(2024-07-04) Delong How Humanity Lost Control

Brad DeLong: How Humanity Lost Control. How can we be at least 15 times richer than our pre-industrial Agrarian Age predecessors, and yet so unhappy?

One explanation is that we are not wired for it: nothing in our heritage or evolutionary past prepared us to deal with a society of more than 150 people

We therefore have built massive societal machines comprising market economies, government and corporate bureaucracies

Yet we struggle to fine-tune these institutions, because we simply do not understand them. We are left with a globe-spanning network of profoundly alien leviathans that boss us around and make us unhappy

The economist Dan Davies has written a wonderful little book about our problematic creations. In The Unaccountability Machine... Davies weaves together an argument from five separate threads.

The first is his observation that our world is rife with accountability sinks: places where things are clearly going wrong, but where there is no one to blame. Instead, the entire system is at fault, and the system has no way of seeing or correcting the problem.

Second, Davies points out that every social system needs not only to pursue its mission but also to preserve itself. This generally means that it cannot focus on one narrow metric.

Third, delegation is crucial to reducing complexities and keeping an organization’s mission manageable

Fourth, it is important to build strong feedback loops.

Lastly, the best way to reform organizations so that they do not become unaccountability machines is to revive the post-World War II quasi-discipline of management cybernetics.

The guru who made the most progress in building management cybernetics was the counterculture-era management consultant Stafford Beer, whose book Brain of the Firm explored how bureaucracies can be reformed so that the internal flow of information between deciders and decided-upon is kept in balance

Felix Martin describes Davies’ approach as “a kind of psychoanalysis for non-human intelligences, with Stafford Beer as Sigmund Freud.”

If the challenge of modernity is to figure out a better way to work and think together as a global community of more than eight billion people, how can we improve our understanding, and thus our control? Unfortunately, Davies does not give us much of an answer.

See his longer 2024-07-04 DelongAReturnOfmanagementCyberneticsAsAWayForwardOutOfEconomicsbasedNeoliberalism