It's the season of the carp. It's the age of the gripe, the whine, the flounder on the welcome mat. Timothy Geithner grumps at Europeans over derivatives and blames Brits for "light touch" regulation. The Brits' cranky retort highlights American hypocrisy. Derivatives rules get postponed more times than a visit to the dentist. Jamie Dimon, reacting to uncharacteristic Federal Reserve zeal on capital, questions Ben Bernanke on whether anyone in economics has studied the effect of greater bank capital on jobs and growth. Bernanke shrugs it off with, "I can't pretend anyone really has." Can't pretend? Meanwhile, the debt ceiling approaches. Goldman, Sachs & Co., through various media proxies, argues the facts of its big short with Carl Levin's proofreaders. There are no good solutions for Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain or global warming except denial. Larry Summers pops up to support stimulus: "This is no time for fatalism or traditional political agendas." What is it, time for cynicism and half-baked schemes? Inflation edges up in China, which is like lighting a match on a hot-air balloon. The economy exhales and sags, a fat man in a hammock.

It's at times like these that one seeks the cool uplift of Walter Lippmann, once America's greatest pundit. Lippmann, who died at 85 in 1974, mastered an air of unruffled, if stiff, rationality, sort of like Martin Wolf, without charts and graphs. This was therapeutic. He witnessed so many disasters -- World War I, Versailles, the Red Scare, the Crash, Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the Vietnam War -- he needed that Olympian detachment to remain upright. In 1922 he wrote a book called "Public Opinion" that argued that the very premise of democracy -- that individuals could rule themselves effectively -- was a crock, and had been since Jeffersonian yeomen traded their farms for the bright lights. Lippmann wrote propaganda in World War I and he was a newspaperman, but he saw a public frequently gulled by both; he particularly thought papers ground out stereotyped "pictures of the world" to "the mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated individuals." This is a long way from Milton and Mill. Like Mencken (without the laughs), he saw inanity everywhere. The public lost its grip as scale and complexity exploded. His solution was typically Progressive-meets-Plato: the expert, the technocrat, the generator of "intelligence." He wanted to attach intelligence bureaus to every Cabinet department; a few years later in "The Phantom Public" he argued for government by administration. By the '30s, he got his wish: Experts were rife.

Was he right or wrong? That's unanswerable. We've arrived, despite everything, at Francis Fukuyama's diner at the end of history. And yet, despite Lippmann's unabashed elitism (which he shares with Fukuyama), he has a point. Education has hardly kept pace with globalization and technology. Despite cellphones and Google maps, the world is big and strange. We are fighting in Afghanistan. Where? We know less and less about more and more. We occupy vast, complex networks we cannot control: markets, the Internet, microwave communications. And all this while we plunge into intensifying technological democracy: mass media, the Internet, social media. We "vote" continually. We see, we hear, we experience. And the more democracy we get, the more we seem to distrust the experience and each other. The further we can see and hear, the more we realize that other folks are as feeble-minded and neurotic as we are. OK, they're worse. They're either terrorists, hackers or sexters.

Lippmann believed in experts. But what if the experts' grasp of reality is unsure? There is no technocracy so powerful, ubiquitous and mysterious as that of the economists. Nations are judged by GDP growth. Politics are shaped by economic imperatives. Economists are consulted as if they have mastered the world's inner gearing. They predict, opine, judge. They regulate and administer. They build models that resemble Lippmann's simplistic "pseudo-environments." And to the milling public, economics and economic policy remain as forbidding as molecular gastronomy. The public views "the dismal science" in its theoretical and applied aspects as brain-paralyzing; and thus they become susceptible to panaceas and false idols. And economists themselves war over fundamentals: the nature of markets; the relation between finance and growth; regulation, inequality, taxes, deficits. And so we carp, wheedle, whine and wonder: Who will save us from the experts? Was Lippmann right? Well, his critique has a kind of bracing austerity. He believed in Answers. But in politics, as in economics, there are few universal Answers. There may be only us: imperfect, limited, wayward. Lippmann, like many economists, may have fallen for his own brilliance. The world's a mess. The hammock sags. Get used to it.