• Acknowledgments


• Preface


• Introduction: Technocracy and Political Epistemology


• -The Absence of an Argument for Technocratic Knowledge


• -Technocracy and Distributive Justice


• -Technocratic Regulation and the Limits of State Autonomy


• -The Technocratic Value Consensus


• -The Politics of Negative Utilitarianism


• -Citizens as Technocrats


• -Distortions Caused by the Standard Definition of Technocracy


• -The Public-Choice Alternative


• -Democratic Technocracy and Nationalism


• -Outline of the Book


• Part I. Belief, Interpretation, and Unpredictability


• Chapter 1: Technocratic Naïveté


• -Naïve Realism and the Fact of Technocratic Disagreement


• -Four Types of Technocratic Knowledge and the Possibility of Unintended Consequences


• -Naïve Realism as a Methodological Problem


• -A Criterion of Technocratic Legitimacy and the Theodicy of Technocracy


• Chapter 2: Lippmann and Dewey: The Unjoined Debate


• -Lippmann and Progressive Epistemology


• -Lippmann's Political Epistemology


• -Dewey's Defense of Democratic Technocracy


• -The Fundamental Dilemma of Democratic Technocracy


• -Dewey's Evolving Defenses of Policy Science


• Chapter 3: Technocracy and Interpretation


• -Dewey's Evolutionary Epistemology


• -Heterogeneous Beliefs and Environmental Unpredictability


• -Epistemological Individualism


• -Intellectual History and the Practical Problems of Technocracy


• -Homogenizing Factors


• Part II. Toward an Empirical Epistemology of Technocracy


• Chapter 4: The Pathological Pressure to Predict


• -Economics and the Assumption of Effective Omniscience


• -Economics as a Policy Science


• -The Taming of Ignorance by Behavioral Economics


• -Econometrics and the Confrontation with Heterogeneity


• -Non-Technocratic Social Scientists Who Think Like Technocrats


• Chapter 5: Epistocracy and the Spiral of Conviction


• -The Spiral of Conviction


• -The Spiral of Conviction among Experts


• -The Financial Crisis in Retrospect: The Economist as Ideologue


• Chapter 6: Public Ignorance and Democratic Technocracy


• -Public Ignorance as an A-Fortiori Argument for Epistocracy


• -The Unfulfilled Promise of Heuristics Research


• -Public Ignorance: Radical, Not Rational


• -A Bias for Technocratic Action


• -Simple Heuristics for a Complex World


• -Systemic Pressures in a Democratic Technocracy


• Part III. Exitocracy


• Chapter 7: Capitalism, Socialism, and Technocracy


• -A Revised Standard of Technocratic Legitimacy


• -Exit and Voice


• -The Public-Private Asymmetry in Voice


• -Some Epistemic Limits of Exit


• -An Exitocratic Difference Principle


• -No Exit Redux: Epistemic and Cultural Critiques


• -Exit and Human Happiness


• Afterword


• Technocracy and the Left


• References

Jeffrey Friedman, a Visiting Scholar in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, is the editor of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, the editor of The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (Yale University Press), and coauthor of Engineering the Perfect Storm: The Financial Crisis and the Failure of Regulation. He has taught political and social theory at Barnard College, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and Yale University.

Do leading social-scientific experts, or technocrats, know what they are doing? In Power without Knowledge, Jeffrey Friedman maintains that they do not. Friedman shows that people are too heterogeneous to act as predictably as technocracy requires of them. Technocratic reason, then, entails a drastically oversimplified understanding of human decision making in modern society.