Chris Dillow's Blog, page 81

Sources of biased journalism

There���s much discontent at the state of journalism, not least at the BBC. What���s insufficiently appreciated, however, is that bad journalism doesn���t just arise from individual incompetence and time pressures. There are also systematic structural forces towards bad and biased reporting. Here���s a list of some of them: I make no claim to completeness; some are more applicable in some news organizations than others; and these are in no order.

 - Low pay. The problem here isn���t just that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. It���s that journalists are often paid less than PRs. This leads to many of them being insufficiently critical of their sources simply because they might want to work in PR later.

 - Cost-cutting. Foreign correspondents have disappeared, as has much investigative journalism, and has been replaced by cheap celebrity gossip and cobbling stories together from a few tweets. What Ben Rhodes says of the US echoes in the UK:

All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,��� he said. ���Now they don���t. They call us to explain to them what���s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That���s a sea change. They literally know nothing.

 - Class. Over half of top journalists were privately educated. This generates a host of distortions, such as a greater sympathy for the rich and powerful than for the poor, and a lack of understanding of economics: ���Money? That���s what comes from daddy!���

 - Exchanging favours. For years, the relationship between the police and media has been too cosy: the police feed stories to journalists who in return downplay or ignore stories of police malpractice. This is one reason why it took years for the brutality of the police at Orgreave or Hillsborough to become properly known. In the same way, advertisers buy not just advertising space but a cooperative silence, broken only by the occasional brave maverick such as Peter Oborne.

 - Misplaced deference. The problem here isn���t just what Adam Smith called the tendency to respect the rich and powerful more than the wise and virtuous. Younger inexpert journalists often need help, which causes them to seek expertise where little exists. Fund managers, for example, are often presented as well-informed when in fact many are simply rip-off merchants. Similarly, their habit of being at the end of a phone with a ready quote about latest market moves or economic releases gives City economists more influence over journalists than academics have.

 - Laziness. It���s easy to get a story by getting quotes from talking heads. It���s harder to find out what���s really going on. This leads to a bias in favour of those talking heads, and against groups which aren���t so rich or organized as to have spokesmen; compare, for example, coverage of banks to coverage of anti-capitalist protestors or of the rich to benefit recipients.     

 - Overcompensation. The problem with trying to balance is that you can sometimes overdo it and topple over ��� hence, for example, the Today���s programme���s otherwise odd decision to interview Ann Coulter and its giving more coverage to Conservative than Labour voices. Similarly, in the 90s the BBC���s liberal arts bias led to it being unsympathetic to business but in recent years, it has over-corrected and become insufficiently critical. I���ll plead guilty myself here. I might have sometimes been too uncritical in the day job of Brexiteers or active managers, as I���ve tried too hard to be ���fair���.

 - Libel laws. As Nick Cohen has shown, the cost of defending libel writs is so high as to have a chilling effect upon journalism; the misdeeds of the rich and powerful simply don���t get reported at all. This helps sustain inequality by leading the public to under-estimate the venality and corruption of the rich.

 - Wanting the scoop. Journalists��� healthy urge to get a story leads to a reliance upon sources who have their own agendas. We see one baleful and widespread effect of this in the advance leaking of speeches; ���the Prime Minister will say today������. Such leaks mean that analyses of the speech are quickly out-of-date and stale, with the upshot that the speaker gets less critical coverage than he should.

 - Cognitive biases. Every profession is prone to deformation professionnelle. One of journalists��� biases is the fundamental attribution error ��� the tendency to over-emphasize personal factors and under-rate environmental ones. For example, politicians are described as ���weak��� ��� think of John Major in the 90s ��� when in fact circumstances, such as a fractious party, make them so. It���s this failure to put things into context that led John Birt in 1975 to complain of the BBC���s ���bias against understanding��� ��� a bias which, says Steve Richards, still exists today.

  - News itself. ���Dog bites man��� is not news, ���man bites dog��� is. This means that everyday tragedies such as the fact that tens of thousands still die of poverty are underplayed, whilst the most trivial of first world problems are covered in depth. Also, news prizes ���human interest��� stories. These are almost equivalent to committing the base rate fallacy ��� of failing to ask ���how common is that?��� This can lead to a class bias: lively stories of benefit fraudsters get covered whilst the millions of decent people living in desperate conditions get ignored.

These biases tend to have the same effect: they lead to insufficiently critical coverage of the rich and powerful. In this sense, the claim that because the BBC is doing a good job because it is criticized from left and right is dubious. In fact It can be biased leftwards because of individuals��� occasional maladroit judgments, and biased rightwards for the above reasons.

You might object here that I���ve missed the obvious ��� that journalists do what their billionaire bosses tell them. That, though, is my point ��� that even without such pressure and without any conspiracy, journalism is biased to support the existing order.

Regulation, & BBC bias

A group of ���business leaders��� writes to the Telegraph:

Britain���s competitiveness is being undermined by our membership of a failing EU���Brussels��� red tape stifles every one of Britain���s 5.4 million businesses.

The BBC gave uncritical coverage to this claim (01���22��� in). However, it raises several questions:

 - If it is membership of the EU which is undermining competitiveness, why is it that Germany is doing so much better at exporting to China than the UK? Last year, its exports (pdf) to China were ���71.4bn (��51.7bn) compared to the UK���s ��12.8bn, which meant such exports represented 2.4% of GDP against 0.7 per cent for the UK.

 - If EU membership determines business regulation, why is it that the volume of regulation varies so much from country to country within the EU? To take one of several indices, the Heritage Foundation puts the UK 15th on its index of business freedom, whilst France is 32nd and Italy 62nd. As Rick says, whether you look at product or labour market regulation, ���compared to most other countries the UK is lightly regulated.��� 

 - Which EU-imposed regulations do you propose to scrap? Although the letter is silent on this, Tim Congdon at least has been more honest, citing energy policy, the working time directive and caps on bankers��� bonuses as examples. For some reason, though, few Brexiteers seem keen to argue that Brexit will allow us to shut down green energy producers and build coal-fired power stations; make employees work longer; and pay bankers more.

 - If Brexit really will make us more competitive, we���d expect to see sterling rise as expectations of Brexit increase, in anticipation of the smaller current account deficits that Brexit would produce. But this is not what has actually happened. Sterling���s fall since the autumn is widely blamed upon the increased risk of Brexit. And most economists, including the Bank of England and NIESR think Brexit would depress sterling. Why are most economists and financial market participants wrong?

Such questions raise a suspicion. It might be that some businesses are blaming Brussels for what is in fact their own inability to export and grow.

In this context the contrast between the BBC���s uncritical coverage of the letter and its ignoring the pro-Remain letter from over 200 economists looks not so much like a reasonable if mistaken editorial judgement but a brazen piece of ideology. It is symptomatic of a deference to business opinion ��� a deference which inhibits it from asking why it is that business is, in some respects at least failing.  

The trouble with the Brexit debate

How should the Brexit debate be structured, and presented in the media? Two things I���ve seen today pose this question: Vote Leave���s anger at ITV inviting Nigel Farage to debate against David Cameron; and the letter from 196 economists in favour of Remain.

These raise two general issues, which I���m not sure the media handle well.

One is: what to do about counter-advocacy, the fact that some proponents of a case are so awful that they detract from what might be a strong argument?

Vote Leave���s unhappiness at their case being represented by Farage is, I think, justified. He is likely to put the case for Brexit as a means towards immigration controls rather than ��� as at least a few of its advocates hope ��� as a step towards the UK becoming an open free-trading nation. For me, this would detract from the Brexit argument.

This is by no means the only example of counter-advocacy. When I see the Brexit case put by Andrew Lilico or Gerard Lyons, I see good intelligent men making arguments that require thought. When I see it put by Boris Johnson, I see only a blustering buffoon. For me, the prominence of the latter over the former weakens the Brexit case. And seeing this disgraceful display of arrogant disingenousness from Dominic Cummings shifted my position from being mildly opposed to Brexit to strongly so.

Not that the counter-advocacy is all on one side: Cameron���s claim that Brexit would increase the risk of conflict in Europe seems to me to be silly hyperbole.

The second question, raised by Simon���s letter, is: how to tackle the imbalance of numbers? For example, a debate on the economics of Brexit between (say) John van Reenen and Patrick Minford would no doubt be intelligent and informed. But it would be horribly misleading to viewers insofar as it would omit a key point ��� that for every one economist who agrees with Patrick there are perhaps five or six who agree with John.

All this makes me wonder whether TV or radio debates are a good way to inform the public. On top of the problems of how to avoid counter-advocacy and how to represent imbalances of expert opinion there are two other problems.

One is that debates are a lousy way of presenting facts. A downright false claim ��� such as that the EU costs us ��350m per week ��� can be met only with denial, leaving the undecided listener none the wiser as to what the truth is.

The other is that debates are naturally polarizing; partisans are expected to advocate that all benefits lie on their side. This disguises what might be crucial facts, that either position has costs. Reasonable people might believe any of the following: that a small loss of GDP is a price worth paying for increased national self-determination; that short-term uncertainty is the cost of what might be a shift to freer trade in the long-run; or that being tied into undemocratic and sclerotic institutions are the price we must pay for the benefits of access to the single market.  Nuanced positions such as these tend to get ignored in simple pro- and anti- debates.

In saying all this, I���m not just making a point about Brexit. There���s a deeper question here, touched upon by Simon: do we have the institutions that best enable informed and rational political decision-making? I fear we don���t, and that the old media ��� even those parts of it that aspire to impartiality ��� are a big part of the problem.

Economics vs bankers

Simon Wren-Lewis says that ���finance gets away with so much partly through a process of mystification���, and that economists must help to cut the sector back to size. This is an important point.

One of the great ideological tricks of bankers has been to present their own vested interests in the language of economic logic, thus giving an apparently technocratic justification for what is in reality mere rent-seeking. Not only have politicians fallen for this, but so too have some on the left. They���ve looked at bankers��� misuse of economics, and inferred that economics is an ideological subject used to justify inequality. This, though, throws out the baby with the bathwater. It deprives the left of one of their potentially most useful tools ��� the fact that conventional economics undermines the self-regard of the financial sector.

I mean this in six senses.

 - Economics tells us that actively managed funds are a rip-off. Most of them under-perform (pdf) the market, but charge extra fees for doing so. The efficient markets hypothesis says that investors would be better off in tracker funds. And in this context, it is correct.

 - Bankers claim that policies to make banks safer, such as higher capital requirements, would reduce lending. As Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig have (pdf) shown, such claims are false and self-serving.

 - Many economists, such as John Kay support ���narrow banking��� ��� the separation of retail from ���casino��� banking. Bankers oppose this not so much because it is insufficient to ensure financial stability, but because financial conglomerates suit them well. As John says, the retail deposit base ���carries an explicit or implicit government guarantee and can be used to leverage a range of other, more exciting, financial activities.���

 - Banks get a huge subsidy from the government because the implicit promise to bail them out in bad times reduces their borrowing costs. As the Bank of England points out, much of this subsidy ends up in the pockets of senior employees. Whatever else explains bankers��� pay, it is emphatically not ���free market ideology���.

 - Econ 101 says that people respond to incentives. And as William Black says, the incentive structures in banks ��� generated by asymmetric information and principal-agent failures ��� favoured criminal activity, such as fraudulent lending in the run-up to the 2008 crisis and PPI mis-selling. As John Quiggin says, it���s plausible that banks make at least $500bn a year from anti-social activity such as tax dodging and market rigging.

 - From customers��� point of view, the financial sector has not increased efficiency for decades: Thomas Philippon points out that the costs (pdf) of financial intermediation in the US, measured by gaps between borrowing and lending rates, haven���t changed since the 1880s, and Guillaume Bazot shows that they have risen in Europe since the 1950s. If technical change has made banking more efficient, those gains have flowed to bankers rather than to customers.

 - The financial sector is hopeless at beneficial financial innovation. There are countless potentially useful products (such as the macro markets advocated by Robert Shiller) which should exist but don���t, at least in a significant or low-cost form. What innovation the industry has practised in recent years has ��� except for some ETFs - generally been dangerous, such as credit derivatives or high-charging funds. In most sectors, there���s a gap between the private and social returns to innovation ��� but this is especially high in finance.

My point here is not just that the financial system is deeply dysfunctional and serves the interests of state-subsidized rent-seekers much better than those of customers. It���s also that this fact is evident through the lens of standard economics. Conventional economics is not only correct in same ways, but can serve a radical purpose.

Against political correspondents

There���s a growing campaign to sack Laura Kuenssberg. This seems to me an example of the fundamental attribution error. What���s wrong with the BBC is not so much Ms Kuenssberg herself, but the very nature of political reporting. I suspect instead that there���s a case for sacking all its political correspondents.

For one thing, they are redundant. All worthwhile issues could be as well or better covered by specialist reporters in other fields. For example, the junior doctors dispute could be covered by health or industrial relations correspondents; the local elections by local government reporters; the Brexit debate by economics, foreign or diplomatic reporters. And so on. The relative standings of the parties could be reported simply by comment-free reports on opinion polls or on Oddschecker���s election odds, in the same way that daily changes in the FTSE 100 are reported without comment.

Which poses the question: what do political correspondents add?

One thing is gossip. Political correspondents��� sources are anonymous briefings from ���senior figures���, ���sources close to Number 10��� and other people too cowardly to go on the record. This gives us politics dominated by tittle-tattle and personal grievances rather than by checkable public evidence.

This, though, is not the only way in which the very existence of political correspondents warps politics. They incentivize parties to invest in spin doctors and the management of short-term headlines (which are mostly noise) rather than in more democratic forms, such as building a mass party membership and using those members to change the political climate through the gradual process of millions of individual conversations. In this sense, Westminster-based political reporting encourages closed hierarchical politics rather than more open egalitarian ones.

Let���s do a thought experiment. Imagine we got rid of political correspondents so that policy was reported by specialist journalists instead. What would happen?

There���d be a shift in the knowledge base of journalists. The opinions of politicians would have less weight and those of experts more. This would diminish bubblethink ��� or at worst, give us a multitude of different bubbles which would at least be some improvement. And it would make politics more technocratic because politicians��� utterances ��� which of course must still be reported ��� would be judged not just against each other���s, but against the weight of evidence and expert opinion.

Rather than have what Paul Krugman calls ���views differ on shape of planet��� journalism ��� of the sort lampooned by Alexander Cockburn ��� claims would be seriously tested. For example, Hunt���s assertion that people are more likely to die if admitted to hospital on a weekend would be counterposed not just to a Labour party statement, but to academic research on the matter. This would encourage a more evidence-based politics.

The BBC can do this: Radio 4���s More or Less is a model of what I have in mind. Getting rid of political journalists would give more space and resources to this vastly superior journalism.

Now, I���m not calling here for the sacking of all political journalists: in a free country, the private sector media should hire whomever it wants. But the BBC is different. It has a duty of due impartiality. However, this is inconsistent with the employment of political journalists, because their prominence has the effect of biasing politics against openness, egalitarianism and evidence ��� which is anything but impartial.  

The errors of the oppressed

Nick Cohen makes an important point here ��� that the oppressed are not necessarily more virtuous than others. I want to expand upon this. There are several mechanisms that might cause this.

One, which is most relevant to Nick���s argument, is that oppression often produces stress and anxiety, which in turn can produce self-obsession and narrow-mindedness ��� just as hypochondriacs are bores to be around because they are forever fretting about their ailments. In his lovely book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Ben Friedman shows how for this reason bad economic times lead to upturns in intolerance and racism. Some bien-pensants are quick to accuse the white working class of being racist ��� but if that oppressed group can have reactionary or self-centred attitudes, why can���t others?

There are three other mechanisms here:

 - Ego-depletion. If it���s a struggle to just get by, you���ll have fewer intellectual resources with which to consider other problems. Researchers at Princeton have shown that, for this reason, the poor tend to have a lower IQ than the rich. But I wonder: might the same be true for people struggling with other oppressions such as racism or sexism?

 - Adaptive preferences. One notable fact about many of the oppressed is that they are so damned quiet about it. This is because they resign themselves to their fate. As Amartya Sen has written:

Deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation because of the sheer necessity of survival, and they may, as a result, lack the courage to demand any radical change, and may even adjust their desires and expectations to what they unambitiously see as feasible (Development as Freedom)

 - Ideology. Several well-known cognitive biases ��� such as the anchoring heuristic, status quo bias or just world illusion - can combine to produce an acceptance of inequality and injustice; see, for example, John Jost���s system justification theory (pdf).

All of this suggest that oppressed groups need not have an accurate opinion of injustice. Many might not see themselves as oppressed, and those that do might lash out at the wrong targets ��� be it taking offense at silly racist talk rather than structural racism or blaming immigrants for low wages rather than various forces within capitalism.

It is of course true that one of the great problems for Marxism has been that the working class has not developed the class consciousness that Marx hoped for. But why should other oppressed groups fare any better?

Now, this is NOT to say that such groups should not be heard and should instead be represented by wiser heads such as um, well white male PPE graduates. For one thing, the more privileged have weaker incentives to fight inequality. And for another, they/we too are also prone to cognitive biases: one of the sillier if unintended implications of the ���nudge��� agenda has been the idea that rulers are free of cognitive error.

Instead, we much distinguish sharply between two questions: ���what do you think?��� and ���what do you know?��� It���s the latter that matters. For example, the everyday sexism project has awakened me to the troubles that women face far more than windy feminist theory has done.

Which brings me to the problem. The institutions that might give voice to the lives of the most oppressed ��� the poor both here and globally; women and gays in backward communities and so on ��� are to say the least under-developed. One of the symptoms of genuine oppression is that one���s voice is not heard. When this absence is combined with the lack of mechanisms to counter false consciousness, it is small wonder that injustice is perpetuated.

Nobody knows anything

Hundreds of pieces will soon be written on what business ���leaders��� can learn from Leicester City���s triumph. I suspect, though, that the biggest lesson will be ignored ��� that it vindicates William Goldman���s famous remark that ���nobody knows anything.���

City���s players are, mostly, a ragbag of rejects from modest clubs managed by a man whose appointment was greeted with consternation. Very few people took up those 5000-1 odds against them winning the league.

Although such improbable victory is unheard of in football, it is not so unusual in other spheres. Elvis Presley was told to go back to truck driving; George Lucas���s proposal for Star Wars was turned down by Universal and United Artists; and J.K. Rowling, Dr Seuss and C.S. Lewis all got rejected by publishers before going onto to sell gazillions. There���s a long history in business of predictions being horribly wrong.

In fact, in business more than in football, success is unpredictable. As Alex Coad has shown, corporate growth is largely random. For this reason, the performance of venture capitalists enormously.

In this sense, Alex Bellos might be right: all that City���s victory tells us is that we under-rate the importance of randomness. City won the title despite having possession and fewer shots on goal than their opponents. They also had fewer injuries than most teams, and a narrow average winning margin. In these senses, they might just have been lucky.

However, there might be another reason why nobody knows anything. It is a clich�� that the City team is more than the sum of its parts. This directs us to an important possibility - that even in quite small groups such as football squads, emergence matters. Some complex systems can display properties which their component parts do not. For example, Alan Kirman shows that demand curves can slope downwards in an aggregate market even if individuals��� behaviour shows no link between price and demand. And Shyam Sunder shows that asset markets can be informationally efficient even if many participants are stupid.

This tells us that what matters is not (just) individuals��� qualities, but interactions between them. City���s players might have been unheralded before this season, but they seem to bring out the best in each other by playing to each others��� strengths.

What matters in hiring, then, is the match between the individual and the organization. City seem to have got this spectacularly right. But many organizations aren���t so lucky. As Boris Groysberg says, ���building capability by hiring stars does not work well.��� This can be because there���s a lack of fit between the star and his colleagues, or because what looked like star performance was in fact due more to organizational capital than individual brilliance.

Herein, though, lies a problem: it might not always be possible to tell in advance whether you have the right match or not. The fact that there is usually a strong correlation between teams��� wage bills and performance suggests not*: it tells us that it is very rare for teams to succeed by hiring cheap players who are in fact good fits with each other.

This warns us that City might have simply gotten lucky in finding players who are good matches for each other, and perhaps it is only the hindsight bias that gives us the impression that they knew what they were doing.

This, though, only reinforces my point ��� that maybe the lessons of City���s victory are that even experts know less than they think; that success is unpredictable; and that organizations are complex and so less controllable than bosses think.

But then, maybe in saying all this I am following that old habit, of interpreting all events as corroboration of my prior beliefs.

* subject to the caveat that the correlation might reflect causality from performance to pay.

Labour's antisemitism problem

Just 12 months ago, Labour had a Jewish leader. Today, we���re told, it has a problem with antisemitism. How can this be?

It might be useful to distinguish between two forms of racism: verbal, and structural. Although the two often go together, they need not. For example, you���ll hear far more racist language in financial firms than in the arts industry ��� but you���ll also see far more ethnic minorities too. One business has more verbal racism, the other more structural racism. In this sense, Labour has a problem with verbal racism, but isn���t obviously structurally racist.

Of course, even small amounts of verbal racism can create a climate in which minorities can feel excluded ��� and for that reason it must be ruthlessly eliminated.

It would, however, be complacent to pretend that Labour���s problem is only with some borderline mentally-ill inadequates. There���s a bigger problem than that, for two reasons.

First, there has always been a trend on the left to want to be ���edgy��� and ���transgressive��� ��� an urge that sometimes can lead to an underweighting of liberal Enlightenment virtues; it���s in this sense that Nick has a point when he speaks of a ���chronic condition��� on the left. It���s this, I suspect that has made Hamas and Hezbollah attractive to some lefties; the same urge led to support for the IRA in the 70s and ��� ironically ��� to posher lefties in the 60s spending their gap year on a kibbutz. It���s this urge ��� amplified in some cases by a desire to appeal to the ���Muslim community��� ��� that has fuelled antisemitic language.

Secondly, even if antisemitism is very rare within the Labour party as Jamie Stern-Weiner says, it is a disproportionately big political problem.

Those rightists who are bleating about Labour���s antisemitism are of course rank hypocrites: they are happy to use racism in the London mayoral election; laughed off the racism of Boris Johnson; and seemed relaxed about using an anti-Semitic dog-whistle in some attacks upon Ed Miliband. But this is only to be expected. The right will use any stick to beat the left. The left should not help by handing them those sticks. In tolerating even the slightest whiff of antisemitism, Labour is breaking one of the first rules of politics and of life: never give a cunt a chance.

In the last few days, we���ve seen a complete vindication of important leftist ideas. Capitalism is not just inefficient, but rapacious. And state institutions are not neutral public servants but corrupt partisans in a class war. But what has been the lead story on the BBC news this morning? Labour���s antisemitism.

Yes, Labour has an antisemitism problem. But it has a bigger twat problem.   

On obliquity neglect

Reading this tosh makes me wonder: is Mesut Ozil being unjustly criticized for the same reason that George Osborne has escaped sufficient public censure for his failure to cut government borrowing as much as he predicted?

The common link is that people over-rate the role of effort, and so give others too much credit for trying. This might be a manifestation of the representativeness heuristic; we think that trying to do something is similar to actually doing it, and so applaud the effort.

Because Osborne makes a great play of taking ���tough decisions��� (tough for others, that is) to reduce the deficit, voters applaud his effort. Conversely, Ozil���s languid style makes people think he isn���t trying ��� ���the willingness to dig in and fight are just nowhere to be seen��� says Adrian Durham ��� and so under-rate him.

Now, of course in many contexts effort should be applauded because it is necessary for success. As Matthew Syed shows, the power of purposeful practice is immense and that of raw talent over-rated. In other contexts, however, effort can be counter-productive, for two reasons.

One is the Yerkes-Dodson effect. We can be over-motivated (pdf) and thus choke under pressure: John Terry was surely trying to score that penalty in the 2008 Champions League final ��� but he might have been trying too hard. Mesut Ozil���s genius is that he has the ability to play the right pass under pressure; to do that he needs a cool head, but this can give the impression of a lack of effort.

The second is that, in interacting with others, our efforts can be stymied.  The lesson of the simple prisoners��� dilemma is that one man���s effort to get off ��� by dobbing in his colleague - can cause him to get sent down. Similarly, Osborne���s efforts to reduce borrowing failed in large part because of the bog-standard paradox of thrift.

This point generalizes. In Obliquity, John Kay writes:

The most profitable businesses are not the most profit-oriented. The wealthiest people are not those most assertive in the pursuit of wealth

Instead, he says, ���complex goals are often best achieved indirectly���. For example, the company that focuses upon make good products will do better than one dedicated to maximizing shareholder value ��� in part because such companies cause their employees to lose intrinsic motivation; hence the mass fraud at banks, for example.

However, it seems that people commonly under-rate all this. Shareholders often want companies to focus on shareholder value just as fans on that perennial moronfest 6-0-6 want their teams to show ���passion��� rather than skill or intellect.

In the same way, I fear that voters under-estimate the virtue of the oblique path to deficit reduction: lower government borrowing is something achieved as a by-product of fixing the (global?) economy rather than by aiming at it directly.

 Perhaps, therefore Osborne and Ozil have something in common: one is the beneficiary, and the other the victim, of the same cognitive error ��� that of obliquity neglect.

Conservatives against conservatism

Here are two things I���ve seen recently. First, there���s Simon on the junior doctors��� dispute:

The NHS works on relatively meagre resources because of the goodwill of those that work within it. Do we really think that facing down UK doctors is the way to get a better NHS?

The point here is that the NHS depends upon what Julian LeGrand calls ���knightly motives��� ��� a sense of vocation which inspires doctors and nurses to do more than their contracts require. Jeopardizing goodwill and these knightly motives could therefore do great harm.

Secondly, in a fine piece Mark Mills writes:

A lot of people affiliated with the Conservative Party or who call themselves ���conservatives��� are advocating a massive and potentially destabilising policy change���Conservatism ought to abhor wrenching discontinuities like Brexit.

There���s a connection here. In both cases we see a conflict between managerialist rationalism on the one hand and Oakrshottian-Burkean scepticism on the other.

So, for example, Jeremy Hunt thinks that top-down managerialist ���solution��� can improve the NHS and under-rates the potential cost of change. Similarly, Brexiters (or at least some of them) attach less weight to the cost of change and more to some ideal-type pattern they think will follow. Both of these contrast with Oakeshottian conservatism (pdf):

To be conservative���is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments.

Oakeshottian conservatives prefer the devil they know; idealists, rationalists and managerialists think they can improve upon it.

What���s at issue here is: how much confidence do you have in your knowledge? Oakeshott and Burke thought we should have little. As Burke wrote:

We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.

In this spirit, we should regard the NHS and the UK���s place in the world as complex phenomena which are hard to fully understand, predict or control and so be cautious about change. As Mark says:

when we draw up plans for a new improved version, we only be making the roughest of sketches. We therefore have little idea how the finished product will look. It is thus probable that we will like it less than we imagined.

This contrasts with Hunt���s position. In what passes for his mind, his single business success is, I suspect, stronger evidence of his managerial acumen than his string of failures. Emboldened by this egocentric bias, he is overconfident about his ability to improve the NHS. Similarly, some Brexiters seem to me and Mark overconfident about their ability to foresee the UK���s place outside the EU.

Of course, there���s nothing new in Conservatives opposing this strand of conservatism. When Thatcher destroyed mining communities ��� Burkean ���little platoons��� ��� in the belief that miners would find better work elsewhere she was taking the anti-Oakeshottian position of elevating an addle-brained (pdf) ideology over familiar if imperfect traditions*.

There is, however, a paradox here. Two of the big (and to me welcome) developments in thinking in recent years have been the increased awareness of complexity and the rise of research into cognitive biases. Both should have strengthened the Oakeshottian case.

But they haven���t, at least within the Tory party. It seems to me to be more dominated by managerialists, rationalists and dreamers than ever before. This makes me suspect that the Tories are not so much a party of principle as the party of privilege.

* You could, of course, see that as an exercise in naked class hatred ��� and you���d be right.