Plimsoll line is a marking where the hull of a ship meets the surface of the water.

I've just read a discussion between Glen Weyl and Scott Alexander about technocracy. It's really hard to figure out what they are actually disagreeing about. My naive understanding is that Weyl may be saying: "When we design mechanisms, we have to pay attention to make them legible to the political class and/or to the general public," and Scott Alexander responding "Sure, but why do you believe the rationalist community to be opposed to the idea?"

And while I have little to add to that discussion - besides maybe adding a case study by pointing out that the gripes that many Europeans have with the European Union seem to be mostly focused on the legibility rather than on the actual performance of the institution - it made me write down couple of thoughts on technocracy that I never bothered to put on paper before.

For the purpose of this article, technocracy, bureaucracy and meritocracy are the same thing: It's a class of people who got their jobs based on their capabilities. The counterpart is the political class, the people who get their jobs based on their political views and/or their loyalty. They may be elected by the public or get selected by a higher-up. I guess there isn't a short word for the latter kind of person, so I'll just go with "political appointee".

Viewed this way, a president or a prime minister are political appointees. So is, say, a director of the tax authority, who may be literally appointed by the prime minister. A head of a department at a ministry may, on the other hand, apply for the position based on a job ad and manage to get hired by passing an interview testing his professional skills. That makes him a technocrat - or bureaucrat, if you will. In the same way, Chinese emperor, even if it sounds weird, is a political appointee and the mandarins are technocrats.

The line tends to be blurry. Even the experts are often hired based on the recommendation of their peers and it's often hard to tell whether a person was hired because they were technically superior or whether they were just buddies with the interviewers.

In any case, the point I am trying to make is that in every state, in every business or organization there's a certain horizontal line separating political appointees on the top from the technocrats on the bottom. Depending on your political pre...

Owen Haaga

Owen Haaga

Owen Haaga

Owen Haaga