Switzerland and Singapore are linguistically diverse. Thus, since availability cascades are not univocal, 'preference falsification' is less. Both countries initially faced a hostile external environment- there the similarities end- other than the obvious one- viz. they are too small to be taken as a model.

Khanna is of Indian origin. He may not know that Nehru tried to establish a technocratic cadre staffed by engineers, scientists, project managers etc. The bureaucracy fought back and won. Nothing came of it. There have been, in every decade, two or three 'technocratic' Indian civil servants who have done a good job. In the previous decade, Indians did have some faith in technocracy. Manmohan Singh was a technocrat. That faith has since evaporated. Why? Technocrats face the same incentive compatiblity problem as other bureaucrats. They have zero resistance to modish availability cascades. Preference falsification is endemic in this class. Switzerland has good push-back against this of a genuinely democratic sort. Singapore has a sort of internalized Trump as part of its ethos. Both, however, don't matter at all globally and can create no mimetic effects.

Let us now examine Khanna's thesis point by pointt.

1) Populism isn't about failure to address economic grievances. It's about preference falsification by elites. They pretended they cared about darker skinned migrants and democracy in far off places. They didn't really. Opportunistic candidates gained traction by appearing truthful and on the side of the people by rejecting political correctness. Now, the elites have done a U turn.

2) Technocrats face intractable preference aggregation, concurrency and agenda control type problems even absent rent-seeking behaviour. Only 'entrepreneurial' political candidates can break concurrency deadlock or agenda control 'chaos' or tame preference cyclicity etc.

This objection to Technocracy is mathematical and was actually developed by Wartime technocrats themselves. Khanna is inventing a perpetual motion machine somewhat late in the day.

3) 'leveraging data to make long term utilitarian decisions' is impossible. Data can't capture dynamics. Campbell Harvey, the leading man in this field, says that 'multiple testing' is an open problem. Utilitarianism has no purchase because of pervasive Newcombe type problems re. meta-preferences.

Politicians can tame these problems and restore ergodicity through mimetic Muth rationality.

Stuff like this has been known since Plato or- more explicitly- since the Nalophkhayanam which actually says that the Just King must learn Statistical Game Theory. Khanna is flogging a dead horse.

4) Khanna does not seem to get that Sweden and South Korea and Switzerland and Singapore have merely paid their least well off out of their own contribution- i.e. administered a risk-pooling scheme. In the case of Singapore, we know that the technocracy yielded a markedly sub-optimal return to its clients. South Korea's Health Service is horrendously sub-optimal.

5) America's 'frequent near shutdowns of Govt.' don't have any negative effect at all. They remind the voter of how worthless most bureaucrats are. Calling the pen pusher 'technocrats' doesn't change this. High levels of 'bureaucratic autonomy' and 'impartial hiring and promotion' are a recipe for waste, mismanagement and sclerosis.

6) The US federal civil service was and is worthless. Its weakening is a good thing. Everybody can agree on that. Britain's once-vaunted civil service was hated by British people. Its own Mandarins urged its reform citing the Australian model. Nobody wants to go back to the days of 'Yes Minister'. Why is Khanna writing such nonsense?

7) Khanna tells us that listening to experts is bad because the real solution is to listen to real experts. How are we tell the real expert from the false expert? For any given policy prescription you can always find two experts, indistinguishable in all 'real' respects, endorsing opposite views. This must be the case if Knightian Uncertainty obtains. If it does not we still would not need technocracy- we could have a market discovery process.

8) In the US, 'reliable technocrats could have pushed through the worker re-skilling program as early as' 2002, in which case every one of those workers would be quite useless today. I say this because a colleague of mine designed such a program. It was well meaning but based on extrapolations we now know to have been utterly wrong. Yet no one else in the field had a better proposal.

Let's face it, for advanced economies, Knightian Uncertainty has risen because of the rapidity of technological change. Technocrats should be doing technical stuff not trying to run things.

7) Khanna says 'In Europe, forward-looking technocrats would pursue further integration and mutualize eurozone debt.' No doubt, there be some such lemmings you could label as 'technocrats' who would in fact be willing to go off the cliff taking the Euro, Schnegen and their own pensions with them but, alas!, the truth is even Khanna's 'real experts' are not so stupid. Technocrats want their pensions. They don't want to destroy Civilization. That's why they take a backseat to the politicians.



Khanna has written a book- probably better than Jason Brennan's- and, fair play to him, he is entitled to profit by its sale in the Globalised market for Academic Stupidity. Still, it may be that he has actually observed something in Singapore or wherever which is worth emulating. Let him write about that sort of stuff rather than so nakedly displaying his book's worthlessness.

