EnthusiasticNature94

You can still have a technocratic system that allows moral weights to be 'baked into' it.

For example, currently, in some states, judges are elected. The people decide what kinds of judges align with their values.

However, most of these states require judges to have a law degree to run, which is technocratic—you cannot run for a judge position without graduating from law school (and passing the bar in some states) first.

Sure, there are no good solutions and a vast amount of conflicting legal theories on how to address or interpret certain things, but as a whole, the judicial system is at least more grounded in some understanding of the law rather than random individuals who were able to market their way into judicial power.

I imagine a similar thing would happen for other issues.

Yeah, I agree.

Poor decisions still happen, but this would be a nice safeguard to lessen the severity and frequency of such poor decisions.

Most economists today would not support a tariff and subsequently wreck the economy.

There's multiple ways to achieve the goals of a technocracy.

I agree with your criticism, but you're criticizing a more extreme, centralized form of technocracy. I have criticisms of direct democracy, but I wouldn't conclude all democratic systems are bad because of the most extreme version.

And democracy and technocracy aren't mutually exclusive, either.

For the legal example, some states hold elections for their judges, and most require a law degree. This sets some minimum to be a judge in those areas, which is technocratic.

What if a judge claims other judges are fake? Well, the people can evaluate those claims and vote accordingly.

But at least you don't have some unhinged individual with no understanding of the law abusing their judicial powers.

I can't really speak to the bloodshed since I don't know which electoral process you're criticizing, but technocracies don't need bloodshed, no.

For your goldbug criticism, here's one potential example (out of many, many possible systems) that could resolve it: Academic and think tank organizations stake their reputation by nominating economists, and then the people vote on them.

Let's say the Mises Institute nominates a goldbug economist. I highly doubt enough people would vote for them vs all the other candidates by organizations like the American Economic Association, etc. And if they do get elected, whatever chaos that ensues would harm not only the candidate's reputation, but the Mises Institute's reputation. People would vote them out and ignore candidates from the Mises Institute.

I don't trust people either. 😭 I had no idea about the EU vs climate protestors. That's wild.

Ah, my bad. Well, thank you for your well thought out response.

I see where you're coming from, but I mean, looking at the current president, we're already living your hypothetical.

I agree experts can be wrong and have been wrong many times throughout history.

I can also see the concerns for maintaining the status quo.

What I'm thinking of is a less extreme variant of technocracy, where academic organizations, think tanks, etc. nominate candidates according to their own criteria. That way the overall bar is raised while leaving the decision on who is 'qualified' decentralized among the public.

My issue isn't that goldbug economists are promoting harmful policies during a depression. Some issues are complex, and people are fallible.

My issue is that tariffs are widely agreed to be harmful, yet we have tariffs wrecking the economy now. Tariffs arguably constrain people's rights by reducing their freedom to purchase what they want at fair market prices.

Like, at the very least, we should be avoiding blatant mistakes that most experts agree on. The fact that we did, in fact, make a glaring mistake against the advice of basic economics means that something is broken with the system.

Yeah, I actually agree with you there. I don't like an extreme form of technocracy where some individuals dictate who is qualified to rule.

In practice, what I'm thinking of is socially delegating the requirements. Have various organizations dictate their own standards, and let them nominate the candidates.

Sure, one could just make their own jank Tariff Society and nominate their own pro-tariff candidates for economic policy, but the people would see that and vote accordingly. The reputation of the organization would be self-regulating in a decentralized way without the extremely centralized power issues you mentioned. I highly doubt a candidate nominated by the Tariff Society would stand a chance against a candidate nominated by the American Economics Association, for example.

Valid. Why do you think education should be the exception to decentralization?

That would be the ideal, but even without AI, you can still have a society that is more technocratic-leaning than it is now. It's not like technocracies were historically impossible before AI existed.

I agree about the problem you mentioned. I would not trust someone who is proposing their AI will magically fix all of society's problems.

To be clear, J-PAL addresses a variety of issues outside of poverty, and some are even fuzzy, like women's empowerment.

I agree that inflation and unemployment are mutually exclusive when it comes to managing the central bank. However, is it really that much different from other problems with constraints? It's not like an engineer just abandons a project and leave it up to 'judgment' - they find optimal ranges to adjust the dials to.

If your ultimate goal is to have more prosperity (in terms of employment and prices), the central bank is simply one of many tools that can affect this (and a pretty constrained one at that). You'd be better off looking at additional tools at your disposal, such as evidence-based vocational training programs, and scaling them nationwide.

Yeah, any hierarchical system is susceptible to abuse.

In contrast to the current system, do you think a technocracy would be more vulnerable to these problems?

I'm also interested in hearing your proposal for a non-hierarchical system. I've wanted to look at some decentralized systems (and ironically, Lemmy is sort of like that), but I haven't really found anything that seems promising.