I was thinking just the other day that, although I consider myself solidly right-wing, there are plenty of issues where I clearly lean left. These days, this distinction doesn’t even really matter outside certain circles. (I can't say that the internet crowds are sufficiently informed to be taken seriously here.)
I was thinking of the globalist–localist axis, which I think may become more important in the future than the classic left–right divide. And I don’t think it’s necessarily incompatible with the elitist–populist axis either
In any case, I’m going to use this from now on even if it somewhat overlaps with the authoritarian axis, it can be still useful.
I've long felt that the Authoritarian vs. Libertarian axis is somewhat outdated. If you gave a classic political compass test to 100 progressives, the vast majority would finish deep into the lib-left quadrant, but a lot of the ideas they support are *definitionally* authoritarian, such as on the topic of free speech.
Basically, the Authoritarian vs. Libertarian axis made sense when the cultural left were the outsiders, the rebels. It made sense for a good stretch of time. It doesn't make sense since the cultural left *became* the establishment, which started (at the latest) in the mid-10s. To be fair, the modern right isn't exactly libertarian either, certainly not on law enforcement or border enforcement. So just flipping where people land wouldn't exactly work either. Authoritarian vs. Libertarian simply doesn't justify its own axis any more.
So right off the bat, I like how your idea would replace this old outdated axis with a new one that maps something that's more important currently. I wonder if globalist vs. localist might be more important still, though off the top of my head I can't think of many leftist anti-globalists or rightist pro-globalists. So globalist vs. localist might end up almost pointless, leaving two quadrants near empty.
Elitism vs. populism really does divide both the right and the left. There are populists on both the right and the left. There are pro-free market elitists and pro-socialist elitists. Elitist vs. populist would give us four *real* quadrants.
I'm still not 100% committed to this idea, since a better one might come up, but I certainly prefer your political compass idea over the old one. It would be a good change. Good work!
Do they? Without getting into No True Technocrat fallacies, empirically that seems wrong by very recent and repeated experience.
A steelman could be built that popular decisions *given these systems we have* would have been even worse, but one of the problems with the technocratic side of things seems to be that they tend to increase systemic complexity until it becomes intractable for anyone.
Maybe a good start would be to go Aristotelian and give different names to good and bad instances of a given type of regime. We love our Technocracy but Expertocracy I can’t stand.
I mean, the statement is almost tautologically true. People get better with practice. I’d rather have a brain surgeon do my brain surgery than a random guy from the street. (Estimating the weight of an ox being a rare exception.)
The institutional dynamics of bureaucratic organizations is a different matter, though. And even there, my strong guess would be that the complexity increases whether you have a agency full of experts or agency full of loyalists. Actually, I’d be even willing to bet some amount of money on loyalist organizations getting more structurally complex.
Your go-to example of brain surgery here is hands-on expertise in individual execution, in a bounded field – characteristics which would be just as true, if generally down the intelligence scale, for e.g. a plumber or a mechanic.
A lot of more abstract, not literally hands-on fields (e.g. process engineering) feel more similar to this type of – for lack of a better word, “individual contributor style” – expertise than “decisionmaking” in the general, which is not as clearly bounded.
In particular the application of such “managerial style” expertise is much more susceptible to principal/agent conflicts. Beyond the way problems are handled, the interests of the managerial expert comes into which issues are accepted (or denied) as problems in the first place. That the boundaries and contents of the managerial fields of expertise seem much fuzzier than those of technical expertise compounds this issue.
As such I think this is a faulty (if frequently used) analogy that tends to create a lot of muddled thinking about the nature(s) of expertise. I think we should use entirely different words, because they describe distinct phenomena that are related enough to be confused in this way.
The complexity bet you bring up is interesting. How would you classify organisations to sort them into “expertist” or “loyalist” (are there other categories?) and how would you measure organizational complexity?
When I used “systemic complexity” I didn’t necessarily mean the internal complexity of organisations though, but rather the total complexity they yield into a societal system. I was thinking of technocratic governance in the style of a contemporary regulatory state creating massive amounts of rules and documentation requirements or prohibitions that may or may not be applicable to each situation, and may or may not interact (or even contradict/supersede each other) if applicable.
I see where you are coming from. To get the contrasting point of view, I would suggest reading Jen Pahlka's "Recoding America." It describes how it looks like from the position of an expert. (Spoilers: Lawmarkers making ill-thought or even impossible rules, then dumping them on the civil servants (i.e. experts) to implement, then complaining when the system does not work.
Though I agree the populists are wrong on stuff, you may have to come up with a better word. The USA has a strong anti-elite prejudice, which is why you see both the DSA and MAGA attacking elites.
I was thinking just the other day that, although I consider myself solidly right-wing, there are plenty of issues where I clearly lean left. These days, this distinction doesn’t even really matter outside certain circles. (I can't say that the internet crowds are sufficiently informed to be taken seriously here.)
I was thinking of the globalist–localist axis, which I think may become more important in the future than the classic left–right divide. And I don’t think it’s necessarily incompatible with the elitist–populist axis either
In any case, I’m going to use this from now on even if it somewhat overlaps with the authoritarian axis, it can be still useful.
I've long felt that the Authoritarian vs. Libertarian axis is somewhat outdated. If you gave a classic political compass test to 100 progressives, the vast majority would finish deep into the lib-left quadrant, but a lot of the ideas they support are *definitionally* authoritarian, such as on the topic of free speech.
Basically, the Authoritarian vs. Libertarian axis made sense when the cultural left were the outsiders, the rebels. It made sense for a good stretch of time. It doesn't make sense since the cultural left *became* the establishment, which started (at the latest) in the mid-10s. To be fair, the modern right isn't exactly libertarian either, certainly not on law enforcement or border enforcement. So just flipping where people land wouldn't exactly work either. Authoritarian vs. Libertarian simply doesn't justify its own axis any more.
So right off the bat, I like how your idea would replace this old outdated axis with a new one that maps something that's more important currently. I wonder if globalist vs. localist might be more important still, though off the top of my head I can't think of many leftist anti-globalists or rightist pro-globalists. So globalist vs. localist might end up almost pointless, leaving two quadrants near empty.
Elitism vs. populism really does divide both the right and the left. There are populists on both the right and the left. There are pro-free market elitists and pro-socialist elitists. Elitist vs. populist would give us four *real* quadrants.
I'm still not 100% committed to this idea, since a better one might come up, but I certainly prefer your political compass idea over the old one. It would be a good change. Good work!
> Experts make better decisions,
Do they? Without getting into No True Technocrat fallacies, empirically that seems wrong by very recent and repeated experience.
A steelman could be built that popular decisions *given these systems we have* would have been even worse, but one of the problems with the technocratic side of things seems to be that they tend to increase systemic complexity until it becomes intractable for anyone.
Maybe a good start would be to go Aristotelian and give different names to good and bad instances of a given type of regime. We love our Technocracy but Expertocracy I can’t stand.
I mean, the statement is almost tautologically true. People get better with practice. I’d rather have a brain surgeon do my brain surgery than a random guy from the street. (Estimating the weight of an ox being a rare exception.)
The institutional dynamics of bureaucratic organizations is a different matter, though. And even there, my strong guess would be that the complexity increases whether you have a agency full of experts or agency full of loyalists. Actually, I’d be even willing to bet some amount of money on loyalist organizations getting more structurally complex.
Your go-to example of brain surgery here is hands-on expertise in individual execution, in a bounded field – characteristics which would be just as true, if generally down the intelligence scale, for e.g. a plumber or a mechanic.
A lot of more abstract, not literally hands-on fields (e.g. process engineering) feel more similar to this type of – for lack of a better word, “individual contributor style” – expertise than “decisionmaking” in the general, which is not as clearly bounded.
In particular the application of such “managerial style” expertise is much more susceptible to principal/agent conflicts. Beyond the way problems are handled, the interests of the managerial expert comes into which issues are accepted (or denied) as problems in the first place. That the boundaries and contents of the managerial fields of expertise seem much fuzzier than those of technical expertise compounds this issue.
As such I think this is a faulty (if frequently used) analogy that tends to create a lot of muddled thinking about the nature(s) of expertise. I think we should use entirely different words, because they describe distinct phenomena that are related enough to be confused in this way.
The complexity bet you bring up is interesting. How would you classify organisations to sort them into “expertist” or “loyalist” (are there other categories?) and how would you measure organizational complexity?
When I used “systemic complexity” I didn’t necessarily mean the internal complexity of organisations though, but rather the total complexity they yield into a societal system. I was thinking of technocratic governance in the style of a contemporary regulatory state creating massive amounts of rules and documentation requirements or prohibitions that may or may not be applicable to each situation, and may or may not interact (or even contradict/supersede each other) if applicable.
I see where you are coming from. To get the contrasting point of view, I would suggest reading Jen Pahlka's "Recoding America." It describes how it looks like from the position of an expert. (Spoilers: Lawmarkers making ill-thought or even impossible rules, then dumping them on the civil servants (i.e. experts) to implement, then complaining when the system does not work.
Though I agree the populists are wrong on stuff, you may have to come up with a better word. The USA has a strong anti-elite prejudice, which is why you see both the DSA and MAGA attacking elites.
That was a part of the point. "Populist" has an offensive feel to it. So does "elitist". The two work good together.