aei.org/articles/a-review-essay-about-knowledge-and-decisions/
The book is not an easy read, and the linked review is not that easy either. I believe it is impossible to really summarise these topics and the relationship between them because they are both deep and VERY wide!
In this age of Covid, I was especially struck by this prophetic statement near the end of the review:
What makes this tale particularly unsettling to me is that the modern regulatory state also has supplied pathways to public influence for specialists in normally obscure scientific disciplines. One need only recall the public role of cytologists, pathologists, and geneticists, all of them claiming the halo of scientific objectivity and concern for public safety, in the debates on Love Canal, nitrates, saccharin, aspartame, and malathion (the Medfly spray).
In 1982, even "Anthropogenic Global Warming", now rebranded as "Climate Change" to cover ALL bases, had not entered the fetid relationship of pseudoscience, bureaucracy, political mass media, etc.
I'd recommend at least trying to make it through the linked review.
The VERY inadequate moose summary is that the ever increasing power of intellectuals who have never done anything in the real world, wielded by bureaucracy, aided abetted by global media and big business, causes the feedback mechanisms of profit/loss and being voted out of office to be effectively suffocated.
While this book is great, "A Conflict of Visions" is a much more reachable way to get to essentially the same conclusions.
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