Twilight of the Wonks

Walter Russel Mead was back, last week, with a typically rich & well written about the rise & fall of "wonks" in our society. "Wonks do well on standardized tests. They pass bar examinations with relative ease, master the knowledge demanded of medical students, and ace tests like the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). Wonks are not rebels or original thinkers. Wonks follow rules." As our society grew & became more complex, wonks ascended to the upper reaches of society, staffing the ever-growing, sprawling bureaucracies that administered more & more of our lives. "The 20th century was the golden age of the wonk.. . People who could do the work to get into and succeed in medical school, law school, accountancy school, engineering school, and other abstruse and difficult pre-professional programs earned high incomes and enjoyed great social prestige."

Alas, the 21st century is the decline & fall of the wonkacracy; you see "technological progress is liberating humanity from the necessity of stuffing the heads of young people with an ever-increasing mass of specialized, functional knowledge aimed at creating a race of highly skilled rule-followers." As well, "the desire of ordinary people to rule themselves in their own way without the interference, well-intentioned or otherwise, of aristocrats, bishops, bureaucrats—or wonks" is making itself felt, says Mead.

I would never gainsay Dr. Mead; I can't disagree with anything he wrote. Yet, his accounting seems glaringly incomplete. Let's consider the case of medicine, since it is a leading example in his recounting. Yes, doctors today enjoy less autonomy than their forebears, they work in large bueacracies subject to cost accounting, they're seeing aspects of their jobs automated away & so forth.

All that said, I would suggest a rather glaring reason for the decline of trust in medical institutions, and the lessened respect accorded to its wonks, beyond all that: the institution as a whole is corrupt. Medical research suffers from a replication crisis. It suffers from an epidemic of fraud: Stanford's president recently stepped down for this very reason. Half the executive staff of Harvard's "prestigious" Dana-Farber institute are under investigation for research fraud. The problem is so widespread that there are researchers making careers out of exposing it. It is increasinly incompetent: during the Covid epidemic, the FDA was unable to produce a working test, all the while denying their betters in the private sector the requisite permits to do it for them.

I would argue, pace Gurri, that the information revolution that Mead blames gave the rest of us visibility into these phenomena, which only begs the question: how long has this been going on while we didn't know about it?

04/01/24 17:49