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in france after world war 2 there was a reworking of part of the educational system to produce "technocrats" who would have both the academic and procedural background to be able to inform (and sometimes block) political policy choices. the reason this got started was in part because there's a body of administrative law that lays out the procedures for how bureaucracies operate. it's boring stuff, but it's more transparent in its way that you find in other places.
the existence of the administrative law made policy formation a more obviously technical matter than it appears to be in the states. the other main reason for this was the expansion of the state after world war 2, which found itself nationalizing some areas on planning grounds and others, like renault and parts of the banking sector, because of the excessive enthusiasm (ahem) that folk who ran the show during the war showed for working with the germans. so the state expanded rapidly in part as a matter of circumstance.
to qualify things: it's not that the development of technocrats enabled the french system to avoid problems--but alot of those problems derived from other features of the political system than are concerned with the technical matters of policy development and implementation.
i mention all this to echo tully's point above---there is a real problem, particularly in more social-democratic style systems, of a technical understanding of how governance works. the american system, which is mixed, a kind of weak version in which the state has long mutated in ways that basically save capitalism from itself (because capitalism generates crisis as one of its primary characteristics---and this is a matter of historical record, not open for debate) but in a context that is also characterized by a bizarre-o political aversion to the idea of government, to the idea of the state. one effect of that is that there's not really been the same kind of redirecting of the educational system to reproduce a professional labor pool for policy formation and implementation.
during period of relative contintuity/inertia this isn't necessarily such a big deal---but when you hit periods of deeper crisis that require basic rethinks that goes beyond merely tweaking arrangements already in place, the fact that the american system is subject to the continual learning curves of the politicos that run the show is a real problem.
this doesn't seem something that can be just fixed either. it'd require something like a system failure it seems to me. maybe we're on our way to one. hard to say.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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