Abandoning the idea that the economic problem is the eternal condition of the human race does more than extend the definition of work beyond how we make a living. It provides us with a new lens through which to view our deep historical relationship with work from the very beginnings of life through to our busy present. It also raises a series of new questions. Why do we now afford work so much more importance than our hunting and gathering ancestors did? Why, in an era of unprecedented abundance, do we remain so preoccupied with scarcity?

Economists end up solving this problem by denying it (a mechanism that Stafford Beer looked at in detail, concluding that ignorance is a kind of information processing system of last resort). Where analysis fails, ideology steps in, and the solution the economists decided on was to fantasise an equivalent system for producers — a profit-maximising firm with an understanding of its market, a style production process and a manageable set of decisions. It ended up going disastrously wrong, but the original intellectual sin may have been the failure to respect the integrity of the black box.

This is how the cybernetic problems of the post-war industrial state have been shaped by economics. There are three major blind spots: the belief in markets as computing fabric, the flattening of time and uncertainty and the commitment to Ricardianism.

The belief in markets as computing fabric is such an obvious source of blind spots as to hardly require explanation. Faith in the power of free markets to solve problems is so great as to support the reverse inference of economists that if something appears to be a market equilibrium, then it must be an optimal solution.

From a cybernetic point of view, it’s interesting as an example of how the systems and structures mattered so much more than the individuals involved. The development of the Friedman doctrine into the intellectual backing for the leveraged buyout boom and the private equity industry are best seen as a conflict between two comprehensive systems of interest, both of which might have regarded the other as a threat. The great unremarked class struggle that happened in the 1970s and 1980s was that between capitalism and managerialism.

The managers lost this struggle, pretty comprehensively. And as we’ve seen, the combination of the blind spots in management and the blind spots in economics came together to produce an ideology which was bound to remove management capacity. And that created further blind spots, and further reduced the system’s ability to cope with shocks. The story of how we got to where we are is a story of the attempts of the system to cope with this, and to search for short-term equilibrium.

If every maximising system has to have a higher-level system governing it (to make sure it doesn’t go bonkers), then that logically implies that the top level of any decision-making system that’s meant to operate autonomously can’t be a maximiser. And so, the governing philosophy of the overall economic system can’t be based on the constrained optimisation methodology that’s currently dominant in the subject of economics. Otherwise there’s a risk that the system will go bonkers, and that it will start pushing maximising objectives, oblivious to the danger that it’s on course for making human life impossible. Like it actually has done.