View source for Libertarian unscience, ctd.

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[[Category:Epistocracy]]
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{{DES | des = "Thinking about that whole subject, I realized that I had another perfect example: [[Jason Brennan]]'s incessant bleating about "epistocracy.""  Points out how Brennan never considers real-world epistocracies. | show=}}
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Late last week, we looked at the libertarian tendency to make pretty theories and then encase those theories inside fact-proof glass. Thinking about that whole subject, I realized that I had another perfect example: Jason Brennan's incessant bleating about "epistocracy."

For those who don't know, "epistocracy" basically means "rule by those who know." You'd think that Brennan would be opposed to epistocracy, being as he is an (alleged) anarchist, but that's neither here nor there; remember, this is a post about how libertarianism in general is an unscience. And so, along those lines, it's worth noting that, for Brennan,

"an epistocracy might deny citizens the franchise unless they can pass a test of basic political knowledge. They might give every citizen one vote, but grant additional votes to citizens who pass certain tests or obtain certain credentials. They might pass all laws through normal democratic means, but then permit bands of experts to veto badly designed legislation. For instance, a board of economic advisors might have the right to veto rent-control laws, just as the Supreme Court can veto laws that violate the Constitution.

Or, an epistocracy might allow every citizen to vote at the same time as requiring them to take a test of basic political knowledge and submit their demographic information. With such data, any statistician could calculate the public's 'enlightened preferences', that is, what a demographically identical voting population would support if only it were better informed. An epistocracy might then instantiate the public's enlightened preferences rather than their actual, unenlightened preferences."

Now, again, there are a million billion different ways that you could object to this. For example, allowing "a board of economic advisors" to veto laws would be suicide; economists don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Likewise, giving credentialed people extra votes would be little more than a good way of making credentials even more artificially important. But, again, this isn't a post about all of the ways in which Jason Brennan is wrong. This is a post about why he's wrong, i.e., why his way of gathering knowledge is gravely and irreparably flawed.*

To start with, let's turn to Nathan Robinson's critique of Brennan's shoddy, harebrained work.

"All of this is very persuasive, until we remember that he is comparing 'democracy as it actually exists' with 'epistocracy as an abstract theory.' By comparing real democracy to hypothetical epistocracy (instead of epistocracy as it would actually be implemented), Brennan's book doesn't address a single one of the important questions around restricted suffrage: in practice, wouldn't voting tests probably be used (as they have for their entire history) to disenfranchise the socially powerless? Wouldn't such a system inevitably be abused, and wouldn't 'knowledge' just become a stand-in for 'things powerful people believe'? (Brennan admits that wealthy white men will probably be considered the most 'knowledgable,' but does not appear to have a problem with this.) By presenting democracy with all its warts, but giving no thought to how 'epistocracies' work in practice, Brennan avoids confronting the difficult fact that his preferred system of government, if adopted, will almost certainly reinstate Jim Crow."

As Robinson and his colleague Breanna Rennix write in the latest issue of Current Affairs, "epistocracy" is not even really a novel or unique idea. Jim Crow may well have been a blatant pretext for white-supremacist discrimination, but there have in fact been polities that attempted to staff themselves with the best and the brightest. "The only problem," Rennix and Robinson write, "is that it is all ludicrous: these Virtuous Policy Fairies do not exist in reality, and so what is in fact being proposed is not even a hierarchy between 'good bureaucrats' and 'indulged masses' but fundamentally unchecked power in the hands of the sort of people who excel at standardized tests and subtle self-promotion." Communist countries like the USSR and modern-day China are the two most obvious examples that spring to mind, but there are many, many others.

All of this makes it rather strange that Brennan doesn't seem to acknowledge any of humanity's real, documented attempts at "epistocracy." Instead, he resolutely (one might even say purposefully) keeps the conversation in the realm of the abstract. Instead of researching Jim Crow "literacy" tests or Chinese communism - two subjects that should fit quite well within his libertarian point of view! - he talks about what epistocracies "might" do, how they "could" function, and so on. Naturally, he goes out of his way to make these options seem attractive and smart. For example, he says that any questions used to disenfranchise citizens should have answers that are "easily verifiable and uncontroversial." But, ultimately, he doesn't believe that we have any real or worthwhile evidence about how epistocracies would work in reality. Instead, he argues that we have to

"experiment with voter examination systems on a relatively small scale at first. For instance, perhaps it would be best if one state in the U.S. tried the system first...If the experiment succeeds, then the rules could be scaled up."

Here, Brennan even works in a little bit of scientific lingo: epistocracy, he says, could be an "experiment"! Everybody likes those, right? Who could object to a little trial and error? But it's fairly obvious that he has no actual intention of treating the experiment like an experiment - that is, treating it like something that could potentially disprove his preferred theory. After all, to reiterate, we've had plenty of experiments with "epistocracy" already and they haven't gone very well. The USSR was a catastrophe; contemporary China is on its way towards being worse; and the Jim Crow south was a living nightmare despite the fact that its voter-suppression tests had "uncontroversial" and "objective" answers.

Indeed, I can go one step further in terms of proving how much of an unscientist Brennan is. Just for fun, let's set aside the decades (if not centuries**) of real-world evidence regarding governmental epistocracy. Even so, there are still many institutions in which the right to rule is contingent on education (or, at least, "education"): namely, colleges and universities. So how does Brennan feel about those, I wonder? Oh, that's right. He hates them. He thinks that most of the humanities are worthless, he believes that his own discipline is a bunch of lies, and, in a moment of sheer self-sabotage, he argues that academic epistocracy doesn't work:

"[I]f your main job is to choose and credential the ruling class, perhaps you also want to get them to mouth pious ideas about equality and social justice. You might even want to hire gatekeepers faculty who actually believe that stuff. The point is to temper the rulers and make them gentler, nicer, and a little more publicly-spirited than they otherwise would be. Maybe it's useful to get the people in power to believe there's something bad about power.

Of course, this could all backfire, and all you end up doing is teaching the people in power to rationalize and justify their authoritarianism and injustice using the language of equality and social justice."

So let's get this straight. According to Jason Brennan, epistocracy is a bad thing that doesn't work because "all you end up doing is teaching the people in power to rationalize and justify their authoritarianism" - but also, at the same time and despite both (1) his own admission of epistocracy's failure and (2) the scads of other evidence we have regarding the fact that epistocracy is a failure, we don't know anything about how epistocracy would work in the real world, so the best we can do is compare actual democracy to theoretical, spherical-cow epistocracy and then try some "experiments" at the state level.

This, friends, is the point of this post. It's not that Brennan is a pseudoscientist: he isn't putting on a tinfoil hat and twisting the evidence until it conforms to the shape of his theory. He's also not a mystic: he's not saying that his theory works because of obscure, supernatural reasons. He's just an unscientist: he crafts a normal-sounding theory, explains the seemingly plausible reasoning behind his theory, and then NEVER EVER EVER TESTS THAT THEORY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, even when reality has already done the work for him.

As such, Robinson is, if anything, far too kind to Brennan. It's not that he (Brennan) merely "giv[es] no thought to how 'epistocracies' work in practice." In at least one case (academia), he's both thought about a real-world epistocracy and published those thoughts on the internet where anybody can read them. So, in fact, it's much worse than Robinson makes it out to be. At some level, Brennan absolutely does know that epistocracy is a bogus idea. But, because he's a libertarian and libertarians are unscientists who learn to scrupulously segregate their theories away from the evidence, he actively prevents what he knows from affecting what he believes. And if you do that, it doesn't matter what type of -ism you subscribe to, you're setting yourself up for absolute and repeated failure.

*An irony here is that, if we did institute a well-functioning epistocracy, Brennan's arguments in favor of epistocratic rule would prohibit him from participating in it.

**It would be very easy to argue that most pre-democratic forms of government were epistocracies. After all, if you've got a hundred thousand illiterate, uneducated peasants who are ruled over by a couple hundred royals who grew up with fancy tutors, that sure sounds like an epistocracy.
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