Enter the Expert

IN THE STATUS-OLYMPICS of Delhi’s drawing rooms, gyaan and glamour remain key currencies. Ergo, people like me must observe, we have very little else to offer. The pandemic has eroded all my will to obsess over being an aesthetically pleasing object. As for gyaan, I am not expected to offer any. Like any of us, I may know things and want to claim a body of knowledge, but only a certain type of person is expected to hold any real insight amongst the city’s chatterati. Seasoned drawing room occupants are trained to sniff power and consequently discount or dismiss the utterances of those without it. The Delhi dinner-party is often exhausting because of what the philosopher Agnes Callard deftly calls the ‘The Importance Game,’ where participants endlessly signal their network wealth and credentials; hilarious exchanges on who knows whose boss, who has dined with the new British High Commissioner, and who interacts with Nitin Gadkari or Ram Madhav. Governments may come and go, and pandemics may devastate the capital, but the structural snobbishness of Delhi’s plush scene remains undented and undaunted.

At the first and only dinner party I attended following the terrifying second wave, I got chatting with a hip-corporate type. In his early fifties, the gentleman was dressed in a sharp Shantanu and Nikhil kurta-suit. Steadily, he revealed himself to be a member of an expanding cult of middle-aged handsome men who worship Milind Soman’s wellness regimen, and perpetually seek younger girlfriends to divert themselves from the dreary stability offered by their successful careers and loving wives. Our conversation started with his account of the lockdown; he had spent the months in Goa, striving to improve himself for an attempt at a triathlon. In keeping with banal dinner-party rules to breezily discuss Issues of Importance, we moved from fitness to talking about the economy. He refused to believe that things were bad; and saw no need for any income support for workers. This is an area I happen to know a fair amount about, leading analysis and support to governments on safety nets for the past decade. I’d written a paper with Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) data on India’s welfare response with a colleague; I knew its coverage, strengths and weaknesses. My early career was spent working with and listening to civil society activists who were fighting for labour rights and helping workers access social protection support. Through the pandemic, I had actively followed social science research, which highlighted how the crisis had diminished welfare gains of the past. Since the man could not be expected to take me or my claims seriously, I cited multiple robust surveys and papers by renowned economists. I flashed comments from Jean Dreze, Raghuram Rajan, Gita Gopinath, Abhijit Banerjee, Rohini Pande, the pantheon of superstar economists. He refused to update his beliefs. “People do not need hand-outs. Spending is back, it will create jobs. Look at the packed markets. These economists and experts you mention should go to DLF City walk.” He sipped his Negroni and added, “Do Nobel Laureates visit malls?”

We moved on, talking about the possibility of future waves. He remained sceptical of the alarm raised by the public health community, insisting on our immunity as a culture. “It is all so confusing frankly. One minute the doctor says use Ivermectin, next minute we are told not to. One minute, vaccines will protect us from diseases, then they say vaccines will only protect against severity of disease. One minute we think the third wave will be in October, the next minute we are told its in January. We open schools, then we close schools. The disease spreads through touch, then it is air-borne. These experts keep changing what they are saying yaar! My wife’s Guru predicts better.” Soon, we were joined by his buddies, all Milind fans as well. I found myself drowning in a chorus bemoaning the expertise of experts.

RETREATING FOR a reprieve at the snacks table, I wondered: Has the pandemic changed the way we value and engage with technical expertise? Have the innumerable esoteric simulations, studies, models of disease spread, retweeted vaccine efficacy results, multiple hot-takes on the state of jobs and income, eroded our ability to consume and interpret useful information? In this year, where we have witnessed the devastating impact of governments unwilling to learn from science, where our fingers have been perpetually crossed in this sea of uncertainty, where every study and claim seems to have a counter study or counter claim, where we became inured to data on deaths and its obfuscation, are some of us simply exhausted by all the evidence we are confronted with?

How do we know what we know? And when do we care to learn? As a community of knowledge producers, anthropologists have been interested in technologies deployed to manufacture, teach and learn facts about ourselves and the material world. Their investigations theorise that power is exercised through the creation of seemingly obvious or basic claims which prescribe how the world works. Ethnographic work on various knowledge systems such as the occult, ecology, psychotherapy and genetic research understand “truth’s” as socially produced entities— seemingly self-evident or apparent ways of seeing and interpreting the world achieved by propagating definitions of the normal motivations and mechanics driving the moral, biological and psychological conduct of human beings.

However, the social production of seemingly Obvious facts cannot be sustained without the dominance of certain mental monopolies—tacit hegemonies exercised by certain types of evidence and knowledge systems over the ways people and organisations ask questions and seek answers. These intellectual monopolies are not static. Within the context of scientific research, scholars such as Thomas Kuhn suggest that different research perspectives or paradigms compete for dominance. The sociology of science suggests that scientific knowledge can also be seen as a socially created process where prevailing forms of thinking or “thought styles” in one’s milieu exerted immense force upon the actions and evidence circulated by knowledge producers and consumers.

I don’t want to dive off the post-modern deep end here. There are facts: clear statements which capture attributes and circumstances that warrant easy understanding and immediate action such as: people are sick or deprived of nutrition. But the more social and complex a phenomenon being studied or investigated, the more contested the claims tend to become. Social scientists understand that power cannot be understood as the capacity of one actor to aggressively assert or impart his or her claims on how others normally behave or how the world works. Citizens are not inert points upon whom such power through knowledge is applied. By ignoring, resisting, modifying or internalising various bodies of knowledge and knowledge production processes, we are all complicit in shaping the power of certain thought-styles and ideas.

The Milind-Bhakts were no fools. I noticed a deep reverence for the medical community. These men had donated to health relief camps and food distribution campaigns. Even if they begrudged the mixed and changing public health messages, they admired various esteemed doctors who were part of the government effort to fight the pandemic. Throughout our interaction, each man mentioned how he had diligently followed interviews in the online news media between prominent journalists and medical professionals. They quoted conversations between Karan Thapar and Gagandeep Kang; they recited and followed the words of Shahid Jameel. When it came to public health and science, domains very few mortals can claim to access and understand easily, these men were hardly anti-rational, albeit frustrated by the rapidly changing landscape of scientific facts and public health consensus. They accepted that science and medicine confronted a complex and ever evolving world; that even the best experts would not have answers to all the questions this new virus and its variants would pose.

Their stand on economic expertise was the polar opposite. I listened to these men discuss farm laws and the jobs scenario and found myself growing agitated at how all insights from reams of CMIE data, journalistic reportage and the government’s own labour survey estimates were utterly disregarded as being un-rigorous, false or meaningless. Perhaps, I am drawing an unfair comparison between how these men perceived expertise in two deeply different domains of knowledge. But as all social scientists, public health experts and activists have highlighted through the past two years, these fields are closely linked. The pandemic has destroyed lives not only through death and disease, but through debt and the destruction of livelihoods. The government’s core response to the livelihoods crisis has been to avoid lockdowns. A broader conversation on universal income support or platforms to trigger these has been stymied by an inertia in public debate and political will. Listening to these elite men, powerful voters in their own right, my disillusionment with the work of economic discourse grew deeper.

As I foolishly and arrogantly returned to debate the facts with the Milind-Bhakts, unlike the conversation on vaccines, I was greeted with a know-it-all anti-rationalism and denialism. Because these men ran businesses and were intimately engaged in the “economy,” primacy was granted to their ‘ground realities’ and emotions over rigour and reason. Each complained about lazy workers coddled by an excessively loving welfare-state. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Despite the perils imposed by the pandemic on the ability to conduct research, scholars and social movements have produced rich and robust evidence on how workers continue to need support as they navigate a battered economy. The IMF worries about India’s K-shaped recovery curve: where salaried professionals and the elite shall recover rapidly but working-class communities and wage-earning workers are yet to report consumption and welfare levels of the pre-pandemic time. Economists have repeatedly written op-eds, papers, offered media interviews, and conducted webinars on the need for deeper cash support and more food support for majority of India’s informal and unprotected workforce. While the top-up to the food allocations have been extended, the depth of the benefits is not commensurate with needs.

Access also remains constrained for those without ration cards. The efforts to create an e-shram portal have been welcome, but activists highlight how workers continue to struggle to access and collate the required paperwork and hand-holding support to register themselves. Development practitioners and technologists have argued for the need to create implementation pipelines to leverage India’s vast food subsidy database to trigger cash transfers or insurance support. There is no dearth of feasible solutions and some state governments have gone ahead to implement these. However, the urgency to create a cohesive welfare response to the poverty and vulnerability of the pandemic has been limited. We cannot be glib and blame the government or political apparatus; part of the problem lies in the general dislike and distrust of social scientists and intellectuals by a powerful new elite. This elite expresses solidarity and deep reverence for medical professionals and scientists, those from the more “technical” field of science. The same elite find delight in rejecting and refuting the advice of social scientists as a way to assert their own egos and autonomy. I was convinced that these men were jealous of Raghuram Rajan.

IN HIS BOOK on the The Death of Expertise scholar Tom Nichols writes: “To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

In India, the elite conversation on the economy has been captured by a level of what-about-ery that seems to paralyse any clear understanding and push on policy. Many of the English-speaking elite supported demonetisation. Farm laws, which contained some useful propositions, were analysed and debated for their democratic merits and rightly so. However, the hours of expert debates on the laws, which involved hilarious moments where TV anchors lectured academic economists on how prices of food grains are determined, succumbed to the trappings of mere he-says-she-says (although most debate participants were men) news-cycle infotainment.

As I listened to the Milind-Bhakt-triathletes berate economists and activists I admired deeply, my self-indulgent meanderings grew uncomfortable. I saw that even my own community of development care-bears and do-gooders is to blame. Economists aren’t always the nicest or most communicative of people. Most writing on the economy remains within a small insider-club, often articulated with powerful policy makers and government agencies as their audience. Commenting on the social behaviour of academic economists, acclaimed heterodox economist Dani Rodrik tweeted about the growing “jerk quotient” in the field. He worried that a hyper-competitive atmosphere in elite academic departments implied young aspiring economists would adopt cut-throat modes of being and doing. I have spent time with younger striving Indian members of the economist community—largely upper-caste men in their thirties and forties, trained in posh schools abroad—and observed how this group tends to treat anyone without connections to further research projects rather abysmally. So many of these men seem drunk on their degrees, having received too much love from their mothers and the Indian education system. They believe their esteemed degrees allow them the power and place to be dismissive of other social sciences and knowledge emerging from lived experience.

The norms Rodrik chided amongst academic economists trained at elite schools have sadly trickled into the world of development practice. Many (certainly not all) socialised and educated at hyper-competitive departments carry these toxic modes of behaviour with them outside academia in three important ways. First, the way they treat their colleagues and assistants. Second, the way they treat those deemed unimportant or unable to help them gain access to a treasured dataset or grant funding. And third, the way economists dominate the discursive spaces they occupy. Try being a social worker or a non-techy-non-PhD who dares to claim expertise on the nuts and bolts of the welfare state these-days. While bureaucrats and activists may actually want to learn from your insights, academics in the development and social policy space will scarcely engage with you unless you can help them do a research project. You’ll meet the same “jerk-quotient” Rodrik describes. You will be silenced; you will possibly censor yourself. You will be expected to jump through a million hoops to claim legitimacy for your voice, even if you’ve been dealing with the practicalities of the issue at hand day-in-and-day-out for a decade, compared to someone who publishes papers or opinions while living in another country. And all of us are probably complicit. This culture of academic pedigree triumphing over the unglamourous world of everyday practice, of academic rock-star worship in a status-obsessed world is so insidious, that not only will you learn to discount the value of your hard-won knowledge from everyday embedded experience, but you’ll continue to value the work and good graces of an academic jerk who derides your authority to make any knowledge claims because he (it’s usually a he) considers you unworthy based on your lack of prestige or degree. No media network will ever have a panel debate with social workers on the merits of demonetisation or the Covid welfare package.

However, I doubt the men I was talking to in Golf Links would change their mind about a livelihoods stimulus if economists behaved better and had better social skills, or if the media and development agencies granted more space to a socio-economic expertise emanating from practice over prominence. Further, the most visible members of the economics-expert-biradri are wonderfully congenial and articulate men and women. For the Milind-Bhakts, all of whom reported children studying finance and economics at elite universities in the West, rejecting and ignoring good advice from sound economists was a way to protect themselves from the perils of redistribution and the torture of being asked to think about an issue beyond the “pro and anti-Modi” discourse that is suffocating all good ideas in the country.

I noticed the questions these men asked about the data on the economy. A snide chill accompanied them. Any data or “ground reality” which hinted at people returning to jobs, the recovery of the GDP or consumption meant that all claims of deep distress were lies, virtue-signalling or liberal propaganda. When it came to economics and its claims, you were expected to know and account for everything—there was no room for complexity, uncertainty, and the mess of real life. Medical science was excluded from these rigid expectations. The new north-Indian elite have lost all patience and interest in the expertise of the economist. And the economy will continue to suffer because of our collective elite disengagement. I abandoned my hopeless attempts at engaging with the group of Milind wannabes. Perhaps, the crisis of the plush Delhi drawing room is not the lack of expertise. Instead, a lack of empathy plagues the air around central Delhi.

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