(2024-08-09) Davies Incompetence Is A Form Of Bias

Dan Davies: incompetence is a form of bias. People will sometimes attribute unfair outcomes, particularly of state processes, to incompetence rather than bias. But, as my slogan suggests, incompetence is itself a bias, because it’s a bias in favour of people who can get mistakes corrected.

Take an unbiased but somewhat random exam system (like, for example, the absolutely putrid retest accuracy of British GCSEs and A-Levels in all subjects other than maths). (standardized test)

one which is a bit difficult to navigate, sometimes costs a small amount of money and requires someone to stand up to authority

You now have a process which is (particularly for borderline cases close to the cut-off points for university admissions – ie, more or less the only cases which matter) quite comically biased in favour of the upper-middle class. And also, hugely biased in favour of the children of teachers.

So … if I hadn’t promised to give up saying “The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does”, then I’d say that this is the purpose of the system – you have two individually unbiased components, but they’re embedded in a wider socioeconomic system, and the compromise between the different levels of embedding means that it’s ridiculous to call the exam system unbiased because it systematically produces biased results.

The system that’s on my mind at the moment is the planning system for infrastructure projects in the UK

The British planning system is a least partly one of “consultation by litigation”.

a system that’s biased in favour of people who can hire lawyers. Or more generally, it makes it biased in favour of organisations that can bring certain kinds of professional competence to bear in their interest

the cluster of professional services industries that views infrastructure permissioning as a source of fee income benefits greatly from the reduction of state capacity

And maintaining, sustaining and increasing that bias is a natural thing for the professional services industry to want.