The Coronavirus Crisis Shows Experts Aren’t Enough

As the pandemic shows, there are no purely technical solutions for problems that demand political leadership

By Yuval Levin. He is director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of National Affairs. Excerpts:

"The world’s leading epidemiologists at first underestimated the potential of the novel coronavirus to give rise to a catastrophe. Early this winter, Dr. Fauci himself could be heard offering assurances that it was unlikely the pandemic would spread across the globe. At the end of January, Dr. Wang Linfa, a Duke researcher who was a member of the team that discovered SARS, told the medical journalism website STAT that the new virus didn’t seem distinctly dangerous. “It’s too early to say if a SARS-like event will happen,” Dr. Wang said. “But I have a gut feeling it won’t.”

Such gut feelings are the currency of expert policy advisers. They can mislead, but they can also offer priceless intuition, and there is no alternative to relying on them. Policy makers have no recourse to purely objective technical advice that does not involve such judgment. And ultimately, the statesman’s task is itself a form of such expertise. The president’s job, and not only in times of crisis, frequently involves listening to experts disagree with one another and taking responsibility for choosing among them, plotting a course through opportunities and dangers. The capacity to do this well involves its own sort of practical wisdom, an expertise in judging expertise.

Technocratic government by experts and populist government by public whim are both impossible fantasies. Our elected officials need expert advice when dealing with complex scientific, economic and social challenges. But that advice does not resolve those problems for them. We empower them to judge, to choose and to act in an uncertain world. Expertise informs the work of republican self-government, but it cannot replace it."