Technocrat

Slate magazine's Forrest Wickman stepped in with an "Explainer" column last Friday that nicely cleared up the issue. A technocrat, he said, is:

An expert, not a politician. Technocrats make decisions based on specialized information rather than public opinion. For this reason, they are sometimes called upon when there’s no popular or easy solution to a problem (like, for example, the European debt crisis). The word technocrat derives from the Greek tekhne, meaning skill or craft, and an expert in a field like economics can be as much a technocrat as one in a field more commonly thought to be technological (like robotics).