taming the unaccountability machine

big time!

Sorry for the missing post yesterday - I’ve been running around doing things. However, there is a lot of content elsewhere to point to! “Hypertext”, the online journal of the Niskanen Center, has done a special edition on Cybernetics, and I am in it trying to suggest that management cybernetics is public choice theory for the 21st century. Not only that, but I have got a response from Margaret Levi, pointing out that my theory kind of totally ignores the role of political power - I find myself kind of going hands up on that one, but at the same time quite thrilled that people like Margaret are taking a passing comedian like me seriously. There is also a very good and practical article by Jenn Pahlka and Andrew Greenway which gets to the heart of the issue - if the government doesn’t understand what it’s doing, why would you expect the results to be anything but dreadful. David Dagan points out in his introduction that all the people coming into government revere Claude Shannon, so they really ought to stop and think about what they’re doing in information theory terms.

A bit of background - the origin of my piece came from a challenge from Brad DeLong. Ever since publishing the book, people have been asking me “yeah, but what do we do with this?”. And my reaction for most of the last year or so has been a sort of nervous giggle. I think there were three reasons:

1. As a management consulting model, the Viable Systems Model is much, much more complicated than the bare bones summary treatment I give it.

2. I am leery and fearful of management advice in general and don’t want to get blamed if something falls apart.

3. I don’t necessarily believe in absolutely every word Stafford Beer ever said, and as far as I can tell nor does anybody else who uses management cybernetics.

So, following a vaguely Hippocratic instinct, my go-to response was “well, if you want to do a cybernetic analysis, my advice would be to just go ahead and do the same analysis you were doing anyway, but keeping in mind the principle of variety - the idea that you have to match the complexity of the system to the capacity of the management to regulate it”. Just simply getting people to remember that management is fundamentally an information processing task is in view view half the battle.

But of course, winning half a battle is often quite like losing. Brad pointed out that actually, a great deal of the influence of economics comes not from anything particularly recognisable or justifiable in terms of rigorous models, but from slightly more than half a dozen important insights which, in combination, might be considered to add up to what it means to be “Thinking Like An Economist”. So when the opportunity came to write something for the Niskanen Center, that’s what I tried to do.