The Unaccountability Machine attempts a grand project of diagnosing and curing the malaise of the 21st century: namely, everything is getting worse and it seems like nobody can do nothing about it. Davies' theoretical approach is to explain and use Stafford Beer's cybernetic management theories against Milton Friedman's neoliberal doctrine that the primary duty of the firm is to maximize shareholder value. I'm not sure it quite works, but it's a brave attempt. The initiating idea is one of accountability sinks. Think about getting bumped from a flight due to a system outage and complaining to the desk agent. It's not like they can do anything to help. They're just a face there to insulate the airline from customers who can no longer make their connections. Information should be flowing, but it instead it's stopped.

The first thing is explaining Stafford Beer and cybernetic management. Beer was one of those mid-century British prodigies, going from philosophy to the Army in WW2 to psychology to operations research to management consultant to public intellectual. His enduring contributions were two books, Brain Of The Firm and The Heart of the Enterprise, the acronym POSIWID (the purpose of a system is what it does), and a consulting hand in Chile's Project Cybersyn, a centrally planned economic operations center that was overtaken by Pinochet's coup.


Project Cybersyn

The key parts of management cybernetics, according to Davies, is that any system managing another system must have sufficient variety to handle the kinds of information coming from the managed system. Secondly, according to Beer's Viable System Model all systems have five interacting components: operations, coordination, regulation, intelligence, and identity. I'll confess that even as someone with a sympathy towards cybernetics, I'm not full convinced. The phrase "sufficient variety" conceals the complexities of what organizations are paying attention to, and applying the viable system model is to a real enterprise is far from easy. With cybernetics, I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' observation about astrology or tarot, in that it doesn't really matter what the rules are (even pure nonsense can work), as long as there are sufficiently many of them in enough fineness to reveal the shape of whatever lies beneath.

But taking cybernetic seriously, the problem is one of economic management, namely how to match inputs and outputs across the billions of human preferences that make up the economy. Davies is an economist, but a critical one, who regards the '-ist' as exemplifying an ideology rather than academic rigor. Economic modeling is powerful, but makes dangerous simplifying assumptions. To whit, individual preferences are atomic, and the effects of complexity in systems can be ignored. While economics is extremely powerful in a policy role, it is also shockingly bad at dealing with things like real accounting practices as done by businesses, time, and debt.

Economic as a discipline fostered a series of moves which represented the triumph of the capitalist class (those who own things) over the managerial class (those who make decisions), with the working class already placed on the ash-heap of history. These moves are most strongly identified with Milton Friendman, and the doctrine that a company's primary and indeed sole duty is to maximize shareholder returns. All sources of information get crushed down into a single number, the stock price, which floats on the whims of speculators. Further, the practice of the leveraged buyout means that companies are forced to ignore everything that isn't generating cashflow to service increasingly high debt obligations. And the neoliberal wisdom of the market means that there's no one to appeal to: this is just how the world works now.

I'm not sure that Davies' advice to adjust the information and incentives is sufficient. Power speaks, and it's no accident that capitalism won and forced the working classes to absorb all shocks to the system. But he offers an insightful and novel prescription, like some new drug extracted from a rare and ancient flower deep in the rainforest.