incompetence is a form of bias

a systems perspective

Posting has been intermittent due to staff holiday, but will hopefully get back on track now I’m back. (Steve, Chad, Nick, David – “posting will be back on track” should be seen as a good thing, meaning that I’m rested and productive, not that I’m screwing around when I should be worrying about the respective deadlines for the things I promised each of you).

So for the meanwhile, some slightly expanded remarks on a slogan I’ve been pushing for a while in social media.  The idea here is that 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.

I first noticed this in the context of exam results.  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).  Give it an unbiased appeals process, but 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.

Can we push it a bit further than that?  The system that’s on my mind at the moment is the planning system for infrastructure projects in the UK, because I’m trying to write something about it.  And I think my slogan might be applicable here too.  (I think many of the points below were first raised by Alex Harrowell).

The British planning system is a least partly one of “consultation by litigation”.  And the courts being “open to all, like the Ritz Hotel” is a joke fast approaching its centenary.  This makes it 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.

Consequently, in my view, the cluster of professional services industries that views infrastructure permissioning as a source of fee income benefits greatly from the reduction of state capacity.  “Incompetence” is a bit of a pejorative word, but the inability of the state to provide its own legal, environmental and engineering expertise creates a biased system. 

And maintaining, sustaining and increasing that bias is a natural thing for the professional services industry to want.  Every time some state capacity is outsourced and therefore lost, the overall bias of the system is entrenched and reinforced.  When an industry keeps on doing something, keeps on benefiting from it and keeps on doing it because it benefits from it … like I say, I’m trying not to use that slogan any more, but can it reasonably be argued that its PR people should be allowed to get away with claiming that they don’t do it on purpose?