How to be an expert in confusing times: lessons from the Office of Budget Responsibility

In an era defined by major political and economic shocks and ruptures, ranging from the 2008 global financial crisis through Brexit and the COVID pandemic, how do the bureaucrats tasked with the job of assessing the health of the economy and predicting its likely direction do their job? Or, to put it in the more prosaic terms of this paper’s title, what does it mean to be an expert in confusing times? In this short analysis, I focus on three key insights from Ben Clift’s book into the nature of technocratic expertise: its messiness, its concreteness and its limits. All three insights are interconnected, and together, they provide us with a much richer appreciation for the politics of economic expertise. At the same time, I suggest that the final insight—into the limits of technocratic forms of knowledge and of the knowability of the economy more generally—has broader implications than Clift’s book currently recognises. I conclude by reflecting on some of the political dilemmas that these limits pose in an era of anti-expert populism, as political institutions seek to balance the need for expert authority with their responsibility for democratic accountability.