Organizing Expert Systems and Democracy: The IMF Case

• In Event: Reimagining Expertise, Reconfiguring the Disciplines

Abstract

One of the fundamental problems of the democratic employment of expertise derives from the conflict between the fact that experts must be supported and therefore have interests and the need for at least the appearance of disinterestedness that is necessary for their expertise to be persuasive. It thus shares the features of agency problems generally. Conflicts of interest are usually supposed to be overcome by features of the social organization of expert careers and activities, and of the organized social processes of expert advice, that is to say expert systems. This, however, is a problem of organizational design with no standard solution, and each design has a propensity to fail under certain circumstances. In this chapter I discuss examples of the problem, and whether there is a way of stress testing expert systems. In addition I explore in detail the example of the failures of the IMF in the 2008 and Greek crises from an organizational perspective, and show that the flaws that led to expert failure in this case were features that were effective in normal circumstances rather than bugs. This is an important lesson that generalizes to all expert systems. The concluding discussion deals with the implications for the democratic reliance on these systems.

Author

• Stephen Turner, University of South Florida