It’s not exactly breaking news that experts are no longer held in high regard. Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency certainly was fueled by voters who believe that expert opinion has little claim to deference. But they are not by any means the only Americans convinced that uninformed views are every bit as valid as those held by people who have specialized knowledge. 

 This is not entirely new. Over the years, there have always been people sure that they could manage the Red Sox better or edit the newspaper more skillfully than the incumbents. (Candidly, once in a while they have been right.) And in many realms of life, expertise still holds sway. People generally prefer to have their surgery performed by expert surgeons, their complicated car repairs executed by knowledgeable mechanics, and their criminal defense undertaken by learned and zealous lawyers.

But in social science and public policy, and other areas of knowledge that touch upon them, the distinction between expert and lay opinion no longer carries much weight with many people. (Climate change is but one outstanding example.)

Tom Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, has lamented this situation in a provocative essay and new book. He writes, “I fear we are witnessing the ‘death of expertise’: a Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and laymen, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers . . . By this, I do not mean the death of actual expertise, the knowledge of specific things that sets some people apart from others in various areas. . . . Rather, what I fear has died is any acknowledgement of expertise as anything that should alter our thoughts or change the way we live.”

Certainly, as Nichols readily acknowledges, experts are sometimes wrong, occasionally with catastrophic consequences. (Thalidomide and the Challenger explosion are examples he cites.) But the chances of experts being right are pretty good, and we ignore them at our peril. President Trump, for example, is certainly of the expert-skeptic school when it comes to public affairs, and the failure of the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare demonstrates the limits of his approach. The historian Michael Beschloss made the case in devastating fashion in The New York Times following the collapse of the Republican health care bill this spring by contrasting the course pursued by Trump with that followed by Lyndon Johnson in shepherding Medicare into law in 1965. The former had little detailed knowledge of what was in his bill, while the latter mastered the detail. Trump tried to ram the bill through Congress on the fast track, while Johnson patiently orchestrated his legislation through Congress. Trump didn’t know much about the legislators or the legislative process, while Johnson was intimately acquainted with both.

Nichols and other commentators have laid the decline and fall of expertise mostly at the doorstep of the internet and social media, on whose unmediated platforms the rankest ignorance has equal footing with the most informed thinking. There is no doubt a lot to this, but we wonder if that’s all. A marker pointing in a somewhat different direction can perhaps be discerned in new work, described recently in The New Yorker, by Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, whose earlier research found that mortality has been rising for middle-aged white Americans since the early 1990s while it has been declining for virtually all other demographic groups in all developed countries. They attributed this largely to “deaths of despair” induced by suicide, drugs and alcohol.

In a subsequent attempt to trace the origins of this despair, the economists have found a decline in something called “returns to experience.” This refers to the economic rewards workers normally reap as they age, gain more experience and presumably become more efficient at whatever they do, whether it’s architecture or parts assembly. It’s a notion of worker value embodied in many union contracts. But as skilled working-class labor has declined over time, the link between experience and economic reward has grown weaker. Case and Deaton hypothesize that there might be a connection between declining returns to experience, which leads to people dropping out of the workforce, and deaths from despair.

Their work also leads us to wonder whether the workplace experience is itself undermining the value assigned to expertise. If a worker who has spent years learning and refining the skills needed to do his job suddenly finds that a robot is replacing him, or that a hedge-fund manager who knows nothing about his job has determined that it can be performed just as well by a low-paid beginner, or that the boss is promoting ahead of him an inexperienced young person who is at home with digital technology, it would be a natural conclusion to draw that expertise doesn’t really matter in today’s world. It’s certainly a powerful, if incorrect, conclusion to draw.