{"id":165809,"date":"2025-12-28T08:01:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T16:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=165809"},"modified":"2025-12-28T08:43:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T16:43:11","slug":"experts-need-power-for-your-own-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=165809","title":{"rendered":"Experts Need More Power For Your Own Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

Randall Collins writes in his 1979 book, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A better explanation of professionals\u2019 altruistic codes of ethics is that they are defenses against the potential distrust of their clients. An occupation that monopolizes an important skill and reserves the right to judge its success or failure can provoke considerable antipathy among those who depend on it. When the doctor or the lawyer is called in, the client is usually helpless and distraught. Moreover, the outcome is often in doubt, even with the best of skilled performance; the disease may be incurable, the case may be unwinnable. In order to protect themselves against the anger of unsatisfied clients (or their surviving relatives), the occupational groups profess strict standards and enforce them against practitioners who bring the entire group into disrepute. As Zilboorg (1941) puts it, it was the public who created the Hippocratic Oath rather than the doctors themselves. There is great variation in how much the self-interest of professionals requires them to enforce their code of ethics and with what emphases. Codes of ethics among lawyers and doctors serve quite well to reinforce a restrictive club based on genteel manners, to prevent competition, and thereby to keep fees high. The introduction of stringent ethical standards among professionals has always resulted in an improvement of their economic and social position and a restriction of access to their ranks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The books argues that “altruistic codes of ethics” are actually strategic defenses. Sociologists analyze this in two main ways:<\/p>\n

One. Professionals often deal with high-stakes, uncertain outcomes (death in surgery, loss in court). If a doctor fails, the family might blame the profession of medicine. By strictly punishing the “bad apples” via a code of ethics, the profession says, “It wasn’t medicine that failed; it was this specific bad doctor.” This preserves the public’s faith in the group.<\/p>\n

Two. Sociologist Magali Sarfatti Larson argues that professions strike a “regulatory bargain” with the state. They say: “Let us regulate ourselves and charge high fees, and in exchange, we promise to put the client’s interest first (altruism).” If they stopped professing altruism, the state might step in and regulate them like any other business, destroying their autonomy.<\/p>\n

To understand why this view is significant, it helps to look at what it replaced.<\/p>\n

The Old View (Functionalism): Early sociologists (like \u00c9mile Durkheim and Talcott Parsons) believed professions were genuinely altruistic. They thought doctors had to have a code of ethics because clients were vulnerable and couldn’t judge the quality of care themselves.<\/p>\n

The “Cynical” View (Conflict Theory) was popularized in the 1960s\/70s by theorists like Randall Collins and Harold Wilensky. They argue that the “vulnerability” of the client is exactly what the professional exploits to maintain power.<\/p>\n

Do experts actually do this? Yes. While individual doctors or lawyers may be personally altruistic, the organizations that represent them often act to restrict trade and protect the group.<\/p>\n

Restricting Supply: Medical associations have historically lobbied to limit the number of medical school spots or residency slots to prevent an “oversupply” of doctors, which would lower salaries.<\/p>\n

Defining “Quacks”: Professional bodies aggressively litigate against competitors (like nurse practitioners, or alternative healers) to maintain a monopoly on the “official” skill set.<\/p>\n

This book is not a fringe opinion; it is a standard sociological critique of professionalism. It reframes “ethics” not as moral goodness, but as a necessary shield that allows a privileged group to maintain a monopoly in a high-risk market.<\/p>\n

Because engineering works so well, engineers are easier to control. This remains the engineer’s greatest professional weakness.<\/p>\n

The “Black Box” vs. The Transparent Output: You may not understand the code a software engineer writes, but you know instantly if the app crashes. Because the result is measurable, the worker is accountable.<\/p>\n

Comparison to Medicine\/Law: If a patient dies, the doctor says, “We did everything we could; the disease was too strong.” If a lawsuit is lost, the lawyer says, “The judge was biased; the law is complex.” These professions have successfully convinced society that the process matters more than the outcome. Engineers have not achieved this; they are judged almost exclusively on outcomes.<\/p>\n

Engineers lack the “high emotional stress” that grants doctors and lawyers their priestly aura.<\/p>\n

Doctors intervene when you are dying; lawyers intervene when you are about to lose your freedom or fortune. These are moments of high vulnerability, which creates a psychological need to submit to the expert\u2019s authority.<\/p>\n

Engineers typically intervene to make things faster, stronger, or more efficient. While crucial, this rarely triggers the deep, existential anxiety that allows a profession to claim “moral” authority. You rarely see an engineer described as “god-like” in the same way a neurosurgeon might be.<\/p>\n

The distinction that engineers do “productive labor” (making things) while lawyers\/doctors do “political labor” (managing reputation and social order) explains why engineers are often subordinate in corporate hierarchies.<\/p>\n

In many companies, engineers reach a salary ceiling unless they switch to management. Why? Because management is political labor. The ability to negotiate, persuade, and manipulate belief (like a lawyer) is often valued higher in the c-suite than the ability to build the product.<\/p>\n

Engineers deal with “uncontroversial” tasks and lack “mystification.” This is changing rapidly with Artificial Intelligence and Big Tech.<\/p>\n

The New High Priests: AI and algorithms are becoming so complex that they are becoming “mystified.” We now hear people talk about “The Algorithm” with the same superstitious awe they used to reserve for the law or medicine.<\/p>\n

We are witnessing the birth of a new “clerical” class within engineering.<\/p>\n

For the last century, engineers were the “secular” workers of society\u2014transparent, reliable, and subservient. But the rise of Artificial Intelligence (specifically Large Language Models and deep learning) allows a specific subset of engineers to break the “reliability trap” and acquire the “mystification” previously reserved for doctors and lawyers.<\/p>\n

Here is how the “Mystification of AI” is changing the sociological status of the engineer.<\/p>\n

Engineers are weak because their work is transparent: either the bridge falls down, or it doesn’t. However, modern AI engineers have created a product they do not fully understand. We often hear top AI researchers admit, “We don’t know exactly how the model learned that” or “We can’t predict when it will hallucinate.”<\/p>\n

Engineering is no longer “uncontroversial.” Content moderation algorithms, data privacy, and AI bias are now central political issues. As engineering becomes more political, engineers (or at least their leaders, like Sam Altman or Elon Musk) are acquiring “moral impressiveness” and “political power.”<\/p>\n

This “interpretability crisis” is a massive sociological asset for the profession. It introduces indeterminacy.<\/p>\n

The Medical Analogy: Just as a doctor cannot guarantee a cure because the human body is complex and mysterious, the AI engineer can now say they cannot guarantee safety because the “neural net is complex and mysterious.”<\/p>\n

The Result: This lack of total reliability protects them. It shifts their work from “productive labor” (guaranteed output) to “practice” (managing uncertainty).<\/p>\n

Doctors gain power from “situations of high emotional stress” (death\/disease). Traditional software engineering (making a spreadsheet run faster) lacked this drama.<\/p>\n

The new narrative around AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) injects maximum emotional stress into the field. When tech leaders talk about “existential risk,” “human extinction,” or “superintelligence,” they are generating the Ritual Impressiveness required for a dominant group.<\/p>\n

The New Priests: Figures like Sam Altman or Dario Amodei are not just selling products; they are managing a “force of nature.” This allows them to speak with moral authority rather than just technical competence.<\/p>\n

Shifting the Focus: The conversation moves from “does this code work?” (a technical question) to “will this code end humanity?” (a theological\/political question).<\/p>\n

The “AI Safety” movement is a textbook example of how a profession uses ethics to achieve social closure.<\/p>\n

Recall the text’s argument: \u201cA better explanation of professionals\u2019 altruistic codes of ethics is that they are defenses against the potential distrust of their clients.\u201d<\/p>\n

“AI Safety” functions similarly to the Hippocratic Oath:<\/p>\n

By professing extreme caution and “aligning” AI with human values, these companies protect themselves from public anger when the AI inevitably makes mistakes.<\/p>\n

By claiming that AI is “dangerous” and requires “highly specific safety protocols” (which only they possess), they create a barrier to entry. This justifies heavy regulation that keeps smaller competitors out, effectively closing the status group to a small elite of “high priests” who can afford the compliance costs.<\/p>\n

We are seeing a split in the engineering profession.<\/p>\n

The “Secular” Engineer: The web developer or civil engineer is still stuck in the “reliability trap.” They are judged on whether their work functions.<\/p>\n

The “Clerical” Engineer: The AI researcher deals in “black boxes,” manages existential dread, and performs political labor. They are becoming the new doctors\u2014unaccountable for specific failures because they are guardians of a mysterious, high-stakes power.<\/p>\n

The irony described in the book is accurate: competence is a professional liability. When engineers solve problems definitively, they render themselves servants to the solution. Because lawyers and doctors manage unsolvable human ambiguity, they remain masters of the situation.<\/p>\n

Randall Collins wrote in his 1979 book: <\/p>\n

Most American government activity toward business has consisted of granting various rights for private self-regulation and appropriation of opportunities. On the local level, this takes the form of granting licenses and franchises to operate liquor stores or taverns, legal, medical and quasi-medical services, repair services, construction, crafts, insurance, real estate brokerages, banks, and other financial institutions. Although much of this has not been investigated in detail, we can surmise from studies of professions that the rhetoric of \u201cprotecting the public interest\u201d that has justified this regulatory activity is mainly a dissimulative ideology, and that the activity serves the economic interests of the groups involved. For the \u201cregulated\u201d group (which usually is delegated the power of self-regulation by its most formally organized sector), this means monopolization of a particular area of business, reduction of competition, and often a form of price fixing. For the politicians who pass such legislation, there are payoffs in the form of having created an area of patronage under their disposal, often involving quasi-legal or illegal contributions (or at least political support) to procure licenses. Insofar as such regulative activities are sponsored more heavily by liberal politicians, it seems primarily because these are the types of small monopolies that can be sought by the ethnic minorities they represent.The same activities may be seen on a grander scale at the federal level: not only the licensing of radio and television stations, airlines, drug sales (usually under prodding from interested medical lobbies), and international trade, but especially indirect protection of favored industries (through taxation and tariffs) and direct protection in the form of government purchases (in military expenditures, in \u201cforeign aid\u201d purchased from American producers, and in price supports for large agricultural businesses). The rhetoric of \u201cpublic interest\u201d involved in such regulatory activities does not mirror the actual pattern of monopolization, patronage bargaining, and market controls involved.<\/p>\n

From a more sociological viewpoint, however, there is a certain appropriateness in this terminology. It is no accident that professions, the most privileged and monopolistic of occupations, should define themselves in altruistic terms, and that at least a certain aspect of this should be convincing. For moral categories refer to the preeminence of the community over the individual, and professions are above all occupational communities. Their ideology reflects reality in the sense that individual practitioners are supposed to subordinate all self-seeking that conflicts with the general interests of other practitioners. Since we commonly miss the difference between private communities and the larger community of the whole populace, it is easy for the rhetoric of altruistic dedication to the former to slide over into an appearance of altruism toward the latter. The same conceptual trick is played by the rhetoric of justifying governmental regulation, and in a double sense. Monopolies are generally given to groups rather than to individuals; thus the very fact that it is the government\u2014which seems to represent the entire community\u2014that grants the monopoly, seems to indicate that the whole population is acting to enforce altruistic standards on one of its parts. But the governments of America do not represent the community as a whole; rather they represent the most mobilized interest communities within it, and the political representatives bargain among themselves to transfer certain governmental powers to private groups to make their private community structure even stronger. The ongoing process of reform in America, as different private groups enter the bargaining, only serves to make private property interests ever more strongly entrenched. American capitalism permeates not only the upper reaches of the corporate economy, but much of the occupational structure as well.<\/p>\n

* White Protestants tend to be disproportionately in the professions and in entrepreneurial businesses, Catholics heavily in government and bureaucracy generally. Particular craft unions have their own ethnic stamp and set their boundaries against ethnic outsiders (Greer, 1959). Blacks are disproportionately in lower-working-class positions and in specialized sectors of the white-collar world, especially government employment.<\/p>\n

* …education is part of a system of cultural stratification and that the reason most students are in school is that they (or their parents on their behalf) want a decent job. This means that the reasons for going to school are extraneous to whatever goes on in the classroom. Reformers expecting that intellectual curiosity can be rearoused by curricular reforms or by changes in the school authority structure were projecting their own intellectual interests onto a mass of students for whom education is merely a means to a nonintellectual end. This even applies to radical proposals like that of Illich that schools should be taken completely out of the classroom and into factories, offices, shipyards, or wherever else students want to learn. This overlooks the fact that most skills are\u2014or can be\u2014learned on the job…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This analysis from 1979 remains strikingly accurate today, though the specific demographic categories have shifted slightly.<\/p>\n

The core of Collins\u2019s argument is Status Closure: social groups use government regulation and “ethics” to create monopolies (closure) that protect their income. In 2025, this dynamic has not only persisted; it has expanded into new sectors.<\/p>\n

Here is the 1979 text applied to the present moment in the USA.<\/p>\n

1. Government Regulation as “Private Monopolization”<\/p>\n

Collins’s Claim: Regulations (licenses, franchises) are not for “public safety” but are economic shields for the practitioners. 2025 Status: Exploded. The most significant change since 1979 is the massive expansion of this “monopolization” downward into lower-income trade work.<\/p>\n

The Data: In the 1950s, only about 5% of American workers required a license to work. Today, that number is over 22%.<\/p>\n

Modern Examples: You now often need a government license to braid hair, arrange flowers (in Louisiana), or work as a travel guide.<\/p>\n

The Mechanism: Just as Collins predicted, these laws are almost always lobbied for by existing practitioners (the “guild”) to keep out competitors and keep prices high, rather than by consumers demanding safety.<\/p>\n

2. Ethnic Stratification in Employment<\/p>\n

Collins’s Claim (1979):<\/p>\n

White Protestants: Professions\/Business<\/p>\n

Catholics: Government\/Bureaucracy<\/p>\n

Blacks: Lower-working class & Government employment<\/p>\n

2025 Status: Partially Shifted, Partially Entrenched. The “Catholic” distinction has largely faded as Catholics assimilated into the general white mainstream. However, the data for Black Americans confirms Collins’s theory that marginalized groups use government employment as a protected enclave against private sector discrimination.<\/p>\n

Statistics (2024-2025):<\/p>\n

Black Employment in Government: The public sector remains the single most important source of middle-class stability for Black families.<\/p>\n

Federal Workforce: Black Americans make up approx. 18.2% of the federal workforce, compared to only 12.6% of the general population.<\/p>\n

Wage Gap: In the private sector, the wealth gap is massive (White households hold ~$10 for every $1 Black household). In the public sector, that gap shrinks to ~$2 to $1.<\/p>\n

The Professions (Law\/Medicine): These remain heavily dominated by Whites and, increasingly, Asians (a new “model minority” status group in Collins’s terms), while Black representation remains stagnant.<\/p>\n

Lawyers: White people are 64% of lawyers (vs. 60% of workforce). Black lawyers are only 4.9%, despite being ~13% of the population.<\/p>\n

The “Closure”: The bar exam and expensive law degrees continue to function exactly as Collins described\u2014as barriers that filter out those without generational capital.<\/p>\n

3. “Patronage” and the “Public Interest” Disguise<\/p>\n

Collins’s Claim: Politicians create “small monopolies” for ethnic minorities they represent, disguising it as reform. 2025 Status: Visible in “Equity” Licensing. We see this clearly in the Cannabis Industry.<\/p>\n

The “Patronage”: When states legalized marijuana, they created “Social Equity” licenses reserved specifically for minority applicants harmed by the War on Drugs.<\/p>\n

The Reality: As Collins would predict, this became a bureaucratic nightmare of patronage. In states like Illinois and California, “equity” licensing created a bottleneck where political connections often mattered more than business viability, and the complex regulations (high fees, zoning) ended up favoring wealthy corporate backers who “partnered” with minority applicants. The “moral” rhetoric of equity masked a fierce struggle for market monopoly.<\/p>\n

4. Education as “Cultural Stratification”<\/p>\n

Collins’s Claim: School is not for learning skills; it is for acquiring the cultural “stamp” needed for a job. 2025 Status: Peak “Credential Inflation.”<\/p>\n

Degree Inflation: Millions of jobs that required only a high school diploma in 1979 (e.g., executive assistants, construction managers) now require a Bachelor’s degree. The skills for these jobs haven’t changed; the barrier to entry was simply raised to filter the applicant pool.<\/p>\n

The “Bootcamp” Anomaly: We are seeing a slight crack in this wall. Tech “bootcamps” (learning coding in 3 months) proved you could learn the skills without the cultural stamp of a degree. However, in the recent tech downturn, companies have reverted to demanding Computer Science degrees\u2014proving Collins right again. When the market gets tight, the “status group” (degree holders) tightens the rules to protect their own.<\/p>\n

Collins’s cynical view is perhaps even more relevant now because the “regulator” class has grown. The “Irony” he mentions\u2014that liberals push for regulations that ultimately solidify corporate or guild monopolies\u2014is the defining feature of the modern American administrative state that Trump is trying to dismantle in favor of more opportunity for those without credentials.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Randall Collins writes in his 1979 book, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification: A better explanation of professionals\u2019 altruistic codes of ethics is that they are defenses against the potential distrust of their clients. An occupation … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[88],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-165809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sociology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t