“Do not simply accept at face value what the people at the top of the institutional hierarchies are saying.”

From a story, “The  Pundits Who Get It Wrong—and Pay No Price,” by Gregg Easterbrook in the 50th anniversary issue of the Washington Monthly:

What lessons can be drawn from the cranky, underfunded Washington Monthly saying the opposite of what the best minds in Washington were proclaiming—and then turning out to be right?

One lesson is the importance of the core insight of founding editor Charlie Peters: Do not simply accept at face value what the people at the top of the institutional hierarchies are saying; go out and talk to those on the front lines who are engaged in the actual work of the institution. They typically know more than their bosses.

Another lesson is that the “experts” who turn out to be wrong rarely are called to account. For example, one of the voices crying “energy crisis” was the physicist and future Harvard faculty member John Holdren, who in 1971 predicted that oil and natural gas supplies “may be tapped within the lifetimes of many in the present population.” This prediction did not even get into the general zone of accurate.

Yet Holdren went on to be White House science adviser for President Barack Obama. The fact that he was wrong on such a basic level was not held against him, because Holdren said what the environmental lobby wanted to hear (shut down industry!) and the Democratic Party wanted to hear (more regulations!). Donald Trump advisers who are denying climate change will be shown to be just as far off as Holdren was. But they are using the same playbook, saying what the president and his base want to hear.