What's Wrong With DeLong?

Brian, please sweep the leg on that response to your essay over at Cato Unbound.

There was a time when technocrats decided that socialism was the way. And then of course it was European-style social democracy, followed by Japanese-style.

Voters can afford to be irrational because they don't directly bear many of the costs of their irrationality. But would technocrats? Wouldn't technocrats have a natural bias towards big schemes that involve lots of government and planning that makes the technocrats more important?

Politicians can be convinced that populist ideas are dumb. Rather easily, in fact. I think it's harder to convince them that technocrat ideas are poor. Populist ideas that are dumb tend to directly conflict with the interests of the elites and money and power, so there are powerful interests working against them. (See the big money behind free trade and immigration.) Technocratic bad ideas tend to co-opt and subsume the elites and those with money and power. Government working hand in hand with Big Business in Industrial Policy-- that's technocratic. Government working to attack Big Business Monopolies, restrict free trade, and immigration-- those are populist, but are all opposed by powerful forces.

He'd just like to push the real world in his ideal direction.

One problem is, just because an ideal is (supposedly) good, that does not mean that moving towards the ideal is good. Hawaii is very good, but if I start walking to Hawaii I'll drown in the Pacific Ocean long before I get there.