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.
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Then the 2008 financial crisis happened, followed by a long period of recession and austerity, and suddenly it turned out that the technocratic consensus wasnât as competent or moderate as it had appeared. Ten to twenty per cent of the electorate suddenly realized that they might have to take an interest in politics after all. So they started paying attention again, and they didnât have the basic assumptions of the mainstream. All they knew was that the people who used to be in charge seemed to have screwed things up mightily.
Trying to build things meant that everything had to be kept specific, but the theory of information couldnât straightforwardly be applied to massively connected systems. You needed to find a way of describing things that was both rigorous and representative of reality. As economists will tell you, this isnât an easy thing to do.
If a manager or management team doesnât have information-handling capacity at least as great as the complexity of the thing theyâre in charge of, control is not possible and eventually, the system will become unregulated.
Even in the early stages when Beer was first retained as a consultant, people had been warning the Allende government that it was nationalising things too fast, without regard for the capacity to manage them, and seemingly without much in the way of an overall industrial plan. They had introduced a system of âintervenorsâ who sat in the factories and passed on orders from central government; this was unpopular, and contributed to the impression of central technocratic control rather than devolved autonomous production.
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 âreformâ 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 â through the policies of governments that they elected.