Question
How is technocracy better than democracy when people with right skills are put up at the right place?
Answer
Politicians siphon off wealth in every political system. They are wealth extraction specialists. That is a non-issue, it is an unavoidable consequence of the principal-agent effect that is created when you have any form of indirect governance via representatives rather than direct democracy (which really cannot exist at scales larger than a dozen or so people).
As Joshua Engel says, technocracy is orthogonal to democracy. You need elements of both in effective state machinery.
By definition technocrats are dangerous because they form natural elites whose wealth cannot be taken away by force. Their wealth is inside their heads. Because of what they know, they can see and do things others cannot understand, and have vast indirect influence on everyday affairs.
Most people simply don't know how or what to think about say, nuclear technology for power.
The technocrats get to partly frame the debate in a democracy, the other part being framed by politicians. The result is a specialist-generalist dialectic. It is flawed, but is far superior to a pure generalist or pure specialist approach to thinking about esoteric things that have mundane implications.
Fortunately, most technocrats have such lousy political instincts that they badly flub things when they are given control over framing esoteric debates with human impact. So they need the politicians. When they don't have politicians to work with, they can only turn to terror and absolutism.
China is an excellent example of the dangers of a technocratic state (most of the top Party leadership appears to comprise engineers). We will probably never learn the true human cost of everything China has achieved. Since you bring up India, this is a basic China-India comparison that all Chindia and Chimerica watchers think about. A specific direct comparison is the Three Gorges dam versus the Narmada Dam. Both are large-scale hydrological projects. In one case, we didn't hear more than a few peeps from the people affected. In the other case, the opposition to the dam basically created the social justice sector in India from nothing, by using the plight of displaced small farmers and tribals as a rallying cause for all kinds of inequality.
As Joshua Engel says, technocracy is orthogonal to democracy. You need elements of both in effective state machinery.
By definition technocrats are dangerous because they form natural elites whose wealth cannot be taken away by force. Their wealth is inside their heads. Because of what they know, they can see and do things others cannot understand, and have vast indirect influence on everyday affairs.
Most people simply don't know how or what to think about say, nuclear technology for power.
The technocrats get to partly frame the debate in a democracy, the other part being framed by politicians. The result is a specialist-generalist dialectic. It is flawed, but is far superior to a pure generalist or pure specialist approach to thinking about esoteric things that have mundane implications.
Fortunately, most technocrats have such lousy political instincts that they badly flub things when they are given control over framing esoteric debates with human impact. So they need the politicians. When they don't have politicians to work with, they can only turn to terror and absolutism.
China is an excellent example of the dangers of a technocratic state (most of the top Party leadership appears to comprise engineers). We will probably never learn the true human cost of everything China has achieved. Since you bring up India, this is a basic China-India comparison that all Chindia and Chimerica watchers think about. A specific direct comparison is the Three Gorges dam versus the Narmada Dam. Both are large-scale hydrological projects. In one case, we didn't hear more than a few peeps from the people affected. In the other case, the opposition to the dam basically created the social justice sector in India from nothing, by using the plight of displaced small farmers and tribals as a rallying cause for all kinds of inequality.