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What people call a “crisis of expertise” has two elements:
(1) a visible rise in elite error or malfeasance and
(2) a sharp fall in public willingness to defer to expert authority.
Both elements can now be documented, but the picture is uneven: performance differs by domain, and trust has collapsed faster than competence itself.
a. Collapsing public trust
• In 1964 two-thirds of Americans said they trusted Washington “most of the time.” In 2024 the figure is 16 percent, and only 4 percent say they trust it “just about always.” [1]
• Comparable declines have been recorded for legacy media, universities, churches, and big business. A veteran NPR editor recently described how the network “lost America’s trust” by substituting advocacy for reporting [10], while The Economist chronicles a similar slide at the New York Times [11].
b. High-profile expert failures
• COVID-19 produced contradictory public-health edicts, poor risk communication, and obvious political signalling—what Frances Lee and Stephen Macedo call “institutional failure” [2].
• Economists badly missed the 2008 crash, underestimated post-COVID inflation, and still disagree on basic macro mechanisms [5][6].
• The replication crisis shows that, in psychology, the estimated false-discovery rate rose to roughly 37 percent of published findings between 1975-2017 [7]. High-profile fraud cases in medicine and business schools (e.g., Harvard’s re-voked tenure of Francesca Gino) exacerbate anxiety about the broader scientific record [8][9].
• Foreign-policy and national-security elites misjudged the Iraq WMD issue, Afghanistan’s resilience, and Russia’s 2022 invasion timetable—eroding confidence that credentialed insiders know more than outsiders.
c. Populist backlash
Martin Gurri’s “Revolt of the Public” argues that digital networks allow amateurs to compare notes and attack elite narratives in real time, producing a “crisis of authority” rather than of knowledge itself [3]. The result is an electorate that alternates between cynicism and anti-expert populism, as surveyed in “Elite Failures and Populist Backlash” [4].
• Information abundance: Social media gives every error an afterlife and exposes previously invisible sausage-making.
• Overpromising: Technocratic elites sold certainty (“2 × cloth masks stop COVID”) and moralized dissent; the inevitable revisions looked like betrayal rather than updating.
• Incentive misalignment: Academic prestige, journalistic clicks, and political careers sometimes reward drama or alignment with tribal narratives more than accuracy.
• Political polarization: Experts become perceived as another partisan bloc.
• Functional domains still perform: mRNA vaccines were designed in days and deployed in under a year, commercial air travel remains extraordinarily safe, and ChatGPT’s existence testifies to genuine scientific progress.
• Transparency cuts both ways: many scandals are being caught precisely because audit tools, pre-registration, and open data have improved.
• Public behaviour is ambivalent: while surveys show distrust, people still board aircraft, take prescription drugs, and seek second opinions from credentialed surgeons rather than influencers.
Critics such as the Honest Broker’s Ted Gioia provide “warning signs” for institutional rot (no dissent tolerated, selective data release, etc.) [12], while defenders of lay participation (e.g., Aporia’s “In Defence of Non-Experts”) remind us that questioning authority is often productive. The real issue, then, is legitimacy: expertise is still indispensable, but experts must re-earn trust by showing epistemic humility, disclosing uncertainty, and separating analysis from advocacy.
Yes, we are living through a crisis of expertise — not because expert knowledge has collapsed, but because the social contract that once linked expertise to public legitimacy has frayed. The crisis is therefore political and cultural as much as technical. Rebuilding it will require better incentives for accuracy, institutional transparency, and greater honesty about what experts do and do not know.
Sources
[1] Pew Research Center – Public trust in U.S. government fell from 77 % (1964) to 16 % (2024). https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/
[2] Frances Lee & Stephen Macedo interview – COVID showed how public-health and political institutions “failed.” https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/frances-lee-and-stephen-macedo
[3] Martin Gurri, “The Revolt of the Public” – argues the digital age has produced a crisis of authority. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Revolt_of_the_Public_and_the_Crisis/qD-1vAEACAAJ
[4] “Elite failures and populist backlash” – summarizes how repeated expert mistakes fuel populism. https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/elite-failures-and-populist-backlash
[5] “The failure of economists…” – outlines forecasting errors and disciplinary groupthink. https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-failure-of-economists
[6] The Economist, “Economists don’t know what’s going on” – notes profession’s inability to agree on core macro questions. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/04/24/economists-dont-know-whats-going-on
[7] J. Szűcs & others, “Are most published research findings false?” – estimates a 37 % false-discovery rate in psychology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10581498/
[8] Vox, “Scientific research fraud and criminal prosecution” – documents rising cases and calls for legal penalties. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/368350/scientific-research-fraud-crime-jail-time
[9] WGBH, “Harvard revokes tenure…” – rare, high-profile fraud case in a top business school. https://www.wgbh.org/news/education-news/2025-05-25/in-extremely-rare-move-harvard-revokes-tenure-and-cuts-ties-with-star-business-professor
[10] Uri Berliner, “I’ve Been at NPR for 25 Years. Here’s How We Lost America’s Trust.” – insider account of mission creep. https://www.thefp.com/p/npr-editor-how-npr-lost-americas-trust
[11] The Economist (1843), “When the New York Times lost its way” – outlines editorial shifts that alienated readers. https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
[12] Ted Gioia, “The Ten Warning Signs” – lists institutional pathologies that predict credibility loss. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ten-warning-signs