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# The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
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For people on the right, science has become the handmaiden of Big Government, raising climate and environmental scares to justify the imposition of ever more restrictive political controls over every aspect of life. And this, too, while overstating the case, is generally correct. Government favor is the single most important factor in science research today. It’s disingenuous to imagine that such favor would be granted without considerations of power and political advantage.
The revelations in the CRU emails likely drove the public one more step down a path in which its perception of science and the scientist have been radically transformed. The beneficent guardian of truth has become, at best, a self-serving ally of remote elites, and at worst the amoral lackey of money and power. The transformation has been partial and erratic, and at any given time can exclude favored fields of science. This doesn’t matter in the larger picture. Legitimacy, like marriage, is a yes-or-no proposition. You can’t be partially married, and you can’t be partially legitimate.
I could trace the crisis of authority of the scientific establishment indirectly to that moment in 1919, and the expectations formed in the mind of the public regarding the power of science and the nature of the scientist. These expectations were wholly unrealistic, but a lack of realism has characterized the public’s relationship to the great institutions. In the past, this inflated the prestige of the institutions. Today, it has left them exposed to accusations of conspiracy and fraud. The failure of the scientist to live up to his exalted image has eroded the legitimacy of his position, I suspect to a fatal extent.
My final incident offered a glimpse into the possible repercussions for individual scientists of this fall from grace.
On April 6, 2009, the ancient Italian city of L’Aquila suffered a devastating earthquake. L’Aquila’s buildings, old and new, collapsed like matchsticks, leaving more than 300 dead and over 65,000 homeless. In the aftermath, the Italian public’s fury turned against the scientists of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks—an institution whose unfortunate name was felt to be the opposite of its performance. Prosecutors indicted seven
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Commission members for manslaughter, charging that they had provided “inexact, incomplete, and contradictory information” about the risk of a killer earthquake. 21> In October 2012, the seven men were convicted, sentenced to six years in prison, and fined over \$10 million.
This may have seemed like a case of outrageous expectations gone bad, Italianstyle—and, on the surface, it was. But the episode contained many layers of conflict and confusion.
L’Aquila, like California, sat on a major fault-line, and had experienced several smaller earthquakes leading up to the April 6 disaster. Days before tragedy struck, the scientist-bureaucrats of the Risk Commission had met in the city to assess the situation. Their attention had been divided between two topics, however. One was the possibility of a major earthquake in the region. The other was the intrusion of an amateur into their special domain, in the person of Gioacchino Giuliani.
Giuliani, a local man, claimed to have invented a method to forecast earthquakes by using unorthodox indicators, such as radon levels. He wasn’t a seismologist or any kind of a scientist: The Economist described him, somewhat derisively, as a “laboratory technician” at a nuclear physics institute. 22 But he had attracted a considerable amount of attention for himself, and spread some alarm among the public, by forecasting that a serious earthquake would hit the nearby town of Sulmona precisely on March 29. 23 This turned out to be a false alarm.
It was Giuliani and his tramping into the precinct of rightful authority, as much as the threat of seismic catastrophe, which concerned the men of the Risk Commission at their meeting in L’Aquila. In their discussion of the science, behind closed doors, they acknowledged multiple times that the possibility of a major earthquake couldn’t be ruled out. When they emerged to face the media, however, they appeared more interested in refuting Giuliani’s alarmist statements.
“The scientific community continues to confirm to me that in fact it is a favorable situation, that is to say a continuous discharge of energy,” affirmed Bernardo De Bernardinis, a high official in the Italian government’s scientific bureaucracy and the only one of the seven who was not actually a scientist.
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When asked whether the public should relax with a glass of wine, De Bernardinis replied, “Absolutely, absolutely,” and recommended a local vintage. 24 Six days later, L’Aquila lay in ruins.
The public needed an assessment of risk. It reasonably concluded that the Risk Commission was doing just that. The public heard an expert forecast: the “continuous discharge of energy” from the smaller earthquakes meant a negligible risk of a dangerous one. But the experts on the Commission didn’t think they were making a forecast. The scientist-bureaucrats believed they were countering bad science, and reasserting their authority against an illegitimate practitioner—a trespasser. The Risk Commission’s statements, as one perceptive analyst observed, “were not specifically about earthquakes at all, but instead were about which individuals the public should view as legitimate and authoritative and which they should not.” 25
Public anger over perceived institutional failure drove the criminal prosecutions, while the convictions evoked public satisfaction. But for the scientists, the entire episode was incomprehensible. “I still don’t understand what I was convicted of,” one of them, a geophysicist, exclaimed after being sentenced. 26
It’s a fair question. I’d like to end my brief examination of science as an institution of authority with an attempt to answer it.
The Risk Commission experts were convicted because they had been unwilling to admit, in public, to the degree of uncertainty which science imposed on them. 27 They had been unwilling to say, out in the open, “We don’t know whether or not a major earthquake will strike L’Aquila in the short term.” In this unwillingness, they behaved in a manner typical of the Center hierarchy. The climatologists at CRU had also felt that announcing the statistical level of uncertainty in their findings would get in the way of their message. “It is not right to ignore uncertainty, but expressing this merely in an arbitrary way . . . allows the uncertainty to swamp the magnitude of the changes through time,” Keith Briffa had complained. 28
Institutions such as the Risk Commission represented authority, which is another way of saying they dealt in certainty. They claimed competence over truth and falsehood, each in its domain. Any hint of doubt undermined this claim. Public uncertainty created an opportunity for unscrupulous outsiders—people like Gioacchino Giuliani and Steve McIntyre—to pollute the mind of the public with “crap science.”
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The pose of infallibility, however, required Einstein-like levels of success, and a monopoly of the means of persuasion. In the event, neither condition was remotely met.
The Italian experts were convicted because they had stumbled into the ditch between their aspirations as scientists and their power as authoritative bureaucrats. The expertise they possessed had raised them up to be members of the Risk Commission, but as members of the Commission they had concentrated their energies on chasing off intruders like Giuliani, rather than on the substance of their expertise.
The seven were convicted, finally, because the exaggerated expectations of science by the Italian public could only lead, sooner or later, to disenchantment and the perception of failure. Science would never be God. Scientists weren’t commanders in a war against cancer, or saviors of the earth against climate change—or, in this case, far-seeing prophets of imminent catastrophe. Einstein’s predictive power, it turned out, didn’t extend beyond his special field of inquiry. In a time of overabundant information and collapsing institutional barriers, within societies of distrust, the result was bound to be a sense of betrayal and a desire to punish.
None of this justified prosecution, much less incarceration. That wasn’t the argument I intended to make. My argument was this: the deep conflict between the public and authority is not merely political but total. No established institution has been forgiven, not even science, once the most revered. In the context of Italy, the prosecution of the Risk Commission scientists must be viewed as part of a larger revolt against the elites, which was to produce, in 2013, electoral victories for a political party from nowhere, the Five Star movement.
The public, in command of the information sphere, has found corruption everywhere at the Center, and has wielded its new persuasive power to attack the legitimacy of every authoritative institution. The criminalization of scientific error was just one clash in this war of the worlds. The tendency has been to dismiss the episode as somehow peculiarly Italian, but the conflict, I repeat, is structural and global. Italy’s government, it may be, was peculiarly weak, and easily stampeded by the public. If this was the case, then Italy in 2009 may have provided a peek at the future of other democratic governments.
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THE PANIC OF THE EXPERTS, OR HOW THOSE WHO THOUGHT THEY KNEW DIDN’T
If Henri Rosanvallon’s “society of distrust” had an official date of birth, it would be Monday, September 15, 2008: the day the Lehman Brothers investment bank, after a protracted agony, finally went bust. In the economic carnage that followed, the expert and political elites betrayed astonishing levels of cluelessness, and did so at center stage, where the whole world could see. Bankers and regulators, politicians and bureaucrats—all turned out to have made drunken-sailor bets on the future, in effect helping to push the US economy over a cliff of illiquidity and bad debt. The consequences were immediate and devastating. Across the world, ordinary people lost trillions of dollars. Unemployment rose to the highest levels in a generation.
Six years later, in early 2014, the afflicted economies had yet to recover from the wreckage of 2008—and trust in economic experts had vanished, probably forever.
My story, of course, concerns this shipwreck of the expert class rather than the crisis itself. A fitting place to start is with the life and times of Alan Greenspan, the man who transformed the economic expert into a glamorous, almost mythical figure.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Greenspan chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System—a portentous name for the central bank of the United States, usually called, without affection, “the Fed.” By law, the mission of the Fed was, and still is, to maintain the stability of prices while promoting sustainable growth and full employment. The claims behind these goals possessed what I can only describe as a magical quality. They presupposed powers of prophecy and control wholly detached from economic reality. The chairman of the Fed, like the genie in the Arabian Nights, was expected to tame the whirlwind.
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Greenspan’s appointment came in August. Two months later, on Black Monday, October 19, 1987, the stock market dropped over 500 points. A trillion dollars of held wealth disappeared overnight. The 22 percent one-day decline was the largest in history—by comparison, the stock market crash which preceded the Great Depression had amounted to less than 12 percent. On the following day —“Terrible Tuesday”—stocks of many famous companies stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange. They could not find buyers.
No one, inside the Fed or out, had any idea why the markets had tumbled. No one knew how to reverse the free fall—or how to prevent a financial catastrophe from swallowing up the economy. The new chairman received panicked, contradictory advice. Although the Fed’s staff had drafted a long, technical statement to reassure the markets, Greenspan opted for a terse proclamation: “The Federal Reserve, consistent with its responsibilities as the nation’s central bank, affirmed today its readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system.” 29 This signaled a change in Fed policy toward cheaper money.
By the end of Terrible Tuesday, the markets had rallied to a record gain. In the ensuing weeks, stocks resumed their upward climb. The reasons for the recovery were no less inscrutable than those for the initial collapse, but Greenspan received much of the credit. 30 Relieved elected officials and the news media alike determined that someone must have been in charge during the crisis, and the chairman of the Fed, whose job description hinted at superhuman powers, was the logical choice.
The episode established the pattern for Greenspan’s 18-year tenure at the Fed. During that time, the US economy enjoyed an uninterrupted run of growth, coupled with low inflation and unemployment. Because of his position, Greenspan was thought to deserve the lion’s share of applause for the continuing prosperity. Greenspan himself avoided making this claim. Like every good analyst, he understood that the future was unknowable, and he felt keenly the limits of his ability to influence the economy. 31
But he was chairman of the Fed. He stood at the pinnacle of a great hierarchy of authority, and my suspicion is that he believed he had to be perceived as prophetic and in command of the situation. Instead of voicing his doubts openly, he developed a tortured style of communication which allowed different observers to draw diametrically opposed conclusions about what he had said. 32 He called this “constructive ambiguity.” 33 Every word Greenspan uttered in public was parsed for meaning, like holy writ. Even his silences were interpreted as conspiratorial.
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Greenspan received praise for engineering a “soft landing” for the economy in 1995–1996: to many, he appeared to have repealed the iron necessity of the business cycle. In a rare moment of pride, Greenspan compared the theory of the soft landing with Einstein’s theory of relativity, and his own search for meaningful economic data with Eddington’s excursion to Principe and Brazil. 34 This was more perceptive than he knew. Greenspan, like Einstein, had risen to become a towering figure in his field, an expert’s expert, to be sure, but also a celebrity to ordinary people. Bob Woodward’s 2000 biography of the Fed chairman was titled Maestro, evoking the image of a genius conductor, leading the economy to a flawless performance with a wave of his baton.
When, at the age of 79, Greenspan retired from the Fed in January 2006, an article in The Economist alluded to his “near god-like status” and observed that he was often called “the second most powerful person in the country.” “Alan Greenspan has dominated American economic policy for two decades,” the article reflected. “Who can fill his shoes and what will happen to the Federal Reserve once he is gone?” 35 Greenspan’s most significant achievement had been to persuade the elites and the public that the pursuit of material happiness required supervision by a brilliant specialist.
Greenspan represented a relatively new type of public person. He was something of an economic authority but very much a master bureaucrat. This hybrid, the expert-bureaucrat, belonged in the same class with the journalist, the corporate CEO, the university administrator, and, indeed, the scientist-bureaucrat. All seemed to be part of the eternal order of things, but were in fact creatures of the industrial age.
As late as 1922, Walter Lippmann had celebrated the arrival of the “specially trained man” who was “oriented toward a wider system of truth than that which arises spontaneously in the amateur’s mind.” Increasingly, Lippmann noted, “the more enlightened directing minds have called in experts who were trained, or had trained themselves, to make parts of this Great Society intelligible to those who manage it.” 37 Put in simpler terms: governments craved control, and the experts, in exchange for a place in the hierarchy, offered to demonstrate how it could be imposed.
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The modern economy is a prodigiously complex swirl of human activity. During the twentieth century, the “more enlightened directing minds” in government, arm-in-arm with their experts, erected an intricate structure of authority around this transactional blur. The Fed occupied the heights, and was granted independent authority to avoid pollution from the democratic process. But there were many mansions in the economic bureaucracy. Consider the following very partial roster of the economic institutions maintained by the Federal government at the time of the 2008 financial crisis:
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (established in 1863), Federal Reserve System (1913), Securities and Exchange Commission (1934), Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (1934), National Credit Union Administration (1934), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (1936), Federal National Mortgage Association (1938), Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (1939), Federal Loan Home Mortgage Corporation (1970), Bureau of Economic Analysis (1972), Bureau of Labor Analysis (1972), Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (1990). 38
The expert-bureaucrats who staffed these agencies made specific claims of competence. They held that the vast throng of amateurs involved in economic activity regularly succumbed to a disorder John Maynard Keynes had labeled “animal spirits” and Greenspan called “irrational exuberance.” Primitive emotions blinded the public to the big picture and the common good. The expert, however, was a disinterested seeker after knowledge. Given a measure of political power, transformed into an expert-bureaucrat, he would predict the economy’s trajectory and achieve outcomes beneficial to all—higher employment rates, say, or a more equitable distribution of income. That was the immanent faith manifested in the Fed’s mission. Those were the claims seemingly validated by the triumphant career of Alan Greenspan.
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drove the financial system over the brink, and the obvious confusion, often amounting to panic, with which it confronted the disaster, falsified in pain and loss its claims to competence. Every institution in the system failed catastrophically, beginning with Greenspan’s Fed, which encouraged a casino atmosphere by flooding the markets with easy money. Investment firms like Lehman Brothers took that money and “leveraged” it, betting \$30 for each dollar they actually held in their hands. The rating agencies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s, designated by the government to assess investment risk, gave the complex, untested subprime securities a AAA rating: when all was said and done, Moody’s had missed the mark by 20,000 percent. 39 The White House and Congress pumped the housing bubble by pressuring regulators to accept ever riskier mortgages.
It was a total bankruptcy of the elites—only the public paid the bill.
While the financial system fell to pieces, the people in authority reacted with uncomprehending shock. “How did we get here?” President George W. Bush wondered. 40 He did not receive an answer. “What happened? How the fuck did we get here?” asked investment financier Peter Weinberg during a frenzied meeting in New York. 41 “How could the government have allowed this to happen?” demanded a member of the Lehman board, betraying, in extremis, an unshaken faith in the ideal of the expert-bureaucrat. 42
Afterwards, most players in the economic melodrama insisted that failure to predict the meltdown had been universal. “S&P is not alone in having been taken by surprise by the extreme decline in the housing and mortgage markets,” the head of Standard and Poor’s testified before Congress. “Virtually no one, be they homeowners, financial institutions, rating agencies, regulators, or investors, anticipated what is coming.” 43 This wasn’t strictly true. Warnings about a housing bubble abounded before the fall, but the people who voiced them had been ignored or marginalized. 44
Whether the crisis was or could have been predicted, or whether all the economic prophets, right or wrong, merely rode a thin stream of randomness atop a massively complex system in the manner described by N. N. Taleb, I am not qualified to say: thankfully, I’m not an economic analyst. 45 But it was an extraordinary defense of the performance of the expert class to say that none of them, at any level, had known what was coming.
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