The expertise of experts

According to experts, you should trust experts with your savings and investments. In fact, experts think that you should trust experts with just about everything. When I do a Google search for the phrase 'according to experts,' I get about 83 lakh results. That looks like a lot of faith being placed on experts, at least by the sort of people who write things that appear on the web. And yet, we are often accused of being in a 'post-expert' time, when people's faith in expertise is said to be waning. Are 'experts' actually experts? A few days back, I read a book by the 'undercover economist' Tim Harford where he recounts the story of a researcher who analysed how well experts could predict the course of international politics. This was in 1984 when the cold war was entering its decisive phase. Philip Tetlock was a