Ignorance has in recent years become a matter of great interest and concern to many students of politics. In political science, a lot of work has focused on the question of what citizens know and what they would need to know for democracy—or at least a crude “folk theory” of democracy—to work (Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, 2016). For some the results suggest that we need greater reliance on experts, and others use it to question the principle of one-person-one-vote altogether (Jason Brennan, Against Democracy, 2016). This has prompted defenses of the judgment of ordinary citizens, either alone or, most persuasively, in groups (Simone Chambers, “Human Life Is Group Life: Deliberative Democracy for Realists,” Critical Review 30 [1–2], 2018).

Jeffrey Friedman’s new book, Power without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy, develops a critique of the program of research on public ignorance from a quite different direction. His claim is that neither citizens nor policy experts can know what they would need to know to solve social problems. Furthermore, he charges both ordinary citizens and experts with “radical ignorance,” which is to say ignorance of the limits of their knowledge. This is manifest in the “naive realism” of ordinary citizens discussed in chapter 1 and further developed in chapter 6, which leads to a pathological politics centered on personalities and a “moral battle over ends” (p. 301). Chapters 2 and 3 give an illuminating discussion of Walter Lippmann and introduce Friedman’s theory of “ideational determinism” and the centrality of interpretation in the human sciences. The middle section of the book—chapters 4 and 5—addresses the claims to policy expertise of neoclassical economics and the disciplinary and institutional pressures that lead to narrowness, dogmatism, and excessive conviction. The final chapter sketches a regime structured around enabling the judgments of individual citizens to choose among competing solutions to their own problems: an “exitocracy.”

These arguments are framed as a critique of technocracy, though Friedman uses that term in a quite novel way. “Technocracy,” for Friedman, is a vision of politics as a set of problems to be solved by legislative and regulatory interventions. On this account, what is decisive is not the possession of expert knowledge but simply the aspiration to answer questions about what we ought to do about poverty, affordable housing, crime, education, public transit, the health system, and so on. There are people who claim technical expertise with regard to these questions, of course, and they are what he calls “epistocrats.” But most of the rest of us are what he calls “citizen-technocrats,” forming our own accounts of the causes of and cures for social problems.

Neither group really knows best what to do. To really know what to do, Friedman argues, the technocrat (whether citizen or expert) would need to know which social problems are (1) significant; (2) what is causing those significant problems; (3) what measures can effectively prevent, mitigate, or solve those problems; and (4) the intended and unintended costs of those measures (p. 46). Only with this sort of knowledge could we be confident that our actions would do more good than harm. Yet, he suggests, this knowledge is simply not available. Human behavior, he contends, is ultimately unpredictable because of an unknowable variation in ideational inputs, influences, and developments (p. 137).

Not only do we—lay citizens and experts alike—lack the necessary knowledge to effectively solve social problems, operating instead with inevitably partial interpretations of the “blooming buzzing confusion” of information (in William James’s phrase). Many of us do not even know that we need—and lack—this knowledge (p. 301). It is this “radical ignorance” that makes technocracy dangerous. If we recognized that what seems like reality to us is in fact a partial rendering of an “epistemically complex society,” then we would recognize the inevitability of honest disagreement in policy debates. Yet too many of us, Friedman suggests, are “naive realists” for whom opposition to our favored policies is a sign not of the natural diversity of “ideations” but rather of bad faith. Thus, as Lippmann put it, “out of the opposition we make villains and conspiracies” (p. 41).

This sort of critique of the naive realism of ordinary people is hardly new. But Friedman extends a version of this critique to social scientists studying public ignorance, and indeed to the assumptions about incentives that underpin neoclassical economics. So when Bryan Caplan asks in The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (2008), “What would the average person believe if he had a PhD in economics?” Friedman’s response is that Caplan is benchmarking political ignorance against contestable knowledge claims. More broadly, Friedman attacks assumptions about rational agents responding to incentives on the grounds that we, the analysts, cannot know that the agent perceived any particular incentive nor how that agent would respond to it. Worse still, economists theorizing in this way “will be radically ignorant of their epistemic blind spot” (p. 193), unaware that they lack what they would need to know to make behavioral predictions. Add to this both an internal disciplinary context of conviction emerging inadvertently as a result of biased search and filtering and an institutional context that selects for those who project certainty, and we have reasons to doubt the reliability of much economic expertise as it is deployed in deliberations on public policy.

This book is stimulating, ambitious, and wide-ranging. It is at its best in its detailed critiques of various research programs in political science, public opinion, and economics. Furthermore, Friedman makes a provocative inversion of who we identify as a technocrat—Donald Trump is the “citizen-technocrat in chief” (p. 291), claiming on the basis of business experience to be able to solve complex problems—and what we mean by technocratic politics. Far from being a bloodless “solutionism,” technocracy pushes politics into a distinctively conflictual formation: because so many people believe the solutions to social problems are simple and obvious, it seems that opposition must be motivated by malice or corruption and that the key point in selecting representatives is their commitment to enact what seems an obvious policy. This could make an interesting contribution to the emerging literature on the relationship between populism and technocracy.

However, Friedman’s positive proposals are narrow in scope compared with the previous chapters. His response to technocratic politics, outlined in a relatively brief final section of the book, is what he calls “exitocracy.” Rather than engage in a politics of communication and cooperative problem solving, we ought, where possible, to create a framework to support “indirect maneuvering in the private sphere, primarily but not solely by means of the exit mechanism” (p. 322). This raises important questions, which Friedman does not really address, about the scope and limits of democratic politics: How are we to decide which sort of problems we are dealing with and which sort of mechanism is appropriate to it? These are the sorts of decisions Jack Knight and James Johnson, for instance, take to be the central work of democratic politics (The Priority of Democracy: Political Consequences of Pragmatism, 2011). Yet it is not clear whether, for Friedman, these questions should be addressed through public deliberation and decision or whether, given his account of the tendency of ordinary citizens to adopt the stance of “citizen technocrats,” they should be taken out of the hands of the people altogether.