In any case, it is neither psychologically plausible nor managerial realistic to expect someone to follow orders 99 per cent of the time and then suddenly act independently on the hundredth instance.

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.

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.

This sort of decision is fundamental to the cybernetic analysis of systems; you are always attenuating variety in some way or other unless you are describing a system that consists of everything in the universe.

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.