Keith Sutherland (Exeter, Imprint Academic): The most remarkable thing about the Chancellor’s Guardian interview wasn’t his unusual candour about the parlous state of the economy (“arguably the worst in 60 years”) but his admission that a year ago he had no idea of what was in store. In fairness to Mr. Darling – an intelligent and likeable man – he was in good company, for most economists and senior bankers hadn’t the faintest inkling of the financial crisis about to unfold: “No one did. No one had any idea”.
However it was pretty damn obvious to everybody else (other than practitioners of the ‘dismal science’) that the nation was gorging on an unsustainable debt and asset price bubble and that the whole pack of cards was about to fall down. Why is it that expert political judgment is so out of line with what has been called the ‘wisdom of crowds’?
This isn’t just a case of folk psychology: Richard Tetlock’s encyclopaedic study, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Could We Know?, demonstrates that there is no obvious correlation between expertise and good political judgment, referring to ‘the ingenuity and determination that political elites display in rendering their positions impregnable to evidence’. Tetlock, a research psychologist at UC Berkeley, made the truly alarming discovery that:
when we pit experts against minimalist performance benchmarks – dilettantes, dart-throwing chimps, and assorted extrapolation algorithms – we find few signs that expertise translates into greater ability to make either ‘well-calibrated’ or ‘discriminating’ forecasts…Who experts were – professional background, status, and so on – made scarely an iota of difference to accuracy.
By contrast James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds, an update of Condorcet’s famous jury theorem, demonstrated that, when the criteria are entirely pragmatic, a randomly-sampled crowd is much more likely to arrive at the ‘right’ decision than the so-called experts. When there are sharp ideological differences the Condorcet theorem would not apply, but modern politics is far less partisan (Darling spent most of the interview extolling his own pragmatism).
Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty’s The Athenian Option and my own book A People’s Parliament demonstrate how randomly-selected citizen juries can radically improve the quality of political judgment. Details at www.imprint-academic.com/ourkingdom (declaration of interest, I am also the publisher).