Greece and Italy have promoted “technocrats” as their new leadership. Newt Gingrich is rising in the polls. There’s even new-found respect for the likes of Timothy Geithner.
Is the technocrat on the rise?
Technocrats got their initial rise during the Soviet era as a solution to socialist regimes — find a “technocrat” that understood how the machinery of government worked, and they would instantly go in and fix what the bureaucracy could not and the people would not. Once the technocrats fixed the machinery, the philosopher kings would recede back to their respective professions and life would continue on for another 50 years or so until the technocrats were needed to save us again…
So what the heck is a technocrat precisely? Slate offers one perspective:
An expert, not a politician. Technocrats make decisions based on specialized information rather than public opinion. For this reason, they are sometimes called upon when there’s no popular or easy solution to a problem (like, for example, the European debt crisis). The word technocrat derives from the Greek tekhne, meaning skill or craft, and an expert in a field like economics can be as much a technocrat as one in a field more commonly thought to be technological (like robotics). Both Papademos and Monti hold advanced degrees in economics, and have each held appointments at government institutions.
Quite popular in Italy and Greece, but not so for America.
…and yet.
The idea of a nation or polis run by experts is as old as Plato. Sometimes it manifests itself in the form of Sulla or Caesar, other times such “philosopher kings” manifest themselves in the American Founding Fathers. Sometimes the technocrats fix the problem (Germany in the 1950s) while other times the technocrats fail massively (Gorbachev in the late 1980s). Sometimes the result is a massive expansion of personal liberty (America in the 1800s) while other times the technocrats inspire a regime of terror (Europe in the late 1840s).
All in all, there are times when leaders are needed to cut through the noise and establish some sort of common sense that the politicians and bureaucrats have created for themselves. In other occasions, those leaders can establish horribly new and devastating polities where the math may work… but the human factor is squeezed entirely out. The 20th century is replete with evidence of this, as is classical antiquity.
The bottom line is relatively simple. Technocrats will not save us from ourselves. Nor will they be able to save a society intent on feeding upon the very engines of prosperity for short-term gain. But the technocrats — whether in Europe or America — may very well set the stage and the conversation for how we will tackle our problems.
Whether we listen to them — or whether they are worth listening to — is another matter.
