Finished
The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How the World Lost Its Mind by Dan Davies. I have mixed feelings about it.
It starts really well, describing problems that are clearly real. That is, the way how, in today's world, often no one is really responsible for decisions, and no one can be held accountable for them, because in a way, the decision is made by a system rather than an individual.
Problem is, the book is mainly about discussing how the ideas of classical cybernetics relate to all that. And I'm not really convinced that this is as relevant to the initial problem as the author clearly thinks it is.
However, over the course of the book, Davies makes a whole lot of great points, so that I kind of think that his minor points are better than his major point. I especially like his criticism of the Economics profession and their reliance on models. For instance, there's
Economics could make a model suggesting that a given outcome was optimal, before gathering data about it and estimating how far reality was from the theoretical optimum. Depending on political preferences and ideological commitments, they could then either go back and make a new model, or declare that the distance represented a failure on the part of reality and suggest a policy to bring the world into line. It’s not hard to see why these people became influential advisors.
Or
Ever since Ricardo, economists have had a strong tendency to:
a) make a model of some feature of the economy, stripping away nearly all the complexity;
b) make a lot of simplifying assumptions, often questionable in terms of their empirical relevance;
c) show that their conclusion follows from their assumptions, which ought to be quite easy if they’ve made the assumptions strong enough;
d) act as if their conclusion has now been proved in the real world.
Or
The real blind spot of modern economics is the economy.
Or
Accountancy, with its books of principles and standards, will always bring you face to face with the realities of production and distribution, and that sort of knowledge is difficult to reconcile with economists’ modelling. Teaching young economists how to read a set of accounts might lead to awkward questions about time and information. Even an innocent question like, ‘How do you really calculate depreciation?’ could get in the way of an efficient modelling strategy that delivers a quick and definite answer. Best to protect the youth from such corruption.
Or his criticism of management consultants
Stereotypically, a consulting assignment goes through stages of signing the contract, talking to the employees and middle managers, finding the person who knows how to solve the problem, then packaging up their solution and selling it to top management.
One point with which I outright disagree is his claim that, in the last decades of the 20th century, the "managerial class" lost a struggle against the capitalist owner class. I think there is too much overlap between those groups for that juxtaposition to make sense.
