The idea that decision making in a democracy is some definable optimization problem that "experts" can solve better than the average voter, or that the very purpose of democratic decision making is to optimize anything in the first place is laughably naive.

Any non-trivial decision that must be made in a democracy is made amongst a set of choices with outcomes that are incomparable to one another in a single objective domain.

For instance: should we raise taxes? If the question were simply to optimize how much money we can raise, then yes, the question could be modeled as an optimization problem; the outcome of each possible choice will be some amount of tax revenue that can be ranked.

But rather, the question is should we be raising taxes or should we be lowering them. There are no outcomes to be compared here, but rather - generously - philosophies to be debated or - cynically - power struggles to be played out.

When there is no objective way to rank the outcomes of a set of decisions "expert" opinion is of little value.