The Role of Experts in an Age of Populism

Alan Philps

Good evening and welcome to Chatham House to this panel discussion on the role of experts in an age of populism. I’m sure it’s a topic close to the hearts of most of you here, maybe even close to the wallets, too. I’ll introduce myself. I am Alan Philps. I edit the World Today magazine at Chatham House. You can see copies there. We have lots of free gifts for you here this evening because this meeting is organised in conjunction with Foreign Affairs magazine. You can pick up some copies there, and we also have Justin, who is the Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs.

A few pieces of housekeeping. This is on the record. It is also being live streamed, so when we get to the Q&A, it’s important that you speak to a microphone, so that everyone can hear, and I think that’s all I – oh, could you kindly put your phones on silent mode and if you want to tweet, which you are heartily encouraged to do, you will see a hashtag on the screens either side of us.

So, we’re very fortunate to have an accredited expert on expertise, Professor Tom Nichols, author of The Death of Expertise. In his day job he is a Professor at the US Naval War College. Next to him is Dr Will Davies, a Reader in Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths University of London. Next to him, Julian Vogt, Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs, whose product you can see down there, and, at the end, Dr Leslie Vinjamuri, Associate Fellow of the US and Americas Programme at Chatham House. What we’re going to do is, I will ask each of the panel members to speak for six or seven minutes, then I will – we will talk amongst ourselves for a little bit and there’ll be a good half an hour for questions from the floor. So, Tom, would you like to start?

Professor Tom Nichols

Sure. Thanks for having me. It’s wonderful to be with you. Since we’re on the record, let me start by saying I do not reflect, in any way, the views of the United States Government, the US Navy, Harvard Extension School, my cat, anybody, but me. The question, I think, posed by the title of the meeting tonight, ‘Experts in an Age of Populism’, is whether these two things can co-exist, whether expertise and populism can co-exist. And I think it’s – in some ways it seems like an obvious question, of course it can, you know, the world’s slipped through populist phases before and yet, people trust experts, from Airline Pilots to their Doctors.

What’s different is, I think, the amount of interaction now between experts and the public, the amount of information available to the public, not always good. A false or, I shouldn’t say false, a radical reimagining of democracy that actually was first, as I point out in the book, was first proposed by none other than C S Lewis, who said that democracy is becoming reinterpreted by the average person, the average citizen. Not just to mean a system of political equality, but a situation of actual equality, that we are not just all politically equal or equal in the eyes of God or equal before the law, we’re actually equal to each other. We’re equally smart. We are equally intelligent or capable and this led, as we were discussing just before we came down, this led to some interesting research on things that didn’t used to have a name, why is it that your annoying uncle, who knows nothing, is the one who holds forth with such energy? Well, it has a title and it’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which the least capable people believe themselves to be the most capable at something. That’s your – this is the way I always describe it, it’s your friend who steps off the karaoke stage after tormenting everybody, he’s terrible, and he looks at you and he says, “Nailed it.” And everybody’s just shaking their – no, you didn’t.

So, the other word that I use in the book, that I think gets under people’s skin, but I keep putting it out there because I think this is an aspect of populism, I talk a lot about expertise, I think, I’m glad tonight we’re going to be talking about populism as well, is narcissism. I think that this increasingly global phenomenon of, at least in the developed world, perhaps it’s an outcome of affluence or higher education levels or the spread of education leading to, what I call, an allusion of knowledge, is leading to an increased narcissism, that we spend a lot of time alone, we spend it in front of a computer, we believe that every opinion we have has to be expressed. I say this as someone who spends a lot of hours on Twitter, so I’m guilty too, you know, people – everybody who follows me knows that I’m a complete maniac for wine gums now that I’m here in London, because I felt it important to share that with the world because people need to know what kind of candy I like.

But what I found interesting about this is that I thought, when I started writing this, that this was primarily an American problem, that Americans, you know, are always – we’re – everything we have to say is most important and we talk, and we have to tell people what’s what. I just found out today that the book is going to its 11th foreign language translation. So, clearly – and it’s from Asia to Europe, and the most recent one is going to be in Ukrainian, and so, it’s clearly a problem that other people think exists in their societies and I think, in part, that is the because of the internet, which is reaching everywhere. I did a – I was speaking – I’m doing a speaking tour for the State Department in the Czech Republic in October and all of the problems, that we’ll probably end up talking about tonight, were just replicated right before my eyes in Pilsen and Ostrava, and everywhere I went.

So, some of that’s the internet, but I’ll just close by saying I think it would be a mistake for us to lay this off on technology. I think that there is something else going on. I think this predated the advent of technology. I talk a lot in the book about education, and I think there’s something wrong, certainly, and I’ll say this only regarding the American system, I think that we have embraced a therapeutic model of education that asks students how they feel, instead of what they’re learning. I think that our media has become dysfunctional, in part, because there’s so much of it. I often refer to the media as being something like our diet, that we’ve never had so much food in the world. We’ve never had such plenty, which is why we’re all fat and diabetic and unhealthy, because we’re gorging on the bad stuff. So, I think that this has been something that has been brewing for a good 30 or 40 years. I think technology has, kind of, put it on steroids, but we can talk about it more. In foreign policy, in particular, I don’t know how we’re going to square this circle, because foreign policy and populism, to some extent, cannot co-exist, and I’ll leave that has my last statement.

Alan Philps

Okay, thank you very much, so you can’t blame it all on technology. Will, take us forward.

Dr Will Davies

Great, thank you and thank you very much inviting me this evening. I want to make a couple of points briefly, one about where I think there isn’t a problem with experts in relation to populism and one where I think there definitely is. And, as far as where there isn’t a problem, you’ll often read that there is a crisis of trust in Western democracies, that populists will say that the elites are, you know, hypocrites, that they are serving themselves and so on. But if you look at a lot of the surveys that are done by the likes of Pew and Adelman and this is of thing on levels of trust across society, across the world, in fact, the area where there is a serious crisis of trust today is the media. This is where rates of trust in facts and truth have been falling steadily for decades and, of course, where experts are dependent on the media for the dissemination of their knowledge, people inevitably have difficulty in distinguishing that which they consider to be true from that which they consider to be false. Trust in the media also correlates quite closely to sympathy for populist movement.

In America, 61% of Trump voters do not trust the media, 27% of Clinton voters, in 2016, do trust the media. So, the distrust in the media and populism have a very close correlation, which doesn’t actually exist, where it comes to experts, to the same extent. And a lot of the Pew data shows that trust in Scientists, the scientific establishment of the United States, has stayed relatively steady, over the last 40 years, at around about 40% of people society trust the scientific establishment. It’s remained relatively level since the early 1970s.

The other area where there is clearly a problem of trust is in representative democracy. We know the Politicians are held in lower and lower esteem and to the extent that Politicians get involved with experts and to the extent that experts become Politicians, like Macron or Ed Miliband or these sorts of figures, there will, inevitably, be a, kind of, fallout effect on the centres of expertise and on the notion of technocrats to the extent that technocrats are seen as a, kind of, fusion of political and scientific authority. And there is tremendous resentment towards the European Union across Europe, not just in the UK, it is – fans the flames of populism in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere and that derives, from a sense, that technocrats working for an unelected Government are combining forms of, kind of, scientific authority with forms of political privilege.

Now, that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that people don’t trust the facts that experts are producing. In Britain, most people, about 80% of people, trust the Office of National statistics, but a small group of – a small minority of people trust Politicians to actually use those statistics correctly. So, we need to distinguish between trusting the actual experts and the facts and trusting the ways in which those kinds of facts are disseminated into society.

Where I think we have had a severe problem, over the last decade and which has contributed directly to the rise of populism, is in relation to economic expertise and economic technocracy. And since the financial crisis of 2007/8/9, there have been various drastic failures of regulation, of calculation, of prediction, that have led, every time a Politician or any, kind of, public figure stands up and cites economic facts or figures or data, they’re considered almost, in principle, to be telling lies by a large sections of society. And this isn’t simply because that section of society is ignorant, it’s for good reasons that have developed over the last ten years, and I just want to list three of those very briefly.

The first is the financial crisis itself. This was an epic failure of expertise, both by central banks, by financial regulators, by credit rating agencies, by market analysts working inside investment banks. Extremely clever, extremely well educated, extremely well-paid people who started to treat risks as if they were facts and had a complete, kind of, failure of basic philosophical understanding of what they were doing, which Alan Greenspan eventually admitted, after the financial crisis, that there’d been a, kind of, fundamental flaw in the whole ideology of the whole thing, and this led to a, kind of, meltdown in the governing economic philosophy of the times.

Secondly, austerity. George Osborne spent around six years saying that cutting public spending would lead to economic growth. None of the economic establishment agreed with that. This is not an ideological point I’m making. There is barely any Economists you can find in the world who believes that cutting public spending is a way of growing the economy. There are a few rare examples and there was one paper that the Treasury based its whole vision austerity on, which was the famous Reinhardt and Rogoff paper showing that if public debt reached a certain level of GDP, that it would lead to a recession. That paper, as you probably recall, was found to have a basic spreadsheet error in it leading to the calculations of that paper not actually being valid. George Osborne, in my view, was the original post-truth Politician in this country. He said various things about economic policy that turned out to be false and there are actually – and this is something that, you know, people from across the London School of Economics, across the political spectrum, believe and the authority of economic credibility in today’s world is, in my view, rightly held in some suspicion.

And I want to end back on the topic of populism, because we’ve now had Brexit, which was, in many ways, sticking two fingers up at economic rationality and economic experts and so on, and the famous Michael Gove comment about these people, I think people in this country have had enough of experts. Let me just remind you what the Treasury published. This was the Treasury, this wasn’t vote leave, this wasn’t leave.EU, this wasn’t Farage, this wasn’t even George Osborne or the Conservative Party, the Treasury, Treasury officials, published a document saying, this was before the referendum, “A vote to leave would cause an immediate and profound economic shock, creating instability and uncertainty, which would be compounded by the complex and independent negotiators that would follow. The central conclusion is that the effect of this profound shock would be to push the UK into recession and lead to a sharp rise in unemployment.”

Now, that was a prediction so, of course, it can be false. All predictions can be false, but when people from the Brexit side of the debate said that this is ‘project fear’, I think we have to recognise that they were actually onto something and that this was an attempt to try and bully people with economic expertise. And I think we can’t be surprised if people don’t fall for the same trick again and I know that there are the Brexit models coming out soon, but I think that they won’t have the impact that we think they might.

Alan Philps

Alright, thank you very much. So, Gove was right, I’ll say, because he did actually – when he was talking about experts, he was talking about experts with acronyms, which is basically, the OECD/IMF and other people, yes.

Justin Vogt

So, I’m a bit of an outlier in this group of experts talking about expertise. I am the only non-expert on the panel. I don’t…

Alan Philps

Me too.

Justin Vogt

Oh, okay. Well, there we go, we’re both outliers.

Alan Philps

I’m a jack of all trades.

Justin Vogt

There you go, and I don’t have a PhD. I’ve never worked in Government at a high level. I’m a Journalist, I’m an Editor. So, what I bring to this conversation, though, is that at Foreign Affairs we publish, you know, some of the, kind of, people that you see quoted in newspapers and other magazines, and these are top level scholars and current or former Government officials, think tank wonks, experts, the kind of people we’re talking about now. And what I do all day, essentially, is help them try to communicate in a clear and compelling way to people like me, a non-expert audience and so, you know, that’s the background I, sort of, bring to this. And what I’ll say is, what you learn when you do that are, what you might consider, some of the supply side problems with this issue of expertise and populism. We’ve been talking about, what I would call, the demand side, the problems with society, the problems with the audience for expert opinion analysis.

What I tend to see is the problems with the supply, the problems that experts themselves actually inject, and I’ll tell you what I – my, sort of – the theory of this, and it’s just, it’s informed by my experience at Foreign Affairs. You know, in earlier areas, experts didn’t necessarily have direct access to a mass audience, with mass education and digital technologies that has changed and it’s mostly a good thing. However, the rhetoric of expertise hasn’t really kept pace. It hasn’t adapted in the ways in which it should have. You know, in early eras you had experts who wrote books and scholarly articles, but they didn’t write op-eds, Economist and Political Scientists, you know, didn’t blog, they certainly didn’t tweet, you know, and it’s – this it a different world we’re in now.

The reason – what I see, in a lot of expert – the product of experts that causes problems that may contribute to the fall in trust, are two very perverse incentives. The first has to do with a perverse incentive that exists for policy professionals when they write. This is our – people who are in Government, who serve around Government or in think tanks, they have a perverse incentive towards vagueness. And the second perverse incentive is a perverse incentive that exists for academics who have, or incentivised, to be jargony. And let me talk about the first one, vagueness, if you are a person whose job it is to inform a policymaker, you have a good reason to get very good at communicating in a strategically vague way, because that Politician or that official may have to compromise. She may have to shift her position, actually, and so you’re going to get very good at crafting language that is sufficiently vague that it can be adapted for whatever shift happens.

So, we end up – when we edit folks like this, we end up having to push them a lot on this vagueness. We have to pin them down. So, for example, you know, we’ll get a sentence like, “Oh, the Trump administration should engage with China on climate change.” And you say, “Well, what does that mean?” You know, what is engage? Engage can mean any number of things or, you know, countering violent – we have to counter violent extremism online. Well, okay, who has to do that? Who has to do this countering, you know? You try to pin people down and they tend to resist.

Academics, it’s a different incentive, it’s this jargon issue and here, you know, look, jargon has always existed and sometimes jargon is justified, especially in hard sciences where there’s highly technical stuff that there’s just no plain English equivalent for. With Social Scientists, with Historians, Political Scientists, Economists, they don’t quite have that excuse and, instead, what I see is a different incentive at work.

You know, the fact is that a lot of times social science insights are actually common sensical, and I don’t mean to detract from them. I’m not saying that they are somehow shallow or thin and that the people who have them are not shedding a lot of light, they’re incredibly useful. But, you know, oftentimes they are insights that non-experts could, in fact, arrive at themselves and often do. Take deterrence, for example, right? Deterrence is a very important concept in political science and in international relations, you know, most people intuitively understand deterrence. Most people intuitively understand that, you know, a threat, if you’re threatening someone, the effectiveness of that threat depends on your credibility, anyone with young children knows that, you know. And so, the difference is that when an expert applies that concept or explores it in-depth, she is bringing to that her deep background in the history of this concept and all the different ramifications of it and the social scientific methodology, which non-experts do not know how to do and do not apply consistently.

The problem is, it’s hard to signal, in plain English, that all of that is happening. It used to be that the byline would be enough, you know, so-and-so is the Professor at a lead institution, so-and-so is the Assistant Secretary of whatever and, you know, so-and-so’s being published by Foreign Affairs. Well, that must mean that she or he really knows what they’re talking about. Increasingly, that’s not the case because people come to the table with a reduced trust. That has only increased the incentive to use jargon to signal to readers this is really complicated and very complex and only someone who’s really an expert can understand it. People hate it when we strip that stuff out of their articles because they say, “Oh, you’re making – you’re taking all the nuance out. You’re taking all the complexity out,” when really what they, sort of, mean is now I just sound like an ordinary person and now this is just so – it’s too clear, you know, I need to complicate this somehow to signal that it’s really important and interesting.

So, you know, we try to strike this balance, and I’m speaking for myself, you know, in Foreign Affairs, but people at all different publications do this. And we try to strike this balance between, you know, preserving the complexity, honouring the fact that people are really dealing with high-level stuff, while also making them abandon these perverse incentives towards vagueness and jargon, and with the hope that we’re contributing, in some way, to a, kind of, communication that maybe won’t reverse declining trust in, you know, figures of authority or authoritative expertise, but might, at least, staunch the belief.

Alan Philps

Thank you very much for explaining those perverse incentives, which make people write incomprehensibly. Leslie.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Okay, so now I’ve changed everything I’m going to say. As an academic/think tanker, I guess I could put myself in that category. No, I found your comments actually very interesting, but I do have to respond a little bit. I agree that there is this problem of expertise and there’s clearly an incentive within the academy to create disciplinary boundaries to professionalise, in part, to keep people out and to differentiate yourself from the ordinary public or, indeed, from other academics and other disciplines. For a whole variety of career reasons, those incentives have gotten higher and created more professionalisation and more jargon.

But I think – I have to come back to the deterrence example. Not everything’s entirely intuitive and sometimes things that the public might take to be intuitive actually, are not intuitive, for example, deterrence is not necessarily intuitive. If you threaten somebody, there’s a very significant debate about whether that leads to more aggression, more arms buildups and all sorts of very negative competitive dynamics that can lead you into spirals that nobody wants to see, as opposed to creating the, kind of, peace and stability that one might hope for. So, I think they’re very significant debates, and the problem is the jargon, but one doesn’t want to underestimate the very important significance of the social science methodology, which has to do with the rigorous, qualitative, and sometimes quantitative, empirical testing of these, supposedly, obvious and simplistic findings that Social Scientists engage in that are somehow different from hard science. In fact, the difference between hard science and social science is something that a lot of people challenge and, in fact, if you think that the methodology is similar across, then I think we should be careful about privileging expertise in the hard sciences and taking that privilege away from expertise and the importance of it in the social sciences. So, I would really, very seriously, critique that argument. Nonetheless, the jargon is a problem.

Let me say something really quickly about expertise and about how I think the marketplace matters on – and this goes to the social media and the changes in technology, which I do think are actually very significant, and I know you do, but I know you think it goes – it’s deeper, but just to, sort of, put that out there. In 1992, to cite some experts, Page and Shapiro wrote a book too, one is a Colombian University Scholar, I’m not sure what the other is, called The Rational Public, and they found that American public opinion was more likely to be swayed by media testimony delivered by experts that were credible and biased, and this was a very significant statistical finding. So if, indeed, we have moved to an era where experts and expertise is not valued and, like the previous speaker, I’m not sure that we actually know that that’s the case, but we have an intuition that it’s the case, but I don’t think we actually know if that’s the case and I am, somewhat, sceptical. It is, if you buy the findings, at least in the US context and this very rigorous research that was done of public opinion attitudes, it’s a very dramatic, significant and highly consequential shift.

Having said that, I’m not persuaded that the shift is necessarily there, but I think one thing that really is important is differentiating it, and you did that, in part, across sectors. I think it’s also important to differentiate whether or not expertise is being rejected at the level of fact, data, how many people were there at the march? How many people were there for the inauguration? Or whether it’s being debated at the level of causality, what is it that produces a better economic result? What kind of economic policy leads to greater distribution and benefits, trickle-down versus intervention? That’s a very different kind of challenge to expertise and I think that, clearly, the challenge to facts is deeply problematic.

The challenge to the debate over causality that expertise engage in is also problematic and then to add a layer to that, one concern is are established consensus views amongst experts being challenged or is the challenge coming in those domains where experts themselves disagree very dramatically? And one could argue that the higher stakes problem is when the challenges to expertise, that has been debated on issues of causality, think about climate change, where experts, themselves, really very much agree. North Korea, I think, is another example on the merits of a pre-emptive strike, where there really is consensus among the experts, but we get that expertise being challenged frequently by elites, right? Not only by the public. So, I think we need to really disaggregate where – what’s being challenged and evaluate the consequences of that.

A word on the marketplace, ‘cause I think it actually really is important. You know, the idea of liberal theory, the liberals believe that, you know, if you let the – in this realm of ideas and expertise and facts, if you open up the marketplace and you subject all ideas to, you know, freedom of the marketplace, and the better ideas will win out. And my PhD Advisor and dear friend and colleague, Jack Snyder, wrote a lot on why this doesn’t work out very well in newly transitioned – in states that are transitioning from authoritarianism to democracy, that elites actually use the opening up of the marketplace of idea to whip up nationalism in a very problematic way. And I think that some of the arguments in that work that he did with Karen Ballantine in the 1990s, during the wars in the Balkans, are things that are really relevant to today and, in particular, they talk about, you know, the segmentation and the fragmentation of the market. And the problem, of course, for populist appeals, is that when you have a changing media landscape where there are multiple views expressed by elites through multiple challenges, that’s all fine, but the other side of that needs to be that the recipients of that information are being exposed to diverse views. And to the extent that what we’re seeing is the recipients engaging with the media through echo chambers, what we talk about is echo chambers, through silos, so they’re not actually being exposed to that diverse array of views. I think we end in a very diff – we land in a very, very difficult position.

And then finally, I wanted to say one word about this whole debate about emotion and the need for dispassionate analysis, and I’m not really sure where I come down on this. But I think it’s a really critical point because what we continue to hear is that, you know, we need to move towards expertise and move away from emotional arguments. And I fear that if the issue is less populism and more nativism, I’m not persuaded that we can win the argument by detaching the integration of, not emotionalism, but emotion and values from rational arguments. If we really different – if we continue to think that rationality is something entirely different from emotion and values, I think we’re, inevitably, going to continue to win the debate, if it’s really much more about nativism than simply populism. I’ll stop there.

Alan Philps

Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that. Lots of – this is a complicated issue, but I’m going to start by asking quite a simple question for each of the panel members to answer. Is it true that Government has got so complex, the Government, the machinery of Government, has got so complex that it requires a technocracy and, inevitably, with this complexity, the technocracy is not going to be able to speak to the people as, say, Politicians did a century ago? Are we – is there any way that we can get around the gulf, which exists between the ordinary people and the experts who are, unfortunately, necessary?

Justin Vogt

The word we’re avoiding here, and Leslie alluded to it a moment ago, is elite.

Alan Philps

Elite, yes.

Justin Vogt

And one of the – one of my pet peeves, and anybody who follows me on Twitter knows I have many of them, but one of my peeves is people say, “Well, you experts and elites,” as though we are the same people all the time, and it’s simply not true. I worked for a US…

Alan Philps

But you are an intellectual elite.

Justin Vogt

Well, okay, but I worked for a US Senator, I knew which one of us had the vote.

Alan Philps

Right.

Justin Vogt

I knew which one of us went to lunch with the President, and it wasn’t me, and I think that this question of technocracy raises a larger question. ‘Cause it’s interesting, we have a gathering like this, the tendency is for experts and intellectual leads to, kind of, hair-shirt it a bit, to say, “What are we doing wrong? How is it that were not communicating? Why does the public not trust us? What are the mistakes we’ve made?” And when I was writing the book, I got the financial crisis, the Iraq War, Vietnam, thalidomide, Challenger, you know, one after another. And I – in the book, the thing I did that I think is a little more controversial, perhaps, ‘cause of my own background, I don’t come from a particularly privileged background, by American standards, is that I start to lay quite a lot of blame for this situation on the public, you know, the financial crisis.

Why were there no bad financial instruments earlier, you know, in the 1970s? Because there weren’t any bad mortgages, because the banks wouldn’t write them, because the Government wouldn’t allow them to. You know, what triggered the financial crisis? No matter how you slice it, it was a lot of people buying houses they couldn’t afford and buying a lot of houses they couldn’t afford, and people don’t want to hear this. The Iraq War, you experts told us, “No, we didn’t.” A 100 experts took a full-page ad in the New York Times saying, “This is a bad idea,” and the public said, “Shut up, pin heads,” and it’s okay.

Now, you know, experts make mistakes all the time, but I think we spend a lot of time trying to figure out what we’re doing wrong and not thinking about the public holding up its end of the bargain. And that’s where we come back to technocracy, because, then, the answer really – you know, when it’s just, look, shut up and protect me from myself, then there are always going to be plenty of people say, “Okay, I can do that.”

I don’t know how many of you’ve ever seen the classic paranoid 1975 thriller, Three Days of the Condor?

Alan Philps

Actually, I did.

Justin Vogt

I make my students watch it and, at the end, a great CIA conspiracy is outed at the end of it. There, I spoilt it for you. But at the end of it this very cynical CIA Officer confronts the hero and he says, “Look, tonight’s food, tomorrow it’s plutonium, after that it’s water or oil,” he says, “What do you think people are going to want us to do about that?” And the hero says, “Ask them,” and he says, “No, not now, then,” and he says, “When their cars won’t start and they’re cold and people who’ve never known hungry are starting to go hungry,” he says, “They’re just going to want us to get it for them.” And it’s probably one of the most cynical, terrifying lines in a movie. He said, “They’re not going to want us to ask ‘em, they’re going to want us to just get it for them.” And I’m desperately hoping that we can stave off that, kind of, outcome because the current situation is unsustainable. It is virtually unsustainable to tell experts, “You must be right all the time and you must provide this magnificent standard of living and we really don’t want to know how it’s done, it’s magic.”

Alan Philps

So, I’m – so, you’re saying the ordinary people have to take their share of the blame?

Justin Vogt

Or we are going to drift into technocracy because that’s where we’re headed already.

Alan Philps

And what do you think of technocracy?

Dr Will Davies

Well, in answer to your original question, I mean, clearly, modern societies, over the last 150 years or so, have required more and more and more complex forms of co-ordination, bureaucracy, centralisation of administrative powers and so on, I mean, you know, the rise of the railways and so on. I mean, the need for concentrations of decision-making power, using sophisticated forms of calculation, has been driving this for a long, long, long, long time and it’s provoked, particularly in American political science, a huge level of anxiety around how does this combine with notions of democracy and so on? And there are all sorts of theories to do with, you know, how to combine deliberation with technocratic solutions and this sort of thing.

I think that – I suppose that part of the problem is where technocrats and elected figures start to blur into one, and I think that’s probably the perception, at any rate, that has started to fuel a lot of populism. It was certainly a problem in Britain in relation to New Labour, and a lot of the animosity that New Labour attracted was the sense that here was a political party led by former Policy Advisors, Speechwriters, Civil Servants, Think Tankers, Special Advisors, and so on.

Alan Philps

And we’re talking about David Miliband here, are we?

Dr Will Davies

Yeah, David Cameron was a former, worked in Norman Lamont’s office, and this sort of thing. So, there is a, kind of – you know, this revolving door between the bureaucratic wing of the state and the, supposedly, representative wing of the state, and I don’t see any real viable alternative to having bureaucratic instruments at the disposal of the state if you’re going to do things like tax collection and have a welfare state and have an army and have an NHS, and so on. There is not a, sort of, purely deliberative way of running all of those things, without reversing about, sort of, 200 years of progress. But I think that what has fuelled populism is the sense and, of course, I’m not letting populists off the hook, I hope, but the sense that people now are all the same. ‘Cause, in a way, that term, ‘elites’, is often used in a, kind of, pejorative sense, which is, oh, there’s a bunch of people in London, Brussels, Washington DC and they all know each other and they’re all in league with each other and they’re all very clever, they went to the same universities, that’s the populist, kind of, vision. And I think that what needs expressing, both in defence of democracy and in defence of technocracy, is how the two things are different. And I think that’s partly what some of the – in some ways if populism can force that upon us, then it will actually have some positive effect, potentially.

Alan Philps

If people want to jump in and were kind of, thinking.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Oh, I did, and, firstly, did you say you published – the experts published in the New York Times and the people didn’t listen, was that what you said?

Justin Vogt

It was a full-page ad of international relations, Professors, in the Times.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

In the New York Times, so, okay, in the New York Times. It’s not republished if you’re trying to have a broad, public impact across a very large audience, so I don’t think that you can dismiss the public because they didn’t listen to an ad in the New York Times, and I know many of the people who signed it and dearly respect them. So, I mean, I take issue with the environment analogy, too, all people discount the future. If you put two products side-by-side and one costs double the amount of the other one and your pocket book is constrained, and somebody says, “In 20 years,” you know, it’s a privilege to be able to make the long-term choice. So, there’s a market here, which I think we cannot underestimate and I think if you put two products side-by-side and you said, “If you buy this one, in 20 years your grandchildren are going to be in a better place,” and it costs basically the same, or maybe it’s, you know, 5% more, you’re going to get a different outcome. So, I’m very – I’d be very sceptical of blaming it on the public and not looking at the social contexts, the social structure and the market incentives.

Alan Philps

You say the market incentives, you mean, we’re talking about people who are at the struggling end of the scale?

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Not, well, struggling, I mean, you know, struggling, the middle, right? The middle working class, which is where the bulk of the population rests.

Professor Tom Nichols

Market incentives I call the inability to defer gratification. And one of the problems, for example, Americans rarely – I’ve had this argument for 25 – we don’t make coloured televisions in America anymore. Well, if you didn’t want two or three of them at affordable prices, I mean, Americans are awash in a remarkably high standard of electronic living, fuelled totally by cheap overseas labour. Americans won’t pay what it costs to buy an American made television set because then, you’re going to have one of them and so, there is a – and I’m not – we may be talking past each other, you may be talking about people that are very, you know, hard edge of subsistence, I’m talking about the average, kind of, lower middleclass to middleclass consumer, who says, “I want a bigger house. I want a better car. I want two televisions. I want three laptops in my house. I want Wi-Fi,” you know, and that – I think that level – and all of this, by the way, happens by magic. I mean, if you ask people how this happens, they just – you know, the idea that experts are involved, including not just stem experts, ‘cause I think you’re right about privileging that knowledge, which is madness. But to say – just to use the internet requires diplomats and conventions and, you know, physical security and various kinds. People just don’t want to hear that.

Alan Philps

So, you’re expecting everyone to understand everything about what they do, what brings them their lifestyle?

Professor Tom Nichols

I think that’s unfair.

Alan Philps

It sounds like it.

Professor Tom Nichols

Objection. But I think this notion of, you know, again, I’ve had this argument with friends that – who, you know, when I was a young kid, I come from a dying, or not dying, dead, in some ways, factory town. I mean, I grew up with empty factories around me and smoke stacks that don’t make smoke anymore and it was amazing to hear people say, you know, as they were mounting their second Chinese made television to say, “You know, we’ve got to bring jobs back to America.” Well, there’s a, kind of, self – there’s a, kind of, reflectiveness there that, you know, used to drive me up the wall and I would have these arguments, say, “Well, you know, don’t have two televisions.” So I take your point that for – the problem of the future, that is a privileged decision to be able to make. But this is not impossible for the public. We talk about the public as though they’re completely incapable of reasoning this way.

Alan Philps

Very good. Shall we open up questions to the floor? Well, let me start. I will – I’ll start on the front, which I shouldn’t do, over there. Could you announce who you are?

James Bone

Hi, my name’s James Bone. I’m a Journalist and Author and occasional expert at different times of my life on different subjects.

Alan Philps

Very good.

James Bone

First, I’d like to challenge, quickly, the revisionist history of Iraq. I mean, the experts in Iraq weren’t the people who put an ad in the New York Times. The experts were the people who decided whether or not Iraq possessed weapon of mass destruction and, in that case, they were clearly wrong. So, I think that’s another thing that can be added to the financial crisis. I’d like to respond to your question about narcissism, which is a good point, but isn’t narcissism, the culture of narcissism, which was really identified back in the 70s, just an aspect of consumerism, capitalism, where the customer is King, and everybody caters to the gratification of the consumer and to the extent that it spread probably beyond America? Maybe that’s just a reflection of consumerism spreading beyond America.

Alan Philps

Narcissism, would you like to respond?

Justin Vogt

Well, just a quick answer on narcissism. I’m not quite sure. I think some of it, if you had asked my father, who, two days ago, would have been 100 years old, so there’s a big generational span there. My dad, you said, came up because of affluence, that, increasingly, people were more and more disconnected from the things that made their lives good, including things like security. I mean, the idea of serving in the military, that there are duties that come with all this and that, instead, we self-actualise. You know, we go to college because it’s fun and, you know, because we enjoy it and not because we’re, sort of, investing, you know, in the future and we just do a lot of things that come easier and easier and easier. When people ask me what, you know, my childhood was like in the 1960s, they think of it as very idealised and I always say, “You know what I remember about the 1960s? No air-conditioning.” That’s what I remember and so, I think a lot of this affluence happens almost transparently to people, that they take for granted, and it gives them the leisure to focus more and more. And our culture, I think, says it’s about you, it’s about your happiness, it’s about yourself self-esteem, and that’s pervaded throughout our society at this point.

Alan Philps

Okay, are we getting away from experts? You had a question, sir. Yes, will you wait for the microphone? No, this gentleman in the front row. You’ll come later, yeah.

Jonathon Eyal

Jonathan Eyal from the Royal United Services Institute, one guy that had his acronyms cut out. I just want to bring back to the question that was asked by Professor Nichols, and by you, on the technology and how much the technology had an impact on this. Now, you tended to – you, Professor Nichols, tended to, sort of, not dismiss, but not discount it up to a certain point. But there was some areas where I looked where a big crisis, for instance, the whole subject of GM food and the subject of mad cow disease, both the disease and the number of casualties that it was supposed to have, which it didn’t. Where a lot of the pressure actually came from quite uninformed reporting, and the barrage of uninformed reporting that, at the end, sort of, erased any distinction between expertise and non-expertise. Or the reporting of medical discoveries in the media, which is, very often, rushed out, half baked by newspapers, which no longer have the money to have a Science Correspondent. So, I just wonder how much the technology platforms have, sort of, evened out the distinction between expertise and non-expertise and, in a way, battered down that distinction to pulverise it.

Alan Philps

Who would like to like to… ?

Justin Vogt

Leslie, did you want to?

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

I mean, I think it’s – you know, I haven’t done – there are a lot of people that are doing very serious work on this and I’m not one of them. But my reaction would be that it’s tremendous that your instinct is right, that the proliferation of news media, somebody quoted at a conference in New York about year ago, that about 20 years ago, 70% of American college students got their news information from three sources in combination, 70% of news was from BBC, New York Times and Washington Post and now, it’s less than 20%. So just the fact that people are getting their information from other places, right? The fragmentation of the market and the fact that so many of the places where we’re getting our news do not have Editors, so they’re not fact checked. The fact that New York Times fact checks is wonderful, but it fact checks for New York Times readers.

Professor Tom Nichols

They don’t. No, newspapers are not fact checked.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

I don’t mean that. They have that separate column where they say fact checking of – right? The New York Times runs a piece now, they run a…

Professor Tom Nichols

They do a, sort of, feature where they fact check statements.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

That’s what I – sorry.

Professor Tom Nichols

But they don’t fact check their own…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

No, sorry, I’m referring to the feature that they’re running now where they’re fact checking public statements by people like Donald Trump, is not helpful because they’re fact checking for the people who already don’t believe the facts that are being delivered by Donald Trump, right? So, you get fact checking of external speeches to lay credibility within the silos in which they’re being read, so there’s not scrutiny across the echo chambers. That’s the fragmentation and the fact that the readers are not subject to a free marketplace of ideas, which requires ideas to be contested in a free market space. But the market is not free, it’s fragmented, so I think it’s deeply problematic.

Justin Vogt

Yeah. So, speaking of Editors, and this goes to your point, you were talking about the Edelman Trust surveys. One of the most incredible findings in that most recent survey, and one that I took, sort of, personally, was that amongst UK public, 59% said they were more likely to trust a search engine than a human Editor. So, you know, and the reason – you know, and the lack of Editors having a, sort of, follow-on effect, which is that there is a lack of, sort of, curation. You also raise an issue in point there before, Leslie, you said, you know, “You don’t take out an ad in the New York Times to reach people.” The question is, where do you take out that ad, then, and what do you – how do you…?

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

USA Today. USA Today, every hotel room, right? Even, you know, the, kind of, motel rooms get USA Today in the front. I mean, I’m just saying, there are other newspapers that, if you want to reach a broader public, you could go to and…

Justin Vogt

What I’m saying is that the challenge is that there aren’t any more – any single places…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Yeah.

Justin Vogt

…that you can go. Those three news sources are…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

The AP, AP.

Justin Vogt

Well, you know, okay, but those are news articles, that’s not actually an aggregated news source.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Yeah.

Justin Vogt

So, there’s really – it’s incredibly fragmented, you know, and it’s hard to know – one bit of sympathy I have for people who want to take dissenting views, experts who want to, you know, go – cut against the grain is, it’s very difficult for them…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Yeah.

Justin Vogt

…to find those persuadables who they hope are there.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Or maybe – sorry.

Dr Will Davies

I just wanted to make a very brief comment. I mean, before – ‘cause the internet’s been in society for 20 years, social media’s been around for a decade or so. But, I mean, what – if you look at the movement that’s often-called junk science, which is the deliberate pushing of bogus facts into the public sphere, it’s been put – the tobacco industry obviously did it, very effectively, from the 1950s onwards. The oil industry has done it since the 1970s. There’s now clear evidence that Exxon knew about the risk of global warming in relation to CO2 emissions from the 1970s and were funding Scientists to say the opposite. So that has been going on for some time.

Now, of course, the internet creates the sense of the level playing field that you’re talking about, but the idea that you can run the scientific public sphere as a, kind of, Darwinian conflict between different voices and that one of them will eventually rise to the top, of course, eventually, you would hope that real science is the one that wins. But you can go for several years, if not decades, by sowing a lot of doubt on that, and that’s the broad issue that’s known as agnotology, that various people have written about, the deliberate manufacturing of ignorance and, you know, now we think that the Russians started it with Twitter. But, I mean, this has been going on for decades.

Professor Tom Nichols

A quick comment on the platform issue. The problem is, and I’m going to push this back onto the public again, the internet creates a shortcut to the illusion of knowledge and this is – anybody who teaches undergraduates can tell you that if it’s not immediately findable by clicking, it’s not worth knowing. And so, I’m not – that – but that has always been a problem, the internet has put it on steroids, that you can find basically, anything you already want to know by asking the magic – your magic box.

Alan Philps

Okay, this gentleman here, you’ve had your hand up for a long time.

Euan Grant

Yeah, thank you very much. Euan Grant, Chatham House member and former Intelligence Analyst. I have taught, over many years, professionally, the President Kennedy case, so I certainly understand the Professor’s comment about the internet creates the illusion of knowledge, given the vast amount of rubbish that is on the internet there. My question is – I also do Challenger, by the way. My question is in relation to the Professor’s comment about narcissism and I wonder if the other members of the panel would care to comment on that. In my experience, narcissism among elites is often associated with arrogance and ignorance and very serious consequences for everyone because of very bad decisions. I’m also a shareholder in Royal Bank of Scotland, thank you.

Alan Philps

Right, so narcissism of elites, so we’re not talking about the narcissism of the populist, but the narcissism of the elites, yes, Leslie.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

I mean, I – well, first of all, I’m not an expert on narcissism, although I feel like I’ve…

Alan Philps

You’re always saying you’re not an expert.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Well, I mean – but there are people who are experts on narcissists and they tend to be in different kind of the sciences. But we all – one of the problems is that we’ve all become armchair experts on narcissism since Donald Trump was elected and armchair experts on Trumpism and his psychology. But I guess, I wanted come back, and maybe it gets at the internet narcissist question. But, two things, one is not all graduates – I have taught in universities since 1996 and still teach, including yesterday, and I can promise you that not all graduates stop with what they can find on the internet. In fact, I would say that the vast majority, about 80 to 90%, probably 95% of my students think very hard, long beyond the internet. They do like to get access to books and articles online, but they read them, they debate them, they think very seriously, maybe things are better in the UK than in the US, but I’ve taught in the US as well. So, I think we have to be careful about taking our graduates and our undergraduates down further than they deserve to go. And I think, actually, there’s a lot of hope.

But the other thing about the internet is that, yes, everything’s on the internet. But the nice thing about our educational systems is that we’re teaching people how to scrutinise and to think about what they’re finding on the internet. People frequently say to me, “Oh, Twitter, it’s such a waste of time,” I know you don’t think that. But the thing about Twitter is, you know, I always say, “Well, what do you mean? Like, is white – are white pieces of paper a waste of time?” It’s simply a vessel. It’s a tool, you have to decide what’s useful, who’s useful to follow, when they’re speaking the truth, when they’re not, right? That takes a level of education and discipline and that’s what we teach our students and our peers and our colleagues. So, again, I would be careful to just, you know, disregard any of these things, it’s all – it is about the educational underpinnings. And so, you know, narcissism and the internet, I guess, I don’t have a good way of answering the question, I feel a phenomena that…

Alan Philps

But the thing is, we’re always looking at narcissism amongst the leadership, leaders, narcissistic leaders, that was what you were asking about?

Euan Grant

one

Yeah.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

But what is the – there are…

Euan Grant

I have seen it, a connection with arrogance and ignorance, but in an elite context and that it tends to lead to disaster, and I’ve seen very obvious cases of that.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Yeah, absolutely.

Alan Philps

Okay, shall we take another question? Yes, the lady at the back, I can barely see.

Jordana Friedman

Yes.

Alan Philps

Yeah, stand up.

Jordana Friedman

Hello, I’m Jordana Friedman. I’m a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations and also, a think tank and geotype. I just two fingered that comment because one of the big picture questions that I have is, isn’t – well, it seems – is the populism that we’re seeing, in other words, a kind of other – it really is about, in my opinion, non-expert elitists, kind of, battling it out with other elitists, a.k.a., experts and I – who have, perhaps, just chosen the mechanism of populism. They’ve written this cycle, which is part of a historical cycle where populism comes and goes, and they’re running with it. I’m just wondering is that a paradigm that speaks to any of you or is that, you know – or am I – or is that a misjudgement?

Alan Philps

Yes.

Professor Tom Nichols

I think the point about experts bullying people with expert opinion is something I’ve warned experts about, that – the one thing I don’t talk about in the book, because I hate this subject more than any other, is climate change because it is – I mean, there is a lot of bullying going on because I think, you know, climate change is real, it’s happening, we have to do something about it. But, you know, I’ve had discussions with Scientists where I keep saying, over and over again, people have a right to make dumb choices, you know, to do bad things. As I say in the book, if the people of Boston want to let the city slide into the harbour, that’s a terrible choice, but you can’t say because my facts are true you must adopt my policy proposals, there is a world of difference between those two things.

Now, I think where people get frustrated, and where I get frustrated with people, is they do see these intra-elite or intra-expert battles and they want to be involved in them because it’s, kind of like, during the Cold War when we used to argue about arms control, people thought, look, my life is in danger here, you know, and I want to be a part of this. I don’t want you guys just talking over my head. But I am forced to point out that, as people say that, we also know that most Americans cannot name all three branches of their own Government. 36% of Americans can find North Korea on a map, the rest of them think it’s in Australia, I’m not kidding. You know, we really – and the problem is that correlates really strongly. Washington posted a poll a few years back where the people who had the strongest opinion about the use of military force in Ukraine, believing America should intervene militarily in Ukraine, now, think about that for a minute, were also the people least likely to know where it was.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

But that makes sense. Sorry, that makes sense, right? If you see that Ukraine is as close to Russia as it is, then, of course, you don’t think it’s a good idea. But if you don’t know that then, of course, you think differently. I mean, I read that in your book and I thought, well, that makes sense to me, right? Of course, I mean…

Professor Tom Nichols

Where is the person who says, “Wait a minute…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Where is it?

Professor Tom Nichols

…I don’t know where that is, I’m not going to express a strong opinion and I’m going to find out?”

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

But the survey didn’t ask that. You didn’t give them the opportunity to answer. I mean…

Alan Philps

I think the question was more about, well, is what we’re talking about, this populism, is it various elite people who are coming along and riding this populist wave? I mean, are you thinking of Commodity Brokers, like Nigel Farage and other things like that?

Justin Vogt

But Tom, let me just point out one thing, though, that relates to this, is that you don’t write about climate change that bothers you, you know, you say that – you tell Scientists, people have the right to make bad choices, but the other path of your critique is all about how their terrible choices are ruining everything. So, you know, those two things don’t square that well.

Professor Tom Nichols

I haven’t given up my commitment to democracy entirely.

Justin Vogt

Okay, but let me point out, though, that with climate change, you know, the issue – my impression is not so much that people are saying, “You know, I just – I get it, it’s totally true and it’s just awful, but I’m just going to keep, you know, driving my gas guzzler.” There really is denialism. There is a real – so, what you see as bullying, from my point of view, is exasperation and desperation with trying to overcome this strain of denialism that just won’t budge.

Professor Tom Nichols

And there is some of that, but I think you’ll also find that, with a lot of programmes and a lot of policy choices, people will agree with the experts, right up until they’re confronted with the costs of it.

Justin Vogt

Right, yeah.

Professor Tom Nichols

And then suddenly it’s, well, you know, I don’t know if that’s true.

Justin Vogt

I see, so you see the cause of that or going the other way?

Professor Tom Nichols

Right.

Alan Philps

Okay. Who has another question? The gentleman in the glasses there.

Imar Akmed

Hi, thank you. I’m Imar Akmed and I’m a PhD student at UCL. The panel’s been discussing what platform to use to persuade and access people who might not be easy to persuade. What if you caught them off guard and appeared on their local radio, TV – radio stations? So, you wouldn’t have to venture into your – the bar that you – in the town that you grew up, you wouldn’t have to get a bloody nose, you have a wall of separation and maybe it’s a little bit highfalutin to assume that they’re reading newspapers.

Alan Philps

So, I didn’t quite get your question, so…

Imar Akmed

So, the question is, would you consider going to…

Dr Will Davies

Speak to the local radio stations.

Imar Akmed

…the places that you grew up, if you’re not from DC or London, and featuring on their local radio station?

Professor Tom Nichols

I’ve done talk radio all over the United States and American talk radio [exhales]. And I’ve done it precisely for that reason, because I can’t complain about people not heeding expertise if I’m not willing to go to where the people are and talk to them, and I have been, you know, in my career, not just since this book. But, I mean, I used to write about Russia, I was a Soviet expert, which tells you that I used that word, how long ago that was. Arms control, I mean, I’ve given talks, you know, all over the US, all over North America. So I believe in that and I think experts need to do it.

Alan Philps

Yes, Leslie.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

Can I just have one line on that? I had an experience, I think it was yesterday, where I was on a panel and somebody from the State Department, actually it was on the record, so Heather Nauert from the States, a spokesman, right, for this paper, cited a Fox News poll, where Trump’s popularity was very high. And so, I say this because it was a panel discussion and I wasn’t really given space, I wasn’t given space, to respond to that. So, one thing that I think is incredibly important, and this wasn’t, you know, the local media session, this was Australian Broadcasting Corporation, you do have to have training, right? It’s easy to go on CNN or BBC, but when you – you know, my other example would be going on LBC where they suddenly put somebody on who is an American, who basically said, you know, ”Everybody in Africa’s a terrorist.” And you need training, right? You need to know how to respond very quickly to things that are really beyond the panel, that you don’t have two respond to if you’re just talking in the classroom and publishing in the New York Times and talking on CNN or BBC.

Alan Philps

So, just – and what do you think of this? I mean, should people who contribute to your magazine, should you say, “No, cut it down to 600 words and get it in USA Today?” Is that what…?

Justin Vogt

No, we don’t think that. Although, it’s funny you mention that, because we did used to do exactly that. We would take our articles and create these like op-ed versions of them for – precisely for USA Today, in fact, that’s where we would publish them.

Alan Philps

Right.

Justin Vogt

It’s interesting that you raise that because we found it got very little traction. It got very little response, and this issue of going to where people are in their home – you know, there are no small-town newspapers anymore, you know, and talk radio is what there is and there’s Fox. And I think the other thing is that Fox, we can have a whole panel discussion about that, but Fox has, in a lot of ways, replaced those voices, it’s supplanted them, and it’s done so, so successfully, it’s the genius of Fox really, it’s one of the unheralded geniuses of it, it’s replaced those voices and make them seem like, oh, this is a person from where I’m from when, of course, they’re not at all.

Professor Tom Nichols

Dan Balz, from the Washington Post, was asked – I was on a panel with him a couple of months ago and somebody said, “Why don’t you guys right more policy pieces to inform people?” He said, “We write them, people won’t read them.”

Justin Vogt

Right.

Alan Philps

Yeah, okay, more questions. I think we’ll take three questions, and I’ll start there. You, yes, the gentleman here. Could you tell us who you are?

Karim Quant

Hi, my name is Karim Quant and I’m a member of Chatham House. So, the issue of the decline of credibly independent institutions, perhaps coupled with the rise of unchecked, political tribalism, would you say – or to what extent would you say that this is a fault line that’s relevant to what we’re talking about today?

Alan Philps

Right, the gentleman with the red scarf.

Frank Gedley

Frank Gedley, member of Chatham House. Reference has been made to the concept of deterrence and I assume a nuclear deterrence is part of that. Now, I don’t think you can actually discuss nuclear deterrence unless you assume rationality and the implications of rationality, like self-interest, survival, self-preservation. Now, a few years ago some, so-called, experts, on the basis of some theological beliefs held by the President of Iran at the time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, brought up the notion of a nuclear attack by Iran on Israel. Now, it’s quite clear the leaders of Iran…

Alan Philps

Sorry, we’re running out of time.

Frank Gedley

…are quite irrational, they don’t want to be disloyal.

Alan Philps

Could you give us a question, please?

Frank Gedley

And the question is, how the experts on irrationality are actually proved wrong, but the rational behaviour of those who are actually in charge of a country?

Alan Philps

Irrational behaviour, and a third question, yeah, the young gentleman there in the second row.

Jan Kilparmar

Hi, Jan Kilparmar. I’m a Masters’ student at the London School of Economics. So, I think we often think about the rise of, sort of, on expert opinions on the internet and that seems to be, sort of, a focal point. But where I see it most, especially when I go to my parents’ house in the States, is on cable news and it’s just unending, 24 hours, of people who aren’t experts. They might be elites in the way some people see them because they’re on TV, but they have no expertise and that’s actually had like a much longer runway than the internet, you know, we’ve had cable news for over 25 years now. So, where do you see the role of, sort of, 24-hour cable news cycles, unending discussions by non-experts about expert topics and what that does to, sort of, the electorate?

Alan Philps

Who wants to answer weak institutions and tribalism, is this the key fault line of the times?

Dr Will Davies

I’m not sure I agree with the way it’s been put, but I think that the point, which is that the quest for facts and for truth, historically, has gone hand-in-hand with institutions that are seen as outside of the fray of politics. This is the whole way back to the scientific revolution of the 17^th Century, is that the establishment of there being non-political premises for research and for philosophy and for knowledge is key to what then became modern science. And I think that we have a dilemma today, and if the Economic and Social Research Council is watching this, then I should probably watch what I say. But I think there is a dilemma today, in terms of whether we want universities to be high impact, fast turnover, engaged, publicly relevant institutions, in which point they become suckered by various, sort of, trends and 24-hour news channels and social media, and we all have to blog and we all have to be constantly in the thick of things. I mean, I do quite a lot of that myself, I quite enjoy it, a lot of people don’t. Or whether universities are to do the slow, hard, more boring work of seeking truth, which is what they’ve been historically set up to do.

So I think that, in a way, universities are in a bit of a bind now because I’m not suggesting that this is necessarily encouraging tribalism, but we’re all now required to demonstrate impact on the world and we’re measured in the way in which we demonstrate impact on the world. So then, when populists come along and say, “These people, they’re not disinterested, they’re not neutral, they’ve actually got into bed with those people and those people and those people,” they’ve actually got a point, to some extent, because there is the requirement, which I understand, completely, but I do think that ‘ivory tower’ has become a pejorative term and if – we’re seriously concerned about the status of truth in today’s politics. There has to be serious attention to the way in which we fund, not only independent journalism, but independent research where we don’t expect constantly keeping up with the news cycle and the political cycle and having policy impact, and all that kind of thing.

So, I’m not sure that that’s – I’m not sure I quite agree with the way you put it about tribalism, but I do think you’re onto something.

Justin Vogt

I think that question and this question are linked together because the availability of information, which we all think of as a great democratising, levelling, it’s actually causing a lot of this tribalism because people now have enough, can now separate their streams of information so carefully they never have too encounter a fact they don’t like. And that makes – and the creation of these echo chambers, the metaphor I use is holding a microphone in front of a speaker until it’s ear splitting, because in an earlier time, you know, people have asked me, do I think it was better when there are only three networks and it was three old, white guys reading corporate, curated news from New York? Okay, we live in a better world.

On the other hand, people who had to sit and watch the news every night had to encounter things they didn’t want to hear because you couldn’t silo, to use – you couldn’t silo that information. Now, if you want to watch – you want to spend your day watching MSNBC or watching Fox or watching CNN, you – or you only read the Huffington Post or Slate or National Review, you never have to encounter an argument or a fact that you don’t like, and that just revs up. I mean, look at this current thing now about the investigation, the Russian investigation, they’re two completely separate and, in some ways, equally crazy narratives that have taken off between two communities, epistemological communities, that simply never talk to each other.

So, I actually think they’re related problems because they have to fill that time. There’s so much time, they have to put somebody in front of that camera and if I – I mean, I wonder, one question for experts, how many times you’ve ever said no to TV? And I’ve said no to Producers, you know, Andy Warhol once said, right? “Never turn down the opportunity to have sex or be on television,” and I think he did, anyway. But, you know, I mean, I’ve said to Producers, “I can’t talk about that, I don’t know anything about it,” and I remember one Producer said, “Come on, it’s five minutes.” I’m like, “It would be five minutes of nonsense, I don’t know this subject.” But, you know, you can’t blame them, they’re trying to fill that time.

Alan Philps

Let’s have three more questions. Sorry.

Frank Gedley

Okay, we’ll have a, yeah, a comment, please.

Alan Philps

A comment, oh, on, you said, “Deterrence proves rationality. Deterrence proves rationale.” Yeah, do we accept that, the success of deterrence proves rationality?

Professor Tom Nichols

I think modern deterrence there is being revised by the understanding that there’s a difference between being rational and being reasonable. We no longer, I think, rat – we – I work on the deterrence issues in my other life and I don’t – I think that presumption of universal western style rationality has been worked on and has been refined. I think we have – going back to Leslie’s point, that although it seems common sensical, real experts spend a lot of time talking about this.

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

And disagreeing on certain things.

Justin Vogt

Sorry, can I – I just want to add a little point to your question, too, which is that a lot of what – you asked about cable news and, Thomas, it gets to what you were saying, a lot of what you’re seeing on cable news is actually people who, you know, might, if they were being honest, would say, “Well, I’m no expert, but I do play one on TV,” especially on Fox. I mean, you can watch Fox, you can get Sebastian Gorka, who can tell you all about Islamic radicalism, even though he’s really hardly qualified to do so, you can get Judge Jeanine Pirro to tell you all about the Russian investigation and you can get Judge Andrew Napolitano to tell you all about the Justice Department. Now, these are people who – you know, the network that puts them on has cast them in the role of expert and, you know, you were talking about media training, they’re very, very good at it. They’re really good at it. I mean, I’ll watch them, and these are people I disagree with and I start, kind of, getting lulled into it, “Oh yeah, that’s a good point,” you know, and I think, snap out of it, you know. They’re good at it because of this, kind of, communication is a skill…

Dr Leslie Vinjamuri

It is a skill.

Justin Vogt

…that people who are qualified need to learn, the people who are unqualified have realised, I don’t really need to understand any of this, all I need to be able to do is talk about it well on TV.

Alan Philps

Who’s got a quick question? This gentleman here, anyone else got a quick? Yes, yes, who are you?

Nate Hubbard

Hi, I’m Nate Hubbard, Term Member at the Council. It strikes me that there might be some policy choices we can make to improve the quality of expertise and the credibility, so if you contrast the States where I grew up in Singapore, where I lived for a long time, the amount of prestige and the associated pay that goes with traditional positions of expertise, you know, whether it’s teaching or Government Civil Service. You know, you grow up in Singapore and the smartest boys and girls in your class went to Harvard and Oxford and came back and went to fight, you know, in different ministries in Singapore, ‘cause their tuition was paid for, you immediately say, “Wow, they actually – these are really bright people.” And they also, aren’t compelled, because they’re paid well, to necessarily trade in that job to go and make money in the private sector, right? So, you don’t have that same corridor, like you do in DC to New York and so that also improves their credibility because you don’t feel that they’re conflicted, or you don’t feel like they’re pushing policies on you with an eye towards their next employer. I mean, should we not be thinking, fundamentally, about what we can do in the West to, kind of, assign more prestige and pay better and reduce some of those, you know, potential conflicts for people in Government, for people, you know, that go into teaching professions, etc?

Alan Philps

Okay, give more prestige to Teachers and Civil Servants.

Professor Tom Nichols

Civil – people who teach and, yes, absolutely, we need a lot more. It’s a losing argument, though. You’re not going to make the – I mean, I have defended Congressmen as – I’ve worked in Congress. I mean, believe it or not, Congressmen, yes, they spend a lot of time on the phone trying to raise money, it’s ugly and it’s a dirty business. They also work really hard. They spend a lot of time, especially if they have to travel far. If you tell an American, you know, think of Congressmen as the Board of Directors of the wealthiest, most powerful corporation on earth and they make $175,000 a year, and they are vastly underpaid. Americans, their heads explode. They hate – they say, “Why are all these Congressmen corrupt and on-the-take and why are they making so much money?” You can’t – it’s just – it’s not an argument you can’t win. I’ve tried. I wish you were right. I wish we would think of, you know, the Civil Service as a noble calling. I wish we could think of, you know – I love that you said, “The ivory tower is now a pejorative.” I’m trying to remember the time when it was like a good thing. But, you know, Americans, and I’m being specific of Americans, you know, the idea that college Professors should be highly paid or Civil Servants, that is a – that’s just a – not an argument.

Alan Philps

Final question, would this only work in a small place like Singapore, which is, sort of, unique in its political system?

John Vogt

And an undemocratic…

Professor Tom Nichols

I don’t mean Singapore is undemocratic. I mean, in a place where you can override the public’s, kind of, distaste for paying Civil Servants what they’re worth, you’re not going to do that in a country of 300 million people as a democratic choice. The last thing we amended our Constitution about was not allowing Congressmen to vote a pay raise that – think of this, a 200 plus year old written Constitution and the last amendment we stuck on it was so that Congressmen can’t take advantage of a pay raise within that electoral cycle, because we thought that was so important we had to actually ink that onto the Constitution.

Alan Philps

Okay, time is – our time is up. Thank you for your questions, for your interest. Thank you to our panel: Leslie Vinjamuri, Justin Vogt, Tom Nichols and Will Davies. So, will you join me in a round of applause for our panel [applause]?