Public health and expert failure

Abstract

In a modern democracy, a public health system includes mechanisms for the provision of expert scientific advice to elected officials. The decisions of elected officials generally will be degraded by expert failure, that is, the provision of bad advice. The theory of expert failure suggests that competition among experts generally is the best safeguard against expert failure. Monopoly power of experts increases the chance of expert failure. The risk of expert failure also is greater when scientific advice is provided by only one or a few disciplines. A national government can simulate a competitive market for expert advice by structuring the scientific advice it receives to ensure the production of multiple perspectives from multiple disciplines. I apply these general principles to the United Kingdom's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).

Cascading expert failure

“…For example, consider the case of the SAGE, as discussed by Koppl (2021). The pandemic models SAGE and others used in formulating their advice for the COVID-19 pandemic relied heavily on assuming a homogeneous population (ibid.…”

“…2 As a consequence of modeling a homogeneous population, SAGE's advice to the British government was predicated on an analysis that likely overestimated benefits of various mitigation measures. Given that SAGE has significant market power in their role as advisor for the British government (Koppl, 2021), failure on their part could have an effect like that described in Figure 3: A relatively small failure (overestimating herd immunity thresholds and spread) causes the experts to be more pessimistic in their advice. This overestimation becomes an input into the British government's decision-making.…”

“…In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the influence of public health expertise show up in fields far removed from public health, but public health officials cared little for the insights of experts in those fields. I explore the effects of these choices by experts by combining the cascading failures literature (Banerjee, 1992;Baqaee, 2018;Bikhchandani et al, 1992;Wu, 2015) with recent work on the production of expert opinion Kamenica, 2017a, 2017b;Koppl, 2018Koppl, , 2021Koppl and Murphy, 2022;Murphy et al, 2021) to show that seemingly small expert failures can have cascading effects on the decisions of unrelated actors, leading to large adverse effects.…”

“…Adam Smith was warning of the dangers of overreaching expertise in his classroom lectures (Smith, 1982) and published work (Smith, [1776(Smith, [ ]1981. The economic literature on failure focuses on incentive and institutional structures that can cause expert failure (Koppl, 2021;Murphy et al, 2021) and how receptive experts are to disconfirming information (Andreoni and Mylovanov, 2012;Kang and Kim, 2021). Knowledge issues also arise regarding how well the expert can advise the nonexpert (Hayek, 1945;Lavoie, 2016).…”

The political cost of sanctions: Evidence from COVID-19

“… [22] suggest that adverse shocks provide voters with the opportunity to learn new information about incumbents. In recent months, new work has assessed how the policy response to the pandemic affects political consensus ( [23] , [24] , [25] , [26] , [27] ). 28 show that COVID-19 cases negatively affected Trump’ s vote share in the 2020 US presidential election, suggesting that voters may have punished Trump for the management of the pandemic crisis.…”