We need experts for almost everything. We need expert programmers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, writers, mechanics, and teachers. In many cases, our lives depend on experts who can perform tasks that we cannot perform for ourselves. When we experience a sharp pain in our chest, for example, many of us will place ourselves in the hands of a cardiologist, an expert. Even when we don’t absolutely need experts, we seek them anyway. We watch expert athletes, actors, musicians, and comedians. We willingly pay a premium for expertise. When our children go to college, we encourage them to focus on a highly specialized field and become experts. We spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars training and tutoring people of all ages to become experts. Th e primary source of social and economic progress in the world is the expert. Medical and nutrition experts have created improved health and longevity worldwide. Transportation experts enable people to travel with speed, comfort, and safety. Technology experts have enabled instant communications. SMEs are the primary reason that humans no longer die young on farms, in huts, lit only by candlesticks. However, as important and influential as experts are, not all of them are worthy of praise.
SMEs have brought us some of the worst catastrophes and toughest challenges in human history, like the slave trade and the Holocaust. Take, for example, Trofim Lysenko, a Ukrainian agricultural expert from the Stalin era. In the 1950s, the Chinese government chose to follow his dogma regarding agricultural practices. Immediately, food production in China dropped dramatically. Between 1958 and 1962, as many as thirty-six million Chinese citizens starved to death.
On April 26, 1986, Anatoly Stepanovich Dyatlov was the deputy chief engineer at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Contrary to the advice of at least two subordinates, he ordered the continuation of an ill-fated nuclear experiment that melted down a reactor. His actions caused the death of thousands of people, the forced relocation of 350,000 citizens, and the contamination of five million residences.
Aimé Le Médec was the captain of the SS Mont-Blanc, a cargo vessel. On December 6, 1917, the ship was fully loaded with explosives in route to France. While entering Halifax harbor in Nova Scotia, Canada, the ship collided with another vessel. The resulting blast was the largest man-made explosion to that date in history. An eleven-hundred-pound section of the ship’s anchor was thrown over two miles away. Two thousand people were killed and nearly ten thousand injured. Twelve thousand buildings were destroyed in the blast.
Angelo Mozilo was the CEO of Countrywide Financial at the epicenter of the financial industry’s subprime mortgage crisis. As cofounder of Countrywide, he engaged in aggressive lending practices and derivative selling. The company grew to become the largest mortgage lender in America and then its largest financial disaster. In 2010 he agreed to pay a settlement and receive an industry ban rather than go to trial.
Expertise, it turns out, has a way of exposing the best and the worst of human thought and ingenuity. With virtue, expertise can be a blessing to the entire human family. Used with malice or recklessness, however, expertise can be a curse.
