The Unaccountability Machine— Dan Davies

Part 1: The Nature of the Crisis

1.Something’s Up

““Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers.”

George Orwell, ‘James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution’,1946

Then the 2008 financial crisis happened, followed by a long period of recession and austerity, and suddenly it turned out that the technocratic consensus wasn’t 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 didn’t 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.

But there was hardly any coordinated policy reaction until the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008.

This ought to immediately alert us — the problem was in System 4, the ‘there and then’ intelligence function. Absence or weakness in this system is one of the most common problems in organisations, and central banks have a few organisational quirks that make them particularly vulnerable.

Marmot ended up concluding that the psychic feeling of being in control of your life is extremely important as a source of well-being, and that conversely, being out of control is physiologically harmful as wells s emotionally intolerable.

At various points in this book, we’ve noted that you can tell when a cybernetic system is overloaded because it breaks down. Marmot’s main conclusion from his research was that inequality in society was a major driver of public health risks, but it could be givens cybernetic interpretation too. The connection that he found looks like the result of a variety mismatch; people are, increasingly, unable to regulate the input from their immediate environment, and they correctly perceive this as a threat to health and life.

Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robinson (Penguin Business, 2021) is also an enthralling history of a massive accountability sink. I learned a huge amount from Gill Kernick’s Catastrophe and Systematic Change: Learning from Grenfell (London Publishing Partnership, 2021) about another case study in which interlocking systems combined to create a tragedy that couldn’t systematically be pinned on any single organisation, let alone an individual.