Alan Johnson is right: the boss should make the decisions; the experts should advise

7 November 2009

Matthew Parris offers Another Voice

I have an independent financial adviser. I can recommend him. He gives me expert advice. But I decide, and sometimes I disagree. Nobody would question either the propriety or the commonplace nature of this arrangement.

Recently we were discussing what to do with my maturing pension fund. His suggestions looked shrewd but were predicated on a measure of resumed economic growth and the persistence for some years of low interest rates.

His assessment was well-informed and would be widely shared. But I just have this hunch that all is not well; that Western economies including our own are rather weakly placed in the grand global scheme of things; that the respite bought by pumping money into the system will have to be paid for; that the consequence might be a stunting of recovery, or inflation, or both, followed by higher interest rates again; and that it could happen within three years. This is probably total balls, but it remains my hunch and I can’t (or won’t) discount it.

So having read my financial adviser’s investment recommendations, I asked if he might revise them somewhat in the direction of the scenario I’ve outlined. He said politely that he thought my fears about interest rates were misplaced, but that I was boss and he’d offer me an adjusted portfolio. In the end we’ve resolved to split the difference. My adviser feels under no pressure to resign, nor I to dismiss him. I’m going public, here, on this page, with my thoughts and he would be welcome to go public with his — including his opinion of my judgment, which is that my judgment is wrong.

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Derek Lambert

November 5th, 2009 7:36pm Report this comment

Having at first sided with Professor Nutt, I rapidly came to realise that I was with Alan Johnson. He is charged with talking the decision, right or wrong. I happen to think his political instincts are spot on. Intellectual fascism is unattractive, and that is what Nutt and his colleagues evince. The other lot that do this are the anthropomorphic warming climate-change proponents who equate those who question them with holocaust deniers. Not attractive, not scientific.

Noa Zrk

November 5th, 2009 10:07pm Report this comment

Subject to the most stringent caveats Professor Nutt's advice may be correct about the relative effects of drugs. Alan Johnson may be incorrect in his policy on drugs. However he is answerable for it at the next election. Nutt is not. Ultimately he argues, wrongly, for the unelected and unchallengeable supremacy of the 'expert'.

Ben Lovell

November 11th, 2009 9:30pm Report this comment

Being an unpaid advisor to the government, who has his own (drug research) job to do, it was certainly within Nutt's remit to publish a scientific paper on the drugs in question. He had no obligation to tow the party line, especially as it was explicit that the value judgements he was providing were his own personal opinions.

Bearing that in mind, Johnson's decision to sack Nutt appears as a rash overreaction to Nutt saying something that wasn't politically acceptable. His position is only superficially similar to your financial advisor - it is as if you were to be paying your financial advisor nothing for his advice, and then sacking him when he publishes a paper disagreeing with your theory of high inflation.

The high profile papers supporting following the experts are pointing out that the government are not only throwing out the advice on policy given by the advisors, but the positive, falsifiable statements given as the consensus of the entire scientific community.

Your extrapolation of experts culture is completely uncalled for, considering the peer reviewed and scientific nature of the committee in question. They provide policies, and facts. The facts can NOT be disregarded because they are inconvenient, and the experts should NOT be disregarded because of some silly extrapolation on the culture of experts.

Nutt doesn't hold an unchallengeable position at all, every fact he comes out with is _strictly_ peer reviewed and published via the scientific method, just like his recent paper that he got sacked over! This is how it should be, and this is not undemocratic, nor is it totalitarian - it is rational, and scientific. Science would not work in a totalitarian environment! But then again, neither does democracy.

Alan Johnson was wrong to sack an advisor over a difference of opinion when the said advisor was not giving the opinion as political advice. He is right to be able to disregard policy matters, but not FACTUAL matters.

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