Today, this old problem of citizen ignorance and its political role has been worsened by the expansion of the scale and scope of the federal government and its agencies over the last 75 years. Indeed, the complexity of the policies that federal agencies enforce and manage has made Wilson’s ideas about the necessity for government by technocratic elites a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1960, economist F. A. Hayek made this point about the Social Security program, noting that “the ordinary economist or sociologist or lawyer is today nearly as ignorant [as the layman] of the details of that complex and ever changing system.”