We are living through a crisis of expertise. Trust in scientists, economists, doctors, and other specialists has declined sharply in many democracies over the past two decades. The causes are multiple and interacting: institutional failures that undermined credibility (the 2008 financial crisis, the Iraq War intelligence failure, early inconsistency on COVID-19 guidance); the democratisation of information that gave false equivalence to all viewpoints; the deliberate amplification of doubt by well-funded interests; and genuine, legitimate grievances about elite knowledge institutions that have historically excluded large parts of the population. The challenge is to distinguish legitimate scepticism from anti-intellectualism, to hold expert institutions to account without abandoning the idea that expertise matters, and to rebuild the trust that democracies need to make difficult collective decisions based on the best available evidence.

💡 Did you know? In 2016, UK politician Michael Gove famously said 'people in this country have had enough of experts.' The statement was widely condemned — but polling showed that many people agreed with the sentiment, if not the framing.