Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface Introduction: Technocracy and Political Epistemology
-The Absence of an Argument for Technocratic Knowledge
-Technocracy and Distributive Justice
-Technocratic Regulation and the Limits of State Autonomy
-The Technocratic Value Consensus
-The Politics of Negative Utilitarianism
-Citizens as Technocrats
-Distortions Caused by the Standard Definition of Technocracy
-The Public-Choice Alternative
-Democratic Technocracy and Nationalism
-Outline of the Book Part I. Belief, Interpretation, and Unpredictability
Chapter 1: Technocratic Naïveté
-Naïve Realism and the Fact of Technocratic Disagreement
-Four Types of Technocratic Knowledge and the Possibility of Unintended Consequences
-Naïve Realism as a Methodological Problem
-A Criterion of Technocratic Legitimacy and the Theodicy of Technocracy Chapter 2: Lippmann and Dewey: The Unjoined Debate
-Lippmann and Progressive Epistemology
-Lippmann's Political Epistemology
-Dewey's Defense of Democratic Technocracy
-The Fundamental Dilemma of Democratic Technocracy
-Dewey's Evolving Defenses of Policy Science Chapter 3: Technocracy and Interpretation
-Dewey's Evolutionary Epistemology
-Heterogeneous Beliefs and Environmental Unpredictability
-Epistemological Individualism
-Intellectual History and the Practical Problems of Technocracy
-Homogenizing Factors Part II. Toward an Empirical Epistemology of Technocracy
Chapter 4: The Pathological Pressure to Predict
-Economics and the Assumption of Effective Omniscience
-Economics as a Policy Science
-The Taming of Ignorance by Behavioral Economics
-Econometrics and the Confrontation with Heterogeneity
-Non-Technocratic Social Scientists Who Think Like Technocrats Chapter 5: Epistocracy and the Spiral of Conviction
-The Spiral of Conviction
-The Spiral of Conviction among Experts
-The Financial Crisis in Retrospect: The Economist as Ideologue Chapter 6: Public Ignorance and Democratic Technocracy
-Public Ignorance as an A-Fortiori Argument for Epistocracy
-The Unfulfilled Promise of Heuristics Research
-Public Ignorance: Radical, Not Rational
-A Bias for Technocratic Action
-Simple Heuristics for a Complex World
-Systemic Pressures in a Democratic Technocracy Part III. Exitocracy
Chapter 7: Capitalism, Socialism, and Technocracy
-A Revised Standard of Technocratic Legitimacy
-Exit and Voice
-The Public-Private Asymmetry in Voice
-Some Epistemic Limits of Exit
-An Exitocratic Difference Principle
-No Exit Redux: Epistemic and Cultural Critiques
-Exit and Human Happiness Afterword
Technocracy and the Left
References

About the Author

Jeffrey Friedman, a Visiting Scholar in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, is the editor of Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, the editor of The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (Yale University Press), and coauthor of Engineering the Perfect Storm: The Financial Crisis and the Failure of Regulation. He
has taught political and social theory at Barnard College, Columbia University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, and Yale University.

Reviews

"Recommended." -- D. Bantz, University of Alaska, CHOICE
"an intellectual and scholarly tour de force: impressively wide-ranging, refreshingly iconoclastic, and consistently interesting." -- Eric MacGilvray, Ohio State University
"Power without Knowledge gives us a provocative and moving evocation of how those ideals undercut technocracy from within. Friedman does not reject the technocratic dedication to the relief of human suffering. But he shows that we should not assume that those who suffer are so homogeneous that they must succumb to positivist methods of behavioral prediction." -- Paul Gunn, University of London, The Review of Politics
"This is just the book for social scientists still in thrall to the capacity of technocratic elites to bring the utopian ideas of political philosophers to the people by virtue of their instrumental skills. Friedman's critique will remove the scales from your eyes. The improvement of society may be possible but it will never emerge from the cost-benefit analyses of what he calls the Epistocrats. Densely and convincingly argued, lucidly written, Power
without Knowledge is perhaps the most convincing case yet against the worship of classical economics in political life." -- James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale
University
"Combining political philosophy, empirical studies of public opinion, and psychology, Jeffrey Friedman provides a brilliant and multi-faceted analysis of political epistemology. The question of how people judge the efficacy of alternative policies raises crucial questions for democracy, and by building on the century-old debates between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey, Friedman takes us deep into current predicaments of governance." -- Robert
Jervis, Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics, Columbia University, and author of How Statesmen Think
"A creative effort to fuse political philosophy, epistemology, and cognitive science and rescue us from our current political predicament: closed-minded partisans locked in tight alliances with over-confident likeminded experts. This book is loaded with profoundly important arguments that I have never seen brought together so skillfully." -- Philip E. Tetlock, Annenberg University Professor, University of Pennsylvania; author of Expert
Political Judgment
"Today, many embrace their own 'alternative facts,' but Jeffrey Friedman contends that we still all too often believe our preferred experts can guide human behavior to good results-when we should doubt that any know how to do so. The bold alternative he raises is to seek to provide people with the resources needed to make their own choices. While so many today claim to champion 'the people,' Friedman seeks instead to help people champion themselves." --
Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania
"In this deeply learned, passionately argued book, Jeffrey Friedman offers a trenchant critique of technocracy that indicts both the epistocratic 'rule of experts' and the opinion-based policy produced by democratic collectives. Rejecting the idea that either experts or ordinary citizens are capable of attaining the knowledge necessary to solve the social problems of modernity, he urges that the choice of individual exit is epistemically superior to voice and
offers 'exitocracy' as a radical alternative to existing forms of government. His bold, carefully reasoned argument challenges social theorists to rethink our most cherished assumptions about the
potential of public policy to foster ameliorative change." -- Josiah Ober, Stanford University
"Friedman offers a powerful critique of technocratic politics. He marvelously pricks the hubris of social scientists with their naive epistemologies and their claims to predictive powers. And he provides an invigorating call for greater freedom and experimentation with a basis in universal welfare." -- Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley