To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “What information do I need to convey?” to “What questions do I want my audience to ask?

Researchers wondered if language could help. Specifically, rather than the standard communication approach (asking people to vote), they tried something slightly different: They talked about being a voter. Again, the difference seems minuscule. Essentially adding the letter r to the end of the word “vote.” But the change worked. It boosted voter turnout by over 15 percent.

• There are five core functions, and if any of them are missing or under-resourced, the flow of information won’t be balanced with the capacity to process it.

• Information only counts if it’s being delivered in a form in which it can be translated into action, and this means that it needs to arrive quickly enough.

• Systems preserve their viability by dealing with problems as much as possible at the same level at which they arrive, but they also need to have communication channels that cross multiple levels of management, to deal with big shocks that require immediate change.

Outsourcing is a contractual relationship, and contracts (like debts) are typically all-or-nothing affairs. Either a requirement has been fulfilled or it hasn’t. The typical outsourcing contract narrows the bandwidth of the communication channel to either ‘everything is going more or less as anticipated’ or ‘it’s stopped working and we need to find out why’. If it’s the first of these two cases, everything’s fine. If it’s the second, the continued stability of the system will depend on how much information-handling capacity can be brought to bear to address whatever problem has arisen.

Since the outsourcing communication channel is designed to spend most of its time transmitting ‘everything’s OK’, it’s difficult to guess how much additional bandwidth needs to be allocated to carry messages like ‘but the following conditions are changing which might affect things in the near future’ — let alone how much might need to be allocated at short notice when it starts to say ‘everything’s no longer OK’. If you have targets to make, it will always be tempting to cut out a bit of spare capacity.

And this is of course what happened; in an accounting system which targeted overhead costs, combined with an emphasis on generating cash, it looked like a no-brainer to thin out the ranks of middle managers who didn’t appear to do anything. But unfortunately, a ‘no-brainer’ was exactly what it turned out to be. Over the course of Jack Welch’s career, the industrial world’s productive system — the corporations — set about the equivalent of amateur brain surgery, hacking away bits of their regulatory and information-handling system, to see if they could do without them.

I think this is what explains the thread between MAGA, Brexit, the Five Star Movement, Hindutva and all the rest. The populist movements of the 2010s all promised a simpler world; they were, in the words of J. K. Galbraith, taking on the great anxiety of their people and addressing it. They were also promising to restore the broken communication channels — to make voices heard, to force the managerial class to listen.