PROJECT SYNDICATE: How Humanity Lost Control: A REVIEW of Dan Davies: "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – And How the World Lost Its Mind"

For Project Syndicate <http://project-syndicate.org>: the unaccountability machines we have built, or how our complex societal systems are making us rich but unhappy as they have become...

For Project Syndicate <http://project-syndicate.org>: the unaccountability machines we have built, or how our complex societal systems are making us rich but unhappy as they have become uncontrollable leviathans—massive social and technological mechanisms that are failing us.

Management cybernetics might—might—be built into something that can offer us solutions: might teach us how to steer the boats, or to at least build boats that can be steered. I derive four key ideas from the book: accountability sinks, only systems that both function & survive persist, the five subtasks—action, logistics, short-term adjustment, balancing here-and-now off against there-and-then, and philosophy—every system must accomplish, the importance of delegation and of feedback loops...

---

---

How Humanity Lost Control

Jul 2, 2024 J. BRADFORD DELONG

Unlike our ancestors, our social world is not confined to our families, our neighbors, our co-workers, and those with whom we directly interact. Instead, more and more of what we do is driven by an extremely complex assembly of vast interlocking social and technological mechanisms that we have made but do not understand.

BERKELEY – How can we be at least 15 times richer than our pre-industrial Agrarian Age predecessors, and yet so unhappy? One explanation is that we are not wired for it: nothing in our heritage or evolutionary past prepared us to deal with a society of more than 150 people. To operate our increasingly complex technologies and advance our prosperity, we somehow must coordinate among more than eight billion people.

We therefore have built massive societal machines comprising market economies, government and corporate bureaucracies, national and sub-national polities, cultural ideologies, and more. Yet we struggle to tune these institutions at all, because we simply do not understand them. We are left with a globe-spanning network of profoundly alien leviathans that boss us around and make us unhappy, even as they make us fabulously rich compared to previous generations.

MOAR OVER AT PROJECT SYNDICATE: <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/unaccountability-machine-why-big-complex-systems-produce-bad-outcomes-by-j-bradford-delong-2024-07>