by Tyler Durden
Original post date: 1 February 2017
What we’re talking about here is the Triumph of the Technocrats. There are multiple levels to this triumph of the technocrat class:
1. The dumbing down of the Technocrat Class via a Higher Education system that optimizes technocrat specialization at the expense of real-world business experience and broad-based knowledge.
As a result, the technocrat class has a very high opinion of its intelligence and judgment because it has no idea how little it actually knows or understands. It believes Higher Education’s hype that specialization has given it a superior understanding that entitles it to control and power.
This overweening belief in its own superiority sets the stage for hubris and catastrophically ungrounded decisions.
Need we look any farther than the invasion of Iraq or the Establishment’s response to the insolvency of self-liquidating money-center banks in 2008?
The roots of the Technocrat Class’s hubris and self-congratulatory bias go all the way back to the 1960s-era “whiz kids” described by David Halberstam’s classic account The Best and the Brightest.
The rise of computers (albeit primitive by today’s standards) enabled the first Technocrat romance with “big data”, i.e. a reliance on data analysis to make decisions about a real world that cannot be reduced to quantification without a loss of decision quality and humility.
This is how we ended up with a nation in which Technocrats with no real-world military combat experience are running America’s wars and Technocrats who have never started a single company or paid a single employee with their own money are running America’s economy.
Read more: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-01/triumph-technocrats
