Friday, December 31, 2010
RE PROFESSIONS EXPERTS SPECIALISTS IN DECLINE VERTICAL MONOPOLY INTEGRATION
I want to say a word about some loosely related matters, which cross different fields, regarding cooptation of what used to be called the professions, and also cooptation of burgeoning experts within various emerging fields as well.
Recall that we wondered why the lead impresarios of certain types of human endeavors were experts, or professionals, previously even limited to a few 'learned' professions, of certain types, eg architects, doctors, accountants, scientists, lawyers?
In the century just past, these vocations were increasingly taken over by what some would call market forces, but I would call even monopoly forces.
A classic example, from classic quasi-pulp fiction, is the architect hero of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, Howard Roark.
There are few 'Howard Roarks' around nowadays; their field was coopted by the construction industry, construction companies, general contractors taking over, construction managers, vertical construction firm integration, design/build firms, architects' services usually just one small input, things like that.
I shared a house with some architect grad students at MIT back in the 70s (visions of Howard Roark); they bemoaned the process, well under way at that time even then. Frank Lloyd Wright (apparently the model for Roark) may have been almost the last, except for the few really big 'name' commercial late 20th C architects.
Very similar kinds of processes have been going on for decades now, in fields as diverse as law and medicine, once learned professions which dominated their fields by technical expertise, and meritocratic criteria up to a point, who called the shots in their areas, and policed themselves as best or as badly as they could, in a loose system of regulation.
Similarly, doctors have increasingly been coopted by drug companies and the insurance industry, which increasingly have been calling the shots both on what they prescribe, on how much they are paid for their skills, and whose constraints configure the practices more than any other single factor.
Similarly for lawyers and the insurance companies. Some lawyers even have some favored coopted medical experts in their stables, rather than rely on impartial doctors who live largely by work outside the legal forensic area. Similarly, some lawyers corruptly rely on forensic medical experts for their livelihoods.
Even liability feuds between these professions were eventually more or less largely coopted by the insurance industry, a bigger more organized hitter with governments.
Public educational and private corporate institutions increasingly dominate the directions and the conclusions of 'research', and the discoveries made, by exact and not so exact science experts in their employ or influence.
Companies, often MNCS, and other entities which control either the funding, production, or the channels of distribution, and eventually the politics, lobbyists (see eg below comment), gain control at the expense of the professions, and of other experts, especially individual practitioners, as inputs.
The business man, the executive, the banker, the insurance executive, the call the shots for the erstwhile learned professions and others.
The Casanova hand of the monopolistic market at work, concepts of profitability overwhelming all other foreign considerations.
Oddly, it has been the unfettered march of an ostensibly individualistic social and economic order which utterly overwhelmed Randian individualistic types, although we continue to pay lip service to it with the so-called entrepreneurial, or Maverick, or even 'the overconfident CEO' (outlined recently in the BU School of Management Magazine), model of the successful person.
Has it been on balance a good development for the societies in which this has happened? On the whole, I think not.
John Droz, jr., wrote a comment on DK's site, this post:
http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/2010/12/self-restraint.html
I rather liked it too, in context of this topic:
"Anyway I am a physicist and longtime environmental advocate. In my view what is happening is that real science is being diminished, and lobbyists are taking over on all levels. This is how such trivialities as wind energy have gotten so far."
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