@DGRossetti
The official position in the UK is that experts aren't needed. It's official because the man that said it was elected while operating on that basis.
You're wrong about that. It is actually a quote from Michael Gove in an interview with Sky News on 3rd June 2016 and the actual quote is this when he was talking specifically about economists:-
"I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong."
He was referring to people like Christine Lagarde who was then the head of the IMF and is now the head of the ECB who claimed that voting for Brexit (never mind implementing Brexit) would immediately result in the sky falling on our heads.
Another of these experts, Andy Haldane, the Chief Economist of the BoE, has admitted that they totally got things wrong about Brexit.
Now, of course, experts are needed to refute people coming up with absolute rubbish (the equivalent of saying 2+2=5).
But when economists (these are the experts he was referring to) start hypothesising that the sky will fall on our heads the day after we vote for Brexit or also back in 2008 were saying that property was a great investment (they were also saying the same thing back in 1990 just before that crash) then you do need to stop and consider just how much reliance should be placed on their forecasts as they are, more often than not, wrong.
In other words, you could toss a coin and get the right answer at least as often as these economic experts when they are asked to make a forecast.