And this story repeats itself through the history of management science; almost every classic of the literature seems to have described a way of adapting systems to a more complicated world, and then to have become obsolete itself. If you look past the slogans and think about what things like ‘management by objectives’, ‘focus on core competences’ and so on actually mean, they are all different ways of advising executives to restructure their businesses so that they don’t generate complexity faster than it can be managed.

This is the whole theory of the firm, according to the Friedman doctrine. There is no analysis of the company as a decision-making system, just individuals making decisions. While modern HR people might talk about ‘bringing your whole self to work’, Milton Friedman explicitly tells the (assumed to be male) modern executive that he has to divide his moral self into judgements ‘as a person in his own right’ and decisions ‘in his capacity as a businessman’.

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.

The imposition of Friedmanism and the debt burden in the corporate sector gave a clear signal about the new priorities, but the equivalent processes in the public sector just added a lot of noise. The system was calling for ‘reform’ and revolution, but not giving any clues as what specifically ought to be done.

And so the progress of outsourcing and decerebration ended up being even more intense, and the public sector became as big a fee pool as the private sector for the consultancy industry. This had the effect of closing off the other possible way in which the working class might have insured themselves against volatility — through the policies of governments that they elected.

There are a number of models, most of them ignored for decades, in which the corporate sector provides a stabilising function, insuring the working class against fluctuations in the business cycle, rather than expecting them to soak up the volatility.

The intriguing thing is that Simon and Galbraith didn’t write polemics to the effect that this was how corporations should behave — they just described what was in front of them at the time. Before Milton Friedman’s essay, lots of people assumed that this was just naturally the way things would tend. Without the Friedman fiction by, without very great re-engineering of the systems of corporate finance, the industrial economy might have just gone on and developed into a technostructure.

Maybe they were right? It would certainly be good if they were, because that might indicate a much easier path to defuse the immediate source of crisis. If the problem with the modern corporation is the result of the capitalist counter-revolution against the managerial class, we just need to change the terms of the battle.