And governments are led astray by supposedly impartial technocrats who have assimilated crazy ideas from colleagues abroad that have yet to make it into the political discourse at home.

It cuts both ways. Sometimes the politicians have restrained neolib technocrats, and at other times entrenched technocrats have restrained neolib politicians.

In the end, the discussion of technocracy vs. elected officials is something of a sidetrack: Any sensible policy will have to be backed by both groups in order to be implemented in a concerted fashion, because both the politicians and the technocrats have the capacity to kill a policy dead if they want to.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Mon Feb 23rd, 2009 at 05:13:54 PM EST
[ Parent ]
JakeS:
And governments are led astray by supposedly impartial technocrats who have assimilated crazy ideas from colleagues abroad that have yet to make it into the political discourse at home.
When the technocracy goes insane there's no way to clean it up, unfortunately. It happened at the IMF and it has happened at the European Commission. The "insanity" is Market Fundamentalism.

Most economists teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless. -- James K. Galbraith
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Tue Feb 24th, 2009 at 03:32:59 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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