So, too, have the increasingly complex institutional arrangements that give power to experts in areas – defence, finance, environment, health – where technical knowledge is assumed to be required.
Where technical questions are difficult, particularly on health care costs, reformers have advocated demonstration projects that can be tested over time.
Envy may be a sin in some books, but it is a powerful driving force in Silicon Valley, where technical achievements are admired but financial payoffs are the ultimate form of recognition.
In Harbin, where technical expertise is limited and most patients are poor, transplants were never an option -- so doctors have always used arsenic, and arsenic alone, to treat A.P. L. They claim that 80to90percentent are cured.
But the Greens' spokeswoman on higher education, Lee Rhiannon, said the Coalition wanted "to turn the clock back to the discredited training policies of last century where technical education was designed purely to meet the employment needs of favoured industries".
Many high-paying jobs in the future economy are expected to be in fields where technical expertise is valued, and, appealingly for fiscal conservatives, the expertise could be taught without the inconvenient cost of a liberal-arts curriculum.
Writing lab reports, giving academic presentations and conducting six-month literature reviews can be surprisingly unhelpful in a world where technical knowledge has to be assimilated quickly and presented simply to a wide audience.
"C.E.O.'s in the food industry are typically not technical guys, and they're uncomfortable going to meetings where technical people talk in technical terms about technical things," Behnke said.
In countries where technical or vocational education forms an important part of secondary school provision, there have sometimes been specialist institutions for the training of teachers for this work.
The stockbrokers have generally said the problems were caused by Nasdaq, where technical issues delayed the start of trading by 30 minutes and mishandled large numbers of orders to execute or cancel shares.
The culture is a meritocracy where technical expertise is valued.
