Do You Trust Your Neighbors to Do the Math?

During the middle of the next US Presidential election cycle it will be twenty years since the Republican majority closed the OTA.

If you’re like the majority of Americans, that little bit of arithmetic will give you pause. You may look to see when this post was published, compare that to what you know about US politics and election cycles and work backwards. If you’re into politics you may know when the last Republican majority was able to do such things.

And if you really know your US history, you’ll know when the OTA was shut down — 1995.

The OTA was the US Congress’s Office of Technology and Assessment, a bipartisan, nonpartisan, group of 150 skilled and trained technologists whose function was to provide unbiased evaluations of technology — expertise — on a wide variety of subjects. They produced incredibly well thought out, well reasoned, cogent and authoritative reports on what should receive funding, what the government should keep an eye on, what should be ignored and so on.

While I’m not surprised that a Republican majority voted to shut it down, I also must recognize that most Democrats weren’t sure what to do with the information the OTA provided.

But shutting it down? Because it was deemed “unnecessary”? In 1995? Thank goodness there’s been no technological developments since then!

That thinking was about as ill conceived as closing the US Patent office in the late 1800s because there was nothing left to invent (an urban myth, by the way).

OTA to pTA

Many countries are moving from an “office” of qualified, trained and tested experts providing technology assessments to what’s known as pTA or “participatory” Technology Assessment.

There are lots of problems with pTA. In its most overt form, it’s known as lobbying. The more covert forms involve groups and individuals funding faux information centers that profess expertise towards economic gain. Expertise towards economic gain is well established in the court system where it’s known as experts for hire.

The most inane form is when everybody, regardless of education or training, has a say in how things such as fusion technology, wind farming, bioengineering and the like should be done and where. Nobody wants the big ugly windmills in their backyard but everybody wants affordable power, and only fools think politics is a rational enterprise.

The US is a republic, not a democracy. We elect people we hope will do the best for us. This sometimes means they will do what they think is best, not what we think is best. Leapfrog Representation and Extremism: A Study of American Voters and Their Members in Congress, published in the Aug 2010 issue of American Political Science Review, demonstrated that the voting records of politicians in the 109th and 110th Congresses didn’t match the electorate’s sentiments on key issues at all.

But truthfully, can you be surprised? Especially in scientific matters? Most times those we elect are as technically and scientifically ignorant as the rest of the population.

And do you want someone who couldn’t figure out the little arithmetic problem in the opener of this blog to make decisions on what technologies, what medical treatments, what scientific endeavors are in the common good?