Reflecting on Robert McNamara

Marc Ambinder has a really nice post up on the significance of Robert McNamara, the Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary who died today. He writes:

John Ralston Saul, in Volatire's Bastards, makes McNamara a central character in his tale of Western governments came to rely on a cult of credentialed, jargon-y experts to make decisions that were better left to politicians. This is not a conservative critique of the elite, per se: it's merely a meditation on the limits of what humans can do, and know, and why it is dangerous to leave major decisions in the hands of people who think they can know. We've see a version of this fallacy play out among the central actors in our economic crisis: CEOs and experts, quants and traders, who created an orderly world from something fundamentally, almost irreducibly complex.

Marc's point, and what McNamara seems to have spent the end of his life grappling with, is the tension between expert decision-making and the democratic decision-making process, which may be (agonizingly) slow and sometimes irrational, but can provide an important check on folks who think they have all the answers.