Will Davies on populism, data and experts

Episode Summary

Executive Summary: The episode argues that expertise and data have shifted from shared public tools to contested political instruments. Will Davies traces the rise of technocracy from the 17th century to the postwar era, its peak in the Great Moderation, and its erosion amid Brexit, Trump, inequality, social media, and surveillance capitalism. The discussion distinguishes public-facing evidence from weaponized measurement used to audit and control.

Main Topics: The rise and fragility of expertise (Priority: 5/5): Davies frames expertise as historically contingent and politically fragile, tracing it from early scientific and state institutions to today’s backlash against experts and facts. Technocracy and the Great Moderation (Priority: 5/5): The conversation examines the late-20th-century belief that economic policy could be depoliticized through expert-led, evidence-based governance, and how the financial crisis exposed its limits. Populism, post-truth, and the crisis of representation (Priority: 5/5): The hosts and Davies discuss how Brexit, Trump, and broader populist movements expanded what counts as political conflict, turning institutions and media into objects of suspicion. Social media and the democratization of critique (Priority: 4/5): Social platforms, smartphones, and video have enabled direct challenges to official narratives, amplifying skepticism, conspiracy thinking, and disputes over what counts as credible experience. Data as public knowledge vs. data as control (Priority: 5/5): A central distinction is drawn between statistics meant to create shared understanding and data systems used by employers, schools, and platforms to monitor, rank, and discipline people. The ethical problem of measurement (Priority: 4/5): The episode argues that modern debates are increasingly about deciding what should not be measured or publicized, because new metrics can create harmful incentives and asymmetries. Economics, rankings, and institutional authority (Priority: 4/5): Examples like GDP and university rankings show how imperfect indicators persist because they help institutions make decisions, even when users distrust their accuracy.

Key Arguments: Expertise is not timeless; it emerged through specific historical institutions and is now undergoing a legitimacy crisis. The Great Moderation created the belief that technocratic governance had solved macroeconomic policy, but the global financial crisis revealed that policy remained deeply political. GDP became a credible proxy for progress only when economic growth broadly aligned with lived experience; rising inequality weakened that alignment. Populism succeeds by reframing experts, journalists, regulators, and institutions as a cultural elite rather than neutral arbiters of fact. Social media and smartphones have shifted credibility toward seemingly unmediated visual evidence, undermining traditional gatekeepers. There is a difference between data produced for public reasoning and data collected to surveil, rank, or control workers, students, or consumers. Many contemporary disputes are not over whether measurement matters, but over which realities should be measured at all and who gets to define them. Economics often functions as a language game for bureaucratic decision-making, helping officials converge on action even when the underlying model is incomplete or contested.

Data Points: Great Moderation period: roughly 1990 to 2007 - Used to describe the era of low inflation, low unemployment, central bank independence, and high confidence in technocratic economic management. Key crisis period: 2007, 8, 9 - Refers to the global financial crisis that undermined confidence in technocratic economic policymaking. Historical origin of modern expertise: mid 17th century - Davies traces the origins of government-by-evidence and the authority of numbers back to this period. Scientific/technocratic institutional moment: late 17th century - Referenced as the era of the scientific revolution, the Royal Society, and the early Bank of England. Inequality statistic: 50% - Davies cites Thomas Piketty’s work to note that half of Americans experienced no increase in real income from the late 1970s to the present. Income period referenced: late 1970s to today - Time span used to illustrate stagnant real incomes for half of the U.S. population. University ranking example: third in the league table - Used illustratively to show how institutions can dismiss rankings publicly while valuing them privately. Social consensus era: 1945 to the mid-1970s - Described as the Keynesian heyday when GDP growth broadly corresponded with improved living standards.

Pivotal Quotes: "I wanted to, I suppose, cast a longer historical and philosophical perspective on these events by saying, first of all, why and how and when did we reach these particular liberal assumptions about the status and authority of experts and facts in public life?" — Will Davies: Explaining the aim of his book and why he traces expertise back to earlier historical periods. "I think clearly, there was never an age where the entire public was beholden to headline indicators of macroeconomics and so on." — Will Davies: Clarifying that macroeconomic indicators were never universally accepted as a complete account of social reality. "the nature of the authority of policymaking, I think, changed" — Will Davies: Summarizing the transition from overtly political policymaking to evidence-based technocratic authority and its later erosion.

Implications: Listeners are left with a warning: data and expertise are still essential, but they are increasingly contested, politicized, and used for control. The future will likely hinge on rebuilding trusted public measurement while resisting surveillance, manipulation, and overclaiming certainty.