people are the same ones who got consistently wrong what was happening.
Interviewer: This is proper Trump politics this, isn't it?
Gove: No it's actually a faith in the British people to make the right decision.
Interview with Faisal Islam on Sky News (3 June 2016)

Michael Gove’s infamous complaint about experts doesn’t really help my case.  With most of the topics I write about, or simply think about, I am not an expert. Even if you are the proud owner of a PhD, you are qualified to speak on perhaps 0.01% of the world’s knowledge. For the most part, you are a non-expert. Perhaps in Mr Gove’s eyes that qualifies me. Unlike Mr Gove, I don’t have any faith in “the British people” (whatever that vague collective may be, and I’m sure I wouldn’t like it if I investigated further what Gove meant by the phrase).

But perhaps, on reflection, Gove’s view has some justification. Let’s take my current reading – a review of a book about neoliberalism. Of all the things I do not know about, neoliberalism ranks pretty high. I even had to look the word up in Wikipedia to learn what it meant. How, then, can I suddenly be qualified to have an opinion on it, or to comment on it?

The answer is, I think, helpful for clarification of what Gove was saying. Economic policy is an area that affects us all. Whether a country should invest in public projects, whether it should aim to balance its budget, whether there should be a minimum wage, these are all questions of political economy, by which I mean economic questions that have a political dimension. These questions cannot be resolved simply by reference to economists. If a market is perfect, it does not mean that market is necessarily satisfactory by all (non-economic) criteria. If I can pay someone in a supermarket car park to wash my car for £10, a price I am prepared to pay and a price at which a supplier is prepared to provide this service, then we have a market in perfect equilibrium. But for all I know, the person washing the car may only be earning £1 out of that £10 I pay, and I don’t want to be a party to exploitation of cheap labour. So I agree there should be a minimum wage, so I know that whoever washes my car gets at least some kind of reasonable reward.

As Ha-Joon Chang states in his 23 Things They don’t tell you about Capitalism (2011) there is a case for everyone being involved in and understanding the thinking behind such things - specifically, neoliberalism:

Even though the 2008 crisis has made us seriously question the way in which our economies are run, most of us do not pursue such questions because we think that they are ones for the experts. Indeed they are – at one level. The precise answers do require knowledge on many technical issues, many of them so complicated that the experts themselves disagree on them. It is then natural that most of us simply do not have the time or the necessary training to learn all the technical details before we can pronounce our judgements on the effectiveness of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program), the necessity of G20, the wisdom of bank nationalization or the appropriate levels of executive salaries … However, it is not necessary for us to understand all the technical details in order to understand what is going on in the world and exercise what I call an ‘active economic citizenship’ to demand the right courses of action from those in decision-making positions.

Chang claims we can all understand enough about something to be “active economic citizens”. In that sense, we can all be experts.

Perhaps, then, what Michael Gove meant, or what I would like him to have meant, is this. There are some issues that are so important that we all of us, as citizens, should be equipped to comment in some way about those issues. Whatever the letters after your name, or however grand your job title, your pronouncements on neoliberalism are likely be coloured by political assumptions. Even though the literary periodicals are full of reviews by experts about books by experts, there is a case, not just for us mere mortals to read about these topics, but have our own ideas. So next time I see a review of a book such as Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: the end of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard, 2018), I will read it, and share what I am learning as I learn more about it. By communicating what I have learned, and what makes sense to me, I am not invalidating experts. But I am both learning to understand, and learning to communicate with others who will disagree; in other words, being an active economic citizen. In that sense, the experts from organizations with acronyms are indeed not sufficient.