What is the Problem of Policymaker Ignorance?
Policymakers are human beings, not wizards.
Scott Scheall
I originally published the following short essay (“The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance”) on the website of the America Institute for Economic Research on July 14, 2022.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine that you are elected to some public office, whatever it might be. Will your knowledge change – improve – in the course of your ascent to this new public role? More to the point, will you suddenly acquire all of the knowledge and abilities that you need to effectively discharge the duties of your new position?
Of course not. You will be the same person of average to above-average intelligence that you were before assuming public office. You will have the same knowledge and possess the same capacities that you had before. You and your fellow newly-elected officials will not all of a sudden become gods capable of bending society to your individual, or collective, wills. Policymakers can only base their decisions on knowledge that is publicly available. There are no Illuminati-like conspiracies whereby elites become political wizards upon grasping the reins of power. Indeed, there are no such reins. Policymakers are forever in search of causal knowledge and powers – to both know enough and be capable of bringing about specific states of social affairs – that no mortal can possess.
Now, imagine that you’re officially in power. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you are unwaveringly beneficent and want only to promote the interests of the people who elected you, your constituents. Unfortunately, you were largely ignorant of your constituents’ interests and incapable of bringing about states of affairs that would promote these interests before you were elected, and you remain ignorant and incapable to about the same degree now that you’re in office.
True, as an elected official, you now have access to an array of scientific experts, but their knowledge was actually available to you before you assumed office, if only you had sought out relevant scholarly sources. More to the point, expert knowledge is of limited value in your efforts to discover and promote the interests of your constituents. Experts might be able to advise you how to realize given objectives, but they are unlikely to know which goals you ought to pursue, which objectives, if realized, will promote your constituents’ interests. In any case, to the extent there is disagreement among experts, you may find their advice more confusing than enlightening. You and your policymaking peers will have to choose whether to follow the advice of experts and, if so, which experts’ advice to follow. Alas, there are no experts about experts, so you cannot expect any expert assistance in making this choice. In the final analysis, you are on your own.
What will you do under these circumstances? Since you do not know how to promote your constituents’ interests, you will not do that. You will do something that you know better how to do. Indeed, there are no other options. After all, you can only do things that you know enough to do (and you definitely do not know how to promote your constituents’ interests, except, as it were, as a matter of luck).
One of the things that you know how to do is use the media to make it seem to your constituents that you are, in fact, trying to promote their interests. You know how to hold daily press briefings and give interviews in which you extol your desire to promote your constituents’ interests (and lambaste your political rivals for their disregard of constituents). You know how to hire social media influencers who will relentlessly advertise your care for your constituents and your desire to advance their concerns. You know how to create special committees, task forces, and blue-ribbon panels; you know how to “put your best people” on the case of improving the lot of the good folks who put you into office.
If you’re lucky, you will be rewarded with repeated electoral victories from voters, who cannot distinguish such media-facilitated and ultimately faux attempts to address their worries from earnest efforts. After all, given your ignorance, your pretended efforts are no less likely to promote your constituents’ interests than legitimate attempts. But, if not, if you’re eventually thrown out of office for your failure to deliver for your constituents, there will be another – no-less-ignorant – aspirant to take your place.
And, thus, politics.
Policymakers* are human beings, and human beings are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. Humans are, by degrees and in different ways, ignorant and incapable. Therefore, policymakers are ignorant of various things and incapable in various ways. Some of this ignorance and incapacity might be relevant to their policymaking duties. They might lack knowledge of facts or theories required to design a successful policy, or they may lack abilities necessary to implement and administer an otherwise well-designed policy in a way that realizes its objective. There are potential policy goals that cannot be realized through deliberate political action because the relevant policymakers are ignorant of things or incapable in ways required to realize the goals.**
The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance has two aspects.
The first we might call metaphysical. Policymakers are causally responsible to bring about certain objectives desired by their constituents. It is part of their remit to bring about certain states of affairs consistent with the objectives and goals associated with the various needs, wants, and interests of constituents. However, since they are neither omniscient nor omnipotent, policymakers are constrained by their ignorance and incapacity in the states of affairs they can deliberately bring about in society.
The effectiveness of deliberate policymaking is ignorance-bound, in other words. As much as we might like to, we cannot eclipse the limits of policymaker ignorance to deliberately realize policy objectives that fall within its scope. If policymakers do not possess the knowledge and capacities required to, say, minimize (or mitigate) human suffering during a pandemic or moderate the effects of environmental degradation, these goals will not be realized through deliberate political action.
However, to say that such goals will not be realized deliberately is not to say that they will not be realized at all. Beyond the limits of policymaker ignorance lie goals that may nevertheless be realized, but only if spontaneous considerations which do not figure in the processes of deliberate policy design, implementation, and administration intervene to counter the consequences of policymaker ignorance.
There are several kinds of spontaneity at work in society. Luck is the kind of spontaneity with which we are probably most familiar from our own personal lives. We “get (un)lucky” whenever something happens that played no part in our plans. Thus, ignorant policymakers might get lucky and minimize human suffering from a disease or mitigate the consequences of climate change, despite their relevant ignorance. The most famous kind of spontaneity, at least among academic philosophers and economists, is associated with Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand” quotation in The Wealth of Nations, and emerges from the interactions of self-motivated individuals in market and other (e.g., scientific and other scholarly) contexts. Thus, policymakers may not know enough to deliberately manage a pandemic or improve the planet’s health, but such results might nevertheless spontaneously emerge from the actions and interactions of individual constituents.
Despite the obvious fact that policymakers may lack some of the knowledge required to effectively discharge various of their policymaking duties, despite the fact that it is always an open question whether they possess the knowledge required to deliberately realize some policy objective (and, therefore, whether spontaneous forces must emerge to compensate for any relevant policymaker ignorance), policymakers are typically treated in political discourse as if they possess special knowledge not available to their constituents. This is true both in formal political discourse, the domain of academic political scientists, philosophers, and economists, and in informal political analysis of the sort performed by political pundits, journalists, and the average voter. We usually assume, at least implicitly and if only with regard to our own personal political predilections, that policymakers possess the knowledge and abilities necessary to bring about whatever policy objectives they might aim to realize, come what may.
The above thought experiment focuses our attention on the absurdity of this assumption. At what point in the transition from mere constituent to policymaker do normal, cognitively-limited, human beings acquire the special knowledge and capacities that our political analyses implicitly attribute to policymakers? Unless one is prepared to engage in unhinged conspiracy theorizing of the Illuminati type – unless one is convinced that elected office carries with it induction into some secret society the members of which possess knowledge hidden to the rest of us – one must acknowledge that policymaking can only proceed on the basis of publicly-available knowledge, that policymakers do not have access to knowledge (or powers, talents, abilities, etc.) inaccessible to the rest of us, that policymakers are not epistemically privileged.
The thought experiment also focuses attention on the limited value of expert policy advice. The mere fact that experts are involved in the processes of designing, implementing, and administering government policies is a tacit admission of the Problem of Policymaker Ignorance, i.e., it is silent witness to the fact that (non-expert) policymakers are insufficiently knowledgeable to discharge their duties and therefore require the assistance of experts. However, experts are only uniquely knowledgeable about narrow topics limited to their specialized areas of study. There are not experts about the whole of many social problems, including their natural, social, and moral aspects. Anthony Fauci (or someone like him) might be an expert about infectious disease, but he knows little about economics, sociology, psychology, or moral philosophy. Similarly, an expert economist may know a lot about the economy, but nothing about infectious disease. And so on for all the other expert policymakers who might contribute their expertise to the policymaking process.
Experts acquire their disciplinary expertise under the constant and consoling cover of ceteris paribus clauses, but other things do not remain the same for long in the real world. Where non-expert policymakers confront the confusing and contradictory advice of multiple experts competing for their attention, each operating according to their own unique ceteris paribus assumption, scientific expertise may be of limited, if not negative, value for policymaking purposes. The presence of experts in the policymaking process cannot alleviate the burden of non-expert policymakers to make a choice.
The second aspect of the Problem of Policymaker Ignorance might be described as psychological. It concerns the way in which belief in their ignorance to realize some policy objective affects policymakers’ incentives to pursue the goal. Simply put, if policymakers believe they lack some of the knowledge required to realize some social goal, they are less incentivized to pursue it.
To see the point better, consider a relevant example. Imagine that you have to travel across country for some reason. Do you face any incentive to try to fly like a bird, without mechanical assistance, to your destination? You do not know how to fly like a bird and, presumably, you believe (correctly, in this case) that you do not know how to fly like a bird. When reflecting on potential actions that you might take, do courses of action that require birdlike flight appear as options among your preference rankings? If you’re anything like me, such courses of action do not appear to you to be options worth conscious consideration. No matter how much you might want to fly like a bird, you have no incentive to pursue related courses of action. You will not try to fly like a bird to your cross-country destination. You will do something else that you know better how to do.
Now, imagine that you are a policymaker charged by your constituents with realizing some policy goal that can only be deliberately realized through a course of action the political equivalent of flying like a bird without mechanical assistance. To make the example more concrete, imagine that your constituents demand government provided time-travel machines. However, you and your fellow policymakers (including the expert physicists whose advice is available to you) do not know how to construct time-travel machines, much less how to build and provide them to constituents affordably. Presumably, you and your policymaking peers recognize your ignorance in this regard. What, if any, incentive do you face to earnestly pursue this goal, knowing the impossibility of realizing it deliberately?
More to the point, what incentive do you confront to pursue this goal given 1) the array of alternative options that you know better how to do, and 2) the fact that some of these alternatives might produce similar benefits at far less epistemic expense. You do not know how provide time-travel machines to your constituents, but you do know how “to create special committees, task forces, and blue-ribbon panels; you know how to ‘put your best people’ on the case of” providing time-travel machines to your constituents. What’s more, you may also know that your constituents cannot distinguish earnest pursuit from merely pretended pursuit of government provided time-travel machines, and that these same constituents are unlikely to punish your failure, so long as you appear to be trying to provide them with time-travel machines.
What will you do under such circumstances? Will you earnestly try to provide time-travel machines or will you engage in a pretended simulation of trying to provide time-travel machines to your constituents?
The logic of the Problem of Policymaker Ignorance suggests that, when policymakers are ignorant of knowledge required to deliberately realize some goal demanded by their constituents, blue-ribbon panels, task forces, and special committees – and, ultimately, disappointed constituents – proliferate.
The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance seems to explain much of what we observe in the political world. As constituents, we do not reflect on policymakers’ epistemic limitations, but convince ourselves, somehow, of their epistemic advantages. So, we demand from policymakers the realization of some very difficult policy goals. We ask them to avoid, solve, or otherwise mitigate health emergencies, environmental crises, economic disruptions, and global military conflicts. However, policymakers either do not know enough or are not capable of realizing many of these objectives. So, believing in their relevant ignorance, policymakers engage instead in political theater: they make it appear that they are promoting, pursuing goals associated with, our interests, while, in fact, mostly ignoring them. The policy goals that we would most like to see pursued are almost never realized, unless to some extent spontaneously. In fact, they’re not pursued with much sincerity at all.