The promises and perils of predictive politics

Rachel Friedman’s Probable Justice and Jeffrey Friedman’s Power without Knowledge explore the promises and pitfalls of the application of predictive tools to the solution of social and political problems. Rachel Friedman argues that a fundamental duality in philosophical interpretations of probability allowed social insurance schemes to successfully accommodate two rival visions of liberal justice over the centuries. But in focusing on ideas around probability, she misses the limitations of the experts who put these ideas into practice and threatened to undermine them in the process. Jeffrey Friedman, by contrast, is centrally concerned with the limitations of experts. While he shows how these undermine one rather narrow conception of technocratic legitimacy, he avoids examining their implications for democratic legitimacy understood more broadly.