Abstract
The dilemma posed by expert consensus can be summarized as follows. On the one hand, it seems perfectly reasonable to give special weight to an agreement reached by those who have studied a topic in great detail. On the other hand, does the very same specialization that confers expert status also mean that the group is unable to consider all alternatives equally? In other words, do the shared analytic models and other practices that expert groups rely on provide an enhanced understanding or mean that they focus only on those aspects of the problem that fit neatly into their pre-conceived way of thinking?
The problem for policy-makers and those who would rely on experts is thus to identify which experts they need to consult. If the boundary is drawn too tightly, reaching consensus may be easy but its practical applicability may be highly restricted. If the boundary is too porous, then consensus may never be reached and the epistemic quality of deliberations may suffer as a result of irrelevant or unfounded concerns. If we accept that non-coercive decision-making is appropriate, then the problems of expert consensus are twofold: first, the members of the expert group must be identified and, second, the relationship between these experts and the wider society must be clarified.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, 2 August 2007 is the date on which BNP Paribas became the first major bank to react to the crisis in the US sub-prime lending market by closing several hedge funds that traded in this debt.
- 2.
Bank of England Quarterly Inflation Reports are available from: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/pages/inflationreport/default.aspx
- 3.
For more information on the Bank of England’s economic research see: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/research/Pages/default.aspx
- 4.
More details on the Bank of England’s fan chart are available at: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/pages/inflationreport/irprobab.aspx
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Minutes of Shadow Monetary Policy Committee, August 2007. Available online at: http://www.iea.org.uk/smpc
- 8.
Taleb (2007) makes a similar argument though does so from a different starting point.
- 9.
- 10.
Examples include : Post Normal Science and the extended peer community (Functowicz and Ravetz 1993), Rethinking Science and the agora (Nowotny et al. 2001), Wynne’s claim that legitimate participants in debate about framing are every democratic citizen (Wynne 2003), Jasanoff’s (2003) argument that the ‘worldwide movement’ is towards greater public involvement and that STS should not seek to critique this, Frank Fischer’s emphasis on the continued need to challenge technocratic forms of decision-making (2011).
- 11.
A sporting analogy might help. In the US baseball and basketball are both games that share some characteristics (e.g. they are competitive, players are expected to train and try hard, cheating is not permitted and so on). On the other hand, they are also different in important respects (you cannot bring a large stick onto a basketball court, for example) and imposing the rules of one sport on the other makes no sense.
- 12.
- 13.
For more information see Boyce (2007).
- 14.
See for example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-23244628
- 15.
Source: transcript of press conference. Available from http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/inflationreport/ir0703.aspx
- 16.
There was some debate about this but the research evidence suggest that single injections are less effective than the combined injection as children are less likely to have all the injections needed.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Carlo Martini and Marcel Boumans for the invitation to workshop and for encouraging me to write up my presentation so it could be included in this volume. It is also a pleasure to thank the other participants in the workshop for two great days of thought-provoking presentations and discussion. In writing this chapter, I have drawn on two previous papers: Evans (2007) and Collins et al. (2010); an early version of the opening section was presented at the “Expert Knowledge, Prediction, Forecasting: A Social Sciences Perspective” held in Bucharest in November 2010. Finally, I am grateful to both the Bank of England and HM Treasury for their permission to re-produce the inflation forecast charts that are used in this chapter.
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Evans, R. (2014). Expert Advisers: Why Economic Forecasters Can Be Useful Even When They Are Wrong. In: Martini, C., Boumans, M. (eds) Experts and Consensus in Social Science. Ethical Economy, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08551-7_12
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