In his presentation for his book titled "Expert Failure", Dr. Roger Koppl discusses many reasons to be wary of expert power. He leans on many factors such as historical data, how incentives can skew results, and the idea that experts are just humans that mistakes just like everyone else. In addition, Kopple defines expert power as anyone who is paid for their opinion, such as many economists. In general, Dr. Koppl has a very pessimistic view of those that are considered experts because of their power to shift thinking and skew results to something that they can deem more valuable. Overall, however, the message is clear that expert power is something that we should value but also something that we should not blindly accept as fact.
First of all, Dr. Kopple notes several notable times in recent history that the experts failed people. As a business major, Alan Greenspan is quite the famous economist and many credit him as being the world's greatest central banker. Dr. Kopple however, heavily disagrees due to Greenspan's massive failure of predicting the 2008 financial crisis that some would say was directly caused by Greenspan's financial policy. In addition, a major failure of government opinion revolves around the issue of Flint, Michigan, and its toxic water supply. Experts told the people that the water was safe to drink as long as they boiled it without even testing to see if it was harmful. The water was full of heavy metals such as lead and was a disgusting brown color and this has resulted in many cases of human health decline. Overall, experts should not advise if they do not know what they are talking about.
Secondly, the presentation also discusses how certain incentives can skew results. To introduce this topic, Dr. Koppl decides to discuss the bad incentives that plague many of the forensic science disciplines in our justice system. In approximately half of the US, forensic scientists are paid through commission-based salaries that are actually based upon conviction rates. Essentially, the more people go to jail, the higher the forensic scientist is paid. While this may fishy, our justice systems are built to presume innocence until proven guilty and this is the exact opposite. Any incentive to put people in jail other than to uphold the constitution should be done away with because there is always the chance that a scientist could become greedy or fail to try and disprove the results of a convicted person. Incentives in politics work no different than market incentives, but the difference is that people's livelihoods are at stake, not just what they purchase.
With this in mind, it is important that any incentive that an expert has to get a specific result will be easier for them to discover because of those incentives. In addition, experts are more likely to share incentivized results with nonexperts which can actually contribute to misinformation from these so-called experts. While many experts are honest and fair, there is always the possibility of corruption, especially if the incentives are less than honest.
Finally, it is important to remember that experts are simply human and they make mistakes just like everyone does. These mistakes can be purely accidental without any intention of malice for a variety of reasons. All the data may not be available or the results may be skewed by another factor that they did not consider. Other things could change based on their recommendations that they had not previously considered. There is literally always the possibility for human error because humans are imperfect creatures that despite even the best intentions can make grave mistakes.
In conclusion, Expert power is valuable but also worth questioning. While people may trust an economist or a disease expert on the economy or a pandemic, these people need to work together and we need many different viewpoints to prevent a monopoly on expert ideas. Compromise and debate should be encouraged and results should be given to the public. No expert should believe that others should do what they say, they have to be persuasive, honest, and realize that they are capable of mistakes in order to gain and retain public trust in the value of expert opinions.