Members of the expert class seldom notice

From Attention Paid by Woody Cozad.  The subheading is Jack Cashill punctures the standard “white flight” narrative by letting former residents of urban neighborhoods tell their own stories.  A book review of Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, by Jack Cashill.  

I refer with some frequency to our litany of centrally planned catastrophes such as defunding the police, decarceration, ESG, DEI, Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, Anthropogenic Global Warming, etc.  I am perhaps not inclusiveness enough with my memory.  Those are merely the modern instances.  But there are plenty of antecedents.

All the social experiments instituted for our benefit by our betters—forced busing, urban renewal, public housing, interstate highways—cascaded together in Newark in just a few mind-boggling years. They were ginned up in Washington and sold on the basis of social science. But when you attempt to explain, predict, or alter human conduct on the basis of numbers, you make mathematics into metaphor.

Indeed.  Busing, urban renewal, public housing, interstate highways in urban contexts - they were centrally planned catastrophes one and all.  Tales from the 1960s and early 1970s, but of the same ilk and genealogy as DEI etc. today.  

The meat of Cozad'sargument:

When you’ve finished crunching numbers, you move on to crunching people. Little Italy is flattened and replaced by a housing project that’s just a slum in the making; an elevated superhighway is plunged through the heart of Roseville; and more drugs circulate through the schoolyards than in Bogotá. When, at long last, people find all these conditions “untenable,” they leave. The exodus is then labeled “white flight,” and the people leaving get labeled “racists.” But what label should we affix to the geniuses in Washington who conceived and executed the whole cock-up? We call them “experts.”

The experts never pause to talk to Bill and Sandy, Artie and Mario, Hannah and Jack. Why would they? The experts aren’t really there to protect the interests of the purported beneficiaries of their projects. In The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham wrote that all large organizations eventually come to serve the interests of their permanent staffs. Ronald Reagan said that the most frightening words in the English language are, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Here to help themselves, says Burnham. They look on the working stiff not as the object of the beneficent program but as an obstacle to it.

Worse than the selfishness of the administrator is his solipsism. The federal agency hardly notices that Bill and Sandy, Artie and Mario, Hannah and Jack actually exist. Before the managerial revolution arrived, back in 1934, Simone Weil, then a Marxist, wrote an article saying that Marx had failed to foresee one form of oppression: bureaucrats could crush working people at least as badly as the most exploitative capitalist. As Weil wrote elsewhere, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. It is given to very few minds to notice that things and beings exist.” Members of the expert class seldom notice.