The Short Life of the Expert Class

The expert class had a good run. From roughly 1945 to 2008, credentialed professionals — economists, epidemiologists, foreign policy analysts, central bankers — operated within a broad public consensus that they knew more than the average citizen and that their recommendations deserved deference. That consensus has collapsed, and it is not coming back in its old form.

The collapse was not caused by social media alone, though social media accelerated it. It was caused by a series of visible failures. Economists did not predict the 2008 financial crisis and largely failed to explain it afterward in terms ordinary people found satisfying. Public health authorities gave contradictory guidance throughout multiple crises and were sometimes caught adjusting their stated positions for reasons that looked political. Foreign policy experts presided over a sequence of interventions that produced outcomes opposite to those promised.

None of this means expertise is worthless. It means the social contract around expertise — defer first, evaluate later — no longer holds. What has replaced it is messier and in some ways more honest. People now shop for experts the way they shop for other goods, selecting those whose track records and priors align with their own. This produces epistemically bad outcomes in some domains and unexpectedly good ones in others.

The institutions have not yet adapted. Universities still train experts for a world that expected deference. Think tanks still publish reports calibrated for a media environment that treated credentialed opinion as inherently newsworthy. Both are producing for a diminished market.

What survives will be expertise that earns trust through demonstrated accuracy rather than assumed through institutional affiliation. That is a higher bar, and most current institutions are not built to meet it.