On "Gatekeeping": A Few Thoughts

It seems that one hears the term "gatekeeping" used a very great deal these days. The term refers to the control of access to something--not least to the practice of some activity, or dialogue about some subject. As a practical matter this sees experts assert their domination over some area of life--and exclude others from participating in it--typically in the name of the public good, but not uncomplicatedly so, precisely because experts, and certainly those experts we call "professionals," are hardly immune to pursuing their self-interest in ways that do not necessarily align with that of society as a whole. Like every other group in any way powerful or privileged they are unavoidably concerned with preserving their power and privileges, and upholding the broader status quo in which that power and those privileges make them invested, with the result that many look on gatekeeping with skepticism and resentment, think there is far more of it about than there needs to be, and regard society as suffering as a result.

It is that "more of it than there needs to be" that interests me at the moment. Specifically it seems to me safe to say that the gatekeeping of participation in some field is easier to justify when that field has a strong claim to having its own, distinct body of technical knowledge whose indispensability to understanding and practice has been proven, and which an outsider to the field is very unlikely to possess.

To cite an admittedly easy example consider the practice of medical surgery. One can point to a body of proven, indispensable technical knowledge here that an outsider is unlikely to have. After all, if many people are dissatisfied with the state of medical knowledge, and there is in fact an old tradition of "medical nihilism" to which even doctors themselves have not been insusceptible, few would go so far as to say that doctors really know nothing and have no ability to help in any situation--all as few would deny that one is extremely unlikely to become even a minimally competent surgeon outside a formal medical training. The result is that for all the imperfections of the practice of medicine as we know it, and the associated gatekeeping, few really desire a situation in which anyone can legally hang up a shingle and offer their services as a surgeon. Rather those dissatisfied with the system by which people become licensed surgeons (thinking, for example, that it keeps the supply of practitioners down in the interest of protecting their privileges and their incomes) desire the system's reform, not the elimination of any such system altogether.

By contrast, consider the field of economics. It is much harder to claim for economics than for surgery its own distinct body of proven and indispensable technical knowledge. Many, in fact, question the legitimacy of the process by which what we once called "political economy," a field that acknowledged that economic life and its study is, in fact, political, and so bound up with societal structures, power, choice, into the "economics" of today with its near-hard science claims (indeed, its notorious "physics envy"). Economics simply not so isolatable, nor so objective, a matter, what the field has for orthodoxy is a far cry from the orthodoxy of the natural sciences with regard to coherence, theoretical rigor, or demonstrated usefulness, as shown by just how much contention there is among economists at the level of theory--and the consistent failure of policy rooted in orthodox economic ideas to deliver positive result, such that even some of the most prominent economists in the history of that orthodoxy have confessed to the limits of their theories' utility (Alfred Marshall, for example, remarking in his masterwork itself that one "is likely to be a better economist if he trusts to his common sense, and practical instincts, than if he professes to study the theory of value and is resolved to find it easy"), while those insistent on defending the value of orthodox theory, faced with the dissonance, often go so far as to embrace a pointedly anti-empirical epistemology in favor of other bases for judgment (like "praxeology"). The result is that we have far less assurance that a professional economist "knows what they are talking about." At the same time, given that it is far easier to pick up a knowledge of economics than of surgery outside the formal channels--anyone who can read a book and understand it, and cope with algebra, and puts the hours into doing that, can learn an awful lot here, and perhaps be more likely to consider much that the professional would dismiss contemptuously on the basis of sheer prejudice--we also have far less assurance that the person who is not a professional economist does not "know what they are talking about." And indeed it has been common to argue that the way in which professional economists present their field to the world as if it had a well-established body of rigorous technical knowledge requiring deference from society at large has simply been a matter of pushing market fundamentalism as cover for the economic policies desired by the privileged, to everyone else's cost--a priestly and dogmatic justification of the ways of Capital to Man that does the job rather less well than malt can.