The article doesn't mention the word "technocrat" but the wiki seems relevant even if the scientists only have modest goals of participating in government rather than grand ambitions of controlling the government from the top down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
I'm not sure it applies. You can still be well educated and greedy/egotistical and not work for your constituents.
But within elections, what else SHOULD we vote for other than merit?
What really bothered me when Obama was elected was people throwing the word "elitism" around, because he was smart, eloquent and well educated, like that was somehow a bad thing.
I sure as hell hope that the people elected are smarter than me, because I would have no idea what I was doing in office.
But I guess we'll now see what happens when you elect someone that's "just like us", except born with money.
The idea that smarter people will be better at government is a fallacy which was conclusively disproved during 20th century. Since Plato's time there was this hypothesis that philosopher kings would somehow bring utopia or at least be better than the average ruler. Alas, the experiences of the 20th century belies that assumption. Communist parties were invariably led by formidable intellectuals (e.g. Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot) but they only left utter hopelessness and destruction in their wake.
We had an 8-year experiment with a dumber person as President and that also failed pretty spectacularly. He got us involved in a war costing trillions of dollars that was in the wrong country and allowed Wall St to crater the economy. The contrast in the past 8 years with the 8 years that preceded it is pretty stark.
The way I see it, being smart is no guarantee of success. This can be especially true when those intelligent people are misguided in what they aim to achieve. History is replete with people who were very effective in pursuing misguided goals. But that doesn't mean that less-than-intelligent people are well-suited to run government. It just means that we need to choose better from among our intelligent people.
I believe you are applying a circular definition. We call people smart when we like a majority of the actions they take. Due to the unknowable causes of these "smarts", we have invented many memes to rationalize them - eloquence, colege education, street smarts, intelligence, philosophical wisdom, the list goes on.
Since we are good at hypocrisy as well as rationalization, we have left ourselves a back door for thebpeople we truly hate - he's not smart, he's lucky(or the opposite, if we are really sympathetic).
I believe you are right that "these qualities" are a "requirement", but only due to their flexible nature and our tendency to assign and strip them in order to meet our just-world view.
I remember history a bit differently, with Obama being attacked due to his lack of political qualifications - he was too young, too inexperienced. I believe it was Clinton that ran with that narrative, although I may be misremembering.
Elizabeth Warren is not a technocrat IMO. Studying Law does not give you any background in science or engineering. It does make you very good at making arguments in support of arbitrary things and bullshitting, but I'm not sure that's something we should encourage in politicians.
The problem is that some background in law is necessary when writing laws. Learning to think like a lawyer is a skill. And where a lay person will write a law that sounds sensible, the lawyer will see loopholes that can be exploited and know of contradictions in other laws.
Anyone who's worked professionally as a programmer has seen a similar effect. Non-programmers see only the success case and, perhaps, a few obvious error cases. Programmers more naturally see the edge-cases and are able to think of their users as possible adversaries. Our laws are very much like computer programs, but written in English and executed in our judicial system instead of a computer.
We don't want non-lawyers writing our laws any more than we want non-programmers writing our code. Having a politician without a legal background seems akin to a non-technical product manager. Absent some other form of expertise that's being put to use, that's usually not a good thing.
You're right that legal expertise is essential to drafting bills. But you don't need to be a lawyer--you can also hire one. Legislators have lots of expert resources available to help with drafting including the offices of legislative counsel[1] and professional staffers and committee aides.
Which is why I compared the elected official to a product manager rather than the programmer. Product owners don't have to be technical, but the best ones often are. And in the cases where a non-technical PM is the best, they're usually bringing some other form of expertise to the table.
I think scientists writing laws, assisted by the legal expertise you mentioned, would be a positive change. They have that other form of expertise. But I also take issue with the above implication that lawyers are somehow unfit to be politicians. They are, in my analogy, the technical product managers. Absent some other form of expertise, having a lawyer in that position is probably the next-best option.
