ArticlePublic choice2023
Public health and expert failure.
Article in Public choice, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bespoke science: the use of ad hoc scientific advisory committees in the Covid-19 pandemic.Public choice · 2025Article
- The impact of public leadership on collaborative administration and public health delivery.BMC health services research · 2024Article
- Epidemic disease and the state: Is there a tradeoff between public health and liberty?Public choice · 2023Article
- The political economy of public health.Public choice · 2023Article
- The pox of politics: Troesken's tradeoff reexamined.Public choice · 2023Article
- COVID-19, Anti-Intellectualism, and Health Communication: Assessing the Chinese Social Media Platform Sina Weibo.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The political cost of sanctions: Evidence from COVID-19.Health policy (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2022Article
- COVID-19 and science advice on the 'Grand Stage': the metadata and linguistic choices in a scientific advisory groups' meeting minutes.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In a modern democracy, a public health system includes mechanisms for the provision of expert scientific advice to elected officials. The decisions of elected officials generally will be degraded by expert failure, that is, the provision of bad advice. The theory of expert failure suggests that competition among experts generally is the best safeguard against expert failure. Monopoly power of experts increases the chance of expert failure. The risk of expert failure also is greater when scientific advice is provided by only one or a few disciplines. A national government can simulate a competitive market for expert advice by structuring the scientific advice it receives to ensure the production of multiple perspectives from multiple disciplines. I apply these general principles to the United Kingdom's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.