When is it valuable for public health experts (and experts more generally) to engage in public political debates, and when is it counterproductive?
On the one hand, the participation of experts in political discourse can enrich our collective understanding of the challenges we face and the solutions available to us. I think almost all reasonable people would agree it is usually valuable for experts to weigh in on the merits of policy debates that are directly within their area of expertise. During a global pandemic that has killed millions, it is essential to learn from a broad range of natural and social scientists about how the disease in question spreads and what policy and personal measures can protect the public. This knowledge has unquestionably saved millions of lives and livelihoods.
On the other hand, the participation of experts in political debate carries at least two distinct risks. First, in a polarized society like the contemporary United States where attitudes towards science and expertise are often tied closely to one’s political identity, the expert runs the risk of unintentionally further polarizing attitudes towards science and expertise itself merely by engaging in political debate. Second, there is a fine line between deferring to experts’ factual knowledge in their domain of expertise versus deferring to experts’ personal values and risk preferences. A culture of excessive deference to experts during a crisis can undermine democratic deliberation by transferring decision-making responsibility from the citizenry and their elected officials to unelected experts, and by substituting the experts’ preferences for the citizenry’s preferences.
What counts as “political”?
Before getting into the weeds here, it’s worth distinguishing between different kinds of “political debate” experts might engage in. One can imagine numerous overlapping axes along which we could classify political debate. Partisan debate focuses on which political party or candidate is a better choice. Ideological debate focuses on which overall vision of a good society should be pursued. Policy debates evaluate the merits of particular public policies. Other debates focus on the determinants of political legitimacy, such as the fairness of the electoral system or arguments over who are members of the legitimate demos.
The Principle of Expected Utility Maximization
While it is impossible to articulate in advance how experts should engage with all of these diverse questions, I argue that experts should generally follow a principle of expected utility maximization when deciding on whether to publicly weigh in on a political debate. In general, the closer the subject of debate is to the expert’s domain of expertise, the greater credibility the expert has with both policymakers and the public, and therefore the greater the expected potential for their public advice to influence social outcomes. We have good reasons to place special trust in epidemiologists when they are describing the disease dynamics of COVID-19, but much less reason to defer to their opinions on the correct capital gains tax rate, for example. Even generalist social scientists who specialize in assessing trade-offs between various policy options, such as economists, also have blind spots. Moreover, while in the long run an individual scientist’s credibility can grow through the repeated demonstration of sound thinking, in the short run, an individual scientist can probably only stake their credibility on so many claims.
One could argue in response that the social responsibility of the intellectual is simply to speak truthfully if they speak at all, and that they should not feel responsible for the consequences of their speech. This is a claim rooted in deontological ethical reasoning and may not be satisfying to intellectuals accustomed to thinking in terms of consequentialist ethics. A consequentialist might argue that by keeping quiet on issues that don’t lie squarely within their core domain of expertise, intellectuals leave a dangerous vacuum in public discourse. This vacuum might be filled by voices that are even less knowledgeable, and perhaps more importantly, less tethered to the scientific ideals of reason, honesty, and dispassionate pursuit of the truth. Moreover, a consequentialist might also argue that while there is far from a perfect correspondence between expertise in a particular domain of science and general across-the-board wisdom, it is also the case that people who have achieved true intellectual mastery in one domain are likely to be above-average thinkers in other contexts who have something to teach us.
These objections are reasonable. However, any intellectual who takes consequentialist considerations seriously has to also consider the risks of certain forms of political engagement as well. These include at least two types of risks: those arising from political polarization, as well as those arising from technocracy.
The Perils of Polarization
In a politically polarized society, many people are deeply suspicious of the idea that an expert can simultaneously be both an objective analyst and also a self-identified member of a different political tribe. A political independent might be skeptical that an expert can be an objective analyst if they’re a member of any political tribe at all. For an expert to identify themselves as having partisan leanings, however obviously well-intended, is to open themselves up to charges that they are seeking to wield their professional prestige in service of a partisan agenda. It can be considered unseemly to “get political”. But a perspective that elevates partisan competition as the embodiment of politics betrays an overly narrow conception of what politics is. Politics is not just partisan competition-to quote the political scientist Howard Lasswell, politics is “who gets what, when, where, how”. Whether an expert is a partisan or not, if they weigh in on a policy debate, they are necessarily seeking to influence the substantive allocation of resources, rights, responsibilities, or dignity in society, which is to say, they are participating in politics. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this.
Many experts live and work in highly polarized societies like the contemporary United States, where attitudes towards science and expertise are often tied closely to one’s political identity. By engaging in certain forms of political debate, the expert runs the risk of unintentionally further polarizing attitudes towards science and expertise itself. For example, if highly publicly visible infectious disease experts (or people pretending to be infectious disease experts, such as Eric Feigl-Ding) were to make it extremely clear to the public that they are highly partisan Democrats, while also advocating for the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination, it would not be surprising that many political conservatives would become suspicious of COVID-19 vaccines, given today’s deep partisan mistrust. Indeed, it seems that to at least some degree, suspicion of public health experts who are easily recognizable as political progressives has contributed to the vaccine hesitancy observed among political conservatives. This dynamic is a tragedy, but it’s not clear that there is much the individual scientist can do about this other than to try to foreground their professional identity rather than their political identity when issuing policy and personal health recommendations, and to exercise discipline in the ways that they engage in politics.
The Trouble with Technocracy
Another set of dangers arises from the potential for excessive reliance on expert authority and judgment to weaken democratic deliberation. It is a fine line between deferring to experts’ factual knowledge in their domain of expertise versus deferring to experts’ personal values and risk preferences. Complicating matters is that experts can influence public policy and private decision-making in a variety of ways. It is rare that experts themselves will arrogate an independent political power base. More commonly, experts will shape policy by using their professional credibility to influence the decisions of politicians. The expert might serve as a policy advisor who works directly with policymakers, or even as an appointed government official. An expert might also influence policymakers and individuals indirectly through their contribution to the intellectual environment at large, through books, op-eds, TV interviews, social media, and other ways.
Experts are, by definition, not representative of the population at large with respect to their knowledge and training. Moreover, not only do they differ from the population at large with respect to their knowledge and training, but experts may also have a distinct set of values, risk preferences, habits, and tastes that set them apart from ordinary people. Of course, this is often a good thing. Even if the expert places more political emphasis on their primary research area than might be warranted from the perspective of an omniscient observer, it is clearly adaptive for society to have specialized classes of people who worry exclusively about how to contain pandemics, limit nuclear proliferation, fight climate change, grow the economy, protect national security, and so on.
An obvious danger posed by the technocrat is that he or she is incompetent in a technical sense. While this is sometimes a real problem, the greater danger is that the technocrat is perfectly competent but nonetheless myopic-overly focused on maximizing the values implicit in their core area of expertise, possibly at the expense of other important social values. Often, there is no technocratic solution to the fundamental tradeoffs that societies face, such as tensions between freedom versus security, equity versus efficiency, and so on. Because the expert is more knowledgeable in their domain than the politicians and voters who they serve, they have opportunities to exploit this information asymmetry. Experts can, in many cases, subtly imbue their technical analyses and advice with their own preferred values at the expense of competing values, without politicians and voters realizing it. Voters and politicians often are aware of the potential for this to happen, and this is one of the sources of their frequent distrust of experts.
Often, distrust of the other political tribe and the distrust generated by the inherent information asymmetry generated by the existence of expertise coalesce. In such situations, we may distrust experts who we expect not to share our values, because we are aware that they can exploit information asymmetry to persuade us to support policies or take actions we otherwise would not. For example, many conservative-leaning Americans know that climate scientists and epidemiologists tend to lean to the left and are therefore suspicious of those experts’ basic scientific findings as well as their policy prescriptions. Similarly, many progressive-leaning Americans know that pharmaceutical company executives and former military officers tend to lean to the right and are therefore suspicious of both descriptive analyses and policy prescriptions recommended by these figures.
While we should not always defer to subject-matter experts, when partisan-inflected skepticism of expertise crosses a certain threshold of cynicism, it presents a serious challenge to the health of the knowledge ecosystem. It is a simple fact that experts in each field often have a sufficiently distinctive set of values that one can make reasonable inferences about their political preferences as a group. To write experts in a given subject area off as hopelessly biased simply because such experts, on average, have different values from one’s own with respect to that subject is to impoverish ourselves intellectually by denying ourselves access to the expert’s insights in their domain of expertise. It is the duty of experts to wield their professional prestige responsibly, so that partisan-inflected skepticism of expertise does not cross that dangerous threshold of cynicism.
How Experts Can Navigate This Minefield
So if you’re an expert, how can you put into practice the principle of expected utility maximization when deciding on whether to publicly weigh in on a political debate? The truth is that there is no single answer to what is really a large family of related but distinct questions, but below is my attempt to offer some suggestions for how I would approach it.
One branch of this family of questions focuses on whether experts should publicly engage in partisan political debate regarding which political party or candidate is a better choice. This includes questions like:
Should public health experts publicly share their overall partisan political preferences when they perceive democracy itself to be in danger (“Trump/Biden/the GOP/the Democrats are literally attempting a coup!”)?
I think the answer here is: Not only is this fine, it is probably morally necessary. In circumstances where democracy is indeed in existential danger, it is possible that preserving democracy might require a public mobilization by as broad a civic coalition as possible. It is worth noting that despite a few exceptions, democracies have tended to outperform autocracies in ensuring their citizens can lead long and healthy lives (Bollyky et al. 2019). Moreover, in some countries where democracy was lost and subsequently recovered, such as Brazil and Chile, public health activism was closely tied to the pro-democracy movement and may have strengthened it (Atun et al. 2015).
Should or when should public health experts publicly share their overall partisan political preferences when they perceive democracy to be stable? (“I think the election of Romney would weaken the US, but I don’t think he’s an aspiring autocrat”.)
I think that in such circumstances, it would be better for the public health expert to channel their political passions into canvassing, donations, or other less-visible forms of political engagement.
Should or when should public health experts publicly share their partisan political preferences about specific issues outside of their core area of expertise (“The position of Trump/Biden/the GOP/the Democrats on financial regulation is terrible!”)?
I think that in such circumstances, it would be better for the public health expert to channel their political passions into canvassing, donations, or other less-visible forms of political engagement.
Should or when should public health experts publicly share their partisan political preferences about specific issues within their core area of expertise (“Trump/Biden/GOP/Dem policy on COVID-19 is better than the alternative!”)?
I think in such circumstances it is both valuable and perhaps morally necessary for the public health expert to take a public stance on issues within their core area of expertise, while also taking care to foreground their professional identity rather than their partisan identity.
Another branch of this family of questions focuses on whether experts should engage in public debate about optimal policy, regardless of the partisan implications. This includes questions pertaining to whether and when public health experts should publicly share their views on:
Their general policy preferences: “I favor an expansion/reduction in social welfare programs.”
I think in this circumstance it is appropriate for the public health expert to publicly state their general policy preferences.
Policy preferences on policy issues related to their core expertise that they more knowledgeable about than the average person but that they are not a true expert in, since they have not actively conducted research in the area: For example, an epidemiologist who studies the social determinants of health and disease might feel that they have strong reasons to favor a particular national strategy for financing health care, even if they freely admit they admit that they are not an expert in the nuances of health insurance design.
I think in this circumstance it is appropriate for the public health expert to publicly state their policy views, while perhaps noting it is not in their core area of expertise.
Policy preferences on specific issues clearly outside of their core area of expertise: “I think the Dodd-Frank Bill decreased/increased systemic risk to the financial system”
I think that in this circumstance, it would be better for the public health expert to channel their political passions into canvassing, donations, or other less-visible forms of political engagement. However, if the expert chooses to engage on the topic, it would be best to explicitly note that their expertise in Topic A does not necessarily carry over to Topic B, in order to avoid causing confusion.
There are undoubtedly more permutations of these questions, as well as other and perhaps better ways of answering them, either as complements or substitutes to my own approach. Nonetheless, I hope I have persuaded you that a general principle of expected utility maximization can help experts decide whether and how to publicly weigh in on a political debate.
References
Atun, Rifat et al. 2015. “Health-System Reform and Universal Health Coverage in Latin America.” The Lancet. 385(9974): 1230–47.
Bollyky, Thomas J et al. 2019. “The Relationships between Democratic Experience, Adult Health, and Cause-Specific Mortality in 170 Countries between 1980 and 2016: An Observational Analysis.” The Lancet. https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0140673619302351.
Byron I think this is great. My one thing to add here is that politics can sometimes be made apparent by what *not* to discuss. Somethings simply aren't on the table, which is itself a political decision. A great example would be the willingness to discuss, or not discuss, the highly polarizing question of covid19 origin.
Great post, Byron! Perhaps this question does not address the public choice/perception of an expert's "proper" role within the political discourse, but: what do you make of the fact that an expert is likely to be more adept at processing information into policy decisions in general than the average voter? Obviously experts are susceptible to pervasive biases and information asymmetries (just like average voters), but should we put any stock in the fact that these are people who are seriously engaged in a process that attempts to discern truth (regardless of what their "core" area of expertise in)? In other words, should experts still be esteemed for opinions they hold outside of their core area of expertise, just as, say, someone might esteem their "smart friend"?