this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2022
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The German economics minister Robert Habeck has a degree in Philosophy. No wonder he doesn't understand the complex world of energy and natural resources.
People also tend to underestimate complexity in domains they have no experience in. You often see this in tech sector where techbros try to reinvent things without realizing why existing processes are in place. Crypto is a perfect example of this. They threw out everything that's been learned about regulation and fraud prevention creating a wild west market.
It's pretty clear that Habeck took a similarly cavalier approach to ensuring energy security in Germany.
It's not just Habeck, but a Germany-wide problem. Our politicians are career politicians with very little practical or useful knowledge. For example our health minister during most of the pandemic studied political science and law, not medicine or anything healthcare related.
Yup, and I'd venture that this is a symptom of an underlying problem with western style parliamentary democracies. We conflate identifying problems with proposing solutions. So, politicians come up with harebrained schemes and then compete with each other to convince the public of which of these schemes to go along with.
Neither the politicians nor the public are qualified to decide whether these proposals make sense or whether they can work in practice. Experts are not part of the decision making process in this system.
A sane process would be to vote on perceived problems that people have, then create expert groups to propose solutions to these problems along with pros and cons for each solution. Then have a second vote on what solution most people prefer. Once that's done there needs to be a commitment to implementing this solution.