[lucas_membrane]

Teddy Roosevelt, a man anxious to do good things, probably gave the idea that people who know things should control things a big boost by promoting science, public health, and reasonable regulation of businesses. This succeeded so well that it seemed like a reasonable approach to government and was extended with the founding of the Federal Reserve to manage the money, by Wilson during WWI when the government took over the economy, by Herbert Hoover when he was a leading problem solver for US presidents during the decade or so before he became president. FDR and most of his successors have continued the trend, with many obvious successes. But the unseen problem was that people felt disenfranchised by the reliance on experts, and our social system, which requires shared wisdom and a balancing of interests and powers did not have appropriate checks and balances to arrange things so that either the technical intelligentsia would somehow be self-correcting or that there would be some other intelligentsia that could check and balance.