David Cameron, Donald Trump, Leicester City, University Rankings and the end of deference
Recently there have several setbacks for the experts on both sides of the Atlantic. In May 2015 the pollsters, armed with all the techniques of scientific social science, got it very wrong about the UK general elections, drastically underestimating the Conservative margin of victory.
Now they seem to be doing even worse with Donald Trump. Pundits have queued up to denounce him as a racist, misogynist, transphobic, xenophobic, anti-semitic, Ku Klux Klan appeasing liar. Successive ceilings above which he could not possibly rise have been declared only to evaporate and replaced by another. And yet he has won the Republican nomination.
Pundits, critics and mainstream journalists are now predicting that his campaign will implode. that he will never have enough money, needs the support of the party grandees, does not have enough support among women, Hispanics, gays or trans people, is a poor organiser, does not read from a teleprompter, has disgusting hair, talks in slow monosyllables, fails to grasp the nuances of various things and so on. Perhaps this time the army of the qualified and credentialed will be right and we will have another wonderful four or eight years of a Clinton presidency with Bill as the First Gentleman. Or perhaps not.
Then there is Leicester City winning the premier league title, against 5000 to one odds. At the beginning of the season was there anyone who predicted anything other than relegation?
The press has had a multitude of stories about the experts of various kinds who have been humbled by Leicester's rise. John Micklethwait of the Economist has recounted how every year but the last he bet on the team winning the premiership title (later on the story was betting that they would come top of their division). Had he not forgotten to do so so this year then he would have have won 100,000 pounds.
I too have a story about the perils of underestimating Leicester City. A few decades ago I was the owner of a complete set of LCFC autographs some of which I got from from my father who went around the town as an inspector for the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance and occasionally got souvenirs from the organisations whose books he helped tidy up.
I got Gordon Banks's by queueing up at Lewis's in Humberston Gate and Jimmy Walsh's, then Leicester's captain just arrived from Glasgow Celtic, because he lived down the road in a semi detached now worth 130,000 pounds (Jamie Vardy's car is more than that) although I had to suffer the public embarrassment of being called a wee laddie by Mrs Walsh.
But at some point in the early or late seventies after Leicester left Division One, I gave the autographs away to somebody I can't remember. Today four signatures from that era plus Norman Wisdom are worth 275 pounds on ebay. That was an error even worse than selling an authentic vinyl copy of the Dylan Royal Albert Hall bootleg, now worth thirty, for ten dollars.
And of course we have the Brexit vote. It is unlikely that that there has ever been such unanimity about any matter of public concern from the various components of the dominant elite. Nearly every vice chancellor, all the managers of the premier league plus an imposing array of pop stars, rock stars and film stars have admonished the great unread (some of whom probably don't have passports!) that no decent person could possibly even dream of voting Leave.
The universities further elaborated on the perils of Brexit. Think about all the money that we get from the EU for research. The merit of this argument may have been blunted by the revelation that the field that got the most from the EU was Education.
The polls conducted with the latest markers of rigour such as sample sizes and margins of error, appeared to confirm that the British electorate was fully aware of the wisdom of their intellectual betters.
But clearly the academic elite had absolutely no idea about what was going on in the minds of over half of the population just as they had no idea of what was going on in the minds of Republican voters.
One wonders whether the economic catastrophe supposed to follow Brexit will actually be so catastrophic. A fall in the value of the pound or the FTSE index is not really a problem if you don't have any shares or pounds to start with.
It is possible that even the university rankers may also be suffering a loss of credibility. Last year the "revered" QS reported that the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University were overtaking the Ivy League, a claim that met with some scepticism even, or especially, in Singapore, and the universally "trusted" and prestige dispensing THE rankers do not seem to have received very much support for their pilot projects in Africa and the Middle East.
Perhaps the age of deference to expertise is coming to an end.
