If you trace back many important decisions of the last few decades, you will regularly come up against the uncomfortable sensation that the unacknowledged legislators are relatively junior civil servants who put placeholder numbers in spreadsheets, which are later adopted as fundamental constraints; to do otherwise would mean someone having to risk being ridiculed for making a decision.

If a manager or management team doesn’t have information-handling capacity at least as great as the complexity of the thing they’re in charge of, control is not possible and eventually, the system will become unregulated.

Systems that aim to prevent this sort of thing happening by enforcing rules for sharing and scheduling are regulatory: System 2.

We’ve already seen how accounting systems can act as an information-reducing filter. It follows from this that the greater the emphasis placed on accounting-based targets set by the CEO, the greater the filtering effect.

Governments were also subject to the same cognitive pressures of a world that was becoming more complicated, so they also needed solutions to attenuate information.