Dan Davies' ideas from the book The Unaccountability Machine sees the whole of neoliberalism as a complex system with built-in errors. Jan Wiklund means on the blog Common in the article "All failures are due to bad routines” 2024/09/18 that crises and failures are not due to individual scapegoats but to a systemic failure integrated into the structure of neoliberalism. Sure, mistakes can occur in individual banks or companies, but it is the entire neoliberal system that forces business leaders and other decision makers to make wrong decisions in order to maintain the neoliberal order.
All systems have routines that can be flawed
All systems create routines, not just neoliberal societies. Companies and authorities have their routines which are growing. In the end, no one really understands them anymore.
In the neoliberal system, Davies believes that two important control functions failed. First it broke in the one who keeps track of risks. Then there were flaws in the one who defines the identity (what the purpose is). The system left these tasks to economists who did not understand them. The routines did not fit into the economists' neoliberal worldview.
Wiklund avoided Davies' proposed solution. Davies' proposal does not consider other concurrent problems. One such is that politicians become less representative. One is that since the 1970s, rentiers increasingly dominate companies due to the overproduction crisis of the 70s. One of Davies' proposals, to reduce the influence of economists over long-term governance, seems to happen automatically because many economists have now changed their view and do not appeal as much to the owners.
Errors in goals and future planning
According to Wiklund, large organizations based on neoliberal principles create routines to manage operations. But over time these routines become so complicated and difficult to understand that no one, not even the managers, fully understands what is happening. But above all, these routines have more business orientation and wrong future planning. Those who defend the routines are often those who profit from them, and when something goes wrong it becomes easy to blame external factors or individuals.
Deficiencies in the systems' control functions
Dan Davies, supported by renowned cybernetician Stafford Beer, argues that the problems are due to deficiencies in the systems' control functions, particularly in terms of future planning and the purpose of operations. The economic theories of neoliberalism have occupied these roles and misdirect. It is not about evil individuals or conspiracies, but about bad practices shaped by a system that favors economic elites and disadvantages the broad masses.
Red Justice's analysis
I think that Wiklund's analysis is apt. Neoliberalism as a whole, rather than individual individuals or businesses, is the cause of the crises. Leaders in businesses and other organizations are forced to make wrong decisions because neoliberal society demands that the system collapse economically and productively. Looking for a single scapegoat is a mistake; it is the system that needs to change.
Neoliberalism creates bad routines that cause system errors. Finding individual scapegoats does not help.
A small correction: All systems create their routines, not just neoliberal societies. Companies, authorities, organizations.... Then the routines are piled on top of each other until no one really understands how they fit together.
The specifically neoliberal system collapse, according to Davies, was that two of the governance functions – the one to do with keeping track of risk and the one to do with identity (“what are we for”) were imposed on neoclassical economists who did not understand the issues because they did not fit into their world view.
In my blog post, I was down with Davies' proposed measures, as I thought they did not take into account other simultaneous system collapses. That e.g. that politicians are becoming less and less representative is not directly the economists' fault, for example. And the fact that the rentiers took over the companies was probably due to the overproduction crisis in the 70s - the profits disappeared but like damned the companies had to invest, so where would they get money from?
Moreover, one of Davies' two proposals – to disconnect the economists' profession from long-term governance – appears to be self-implementing. Perhaps because so many economists have changed their minds that they are no longer safe from the rentiers' point of view.
My new favorite blogger Aurelien puts it this way:
"We therefore face a problem which is, I think, unique in western history. It can be summarized as follows. A shallow and incapable ruling class and its parasites are confronted with a series of subtle changes in the way the international political and economic system works, some linked, some not, that require the sort of careful analysis and thoughtful reactions of which they are inherently incapable . At the same time, the machinery of politics and economics in their own countries is breaking down, and they have no idea why, or what to do about it. These two points—the inability to imagine alternatives and the inability to understand even what is going on in front of their eyes—are the two themes I want to develop in the essay.”
https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/the-newer-world-order
Aurelien is right that since the oil crisis and especially since 2000, power is blinded by loyalty to the greed of the richest and therefore allows the power of the West to perish and the climate catastrophe to shine.