The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies - Non Fiction Paperback - Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - FT Business Book of the Year Longlisted

Condition: BRAND NEW Format: Paperback ISBN: 9781788169554 Publisher: Profile Books Overview: The Unaccountability Machine is Dan Davies' acclaimed exploration of why markets, corporations and governments so often produce outcomes nobody actually wanted. Drawing on the forgotten work of cybernetics pioneer Stafford Beer, Davies argues that large organisations behave like artificial intelligences with logic of their own, detached from the people inside them. Sharp and rigorously researched, this paperback is essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of institutional failure, from financial crashes to bureaucratic gridlock, and why "the system" is so rarely held to account. About the Book: When a decision goes wrong inside a large organisation, it can feel impossible to say who was actually responsible. Dan Davies sets out to explain why, reviving the largely forgotten ideas of Stafford Beer, a mid-twentieth-century management theorist who proposed that organisations should be understood as artificial intelligences: systems capable of making decisions that diverge entirely from the intentions of the humans who created them. Beer's discipline of management cybernetics argued for built-in self-regulation and accountability, but it was widely ignored, a road not taken whose absence, Davies suggests, helps explain many of today's political and economic crises. Davies introduces the concept of the "accountability sink," the point at which a decision gets buried inside a rulebook so thoroughly that no individual can be blamed for the outcome, however disastrous. Combining a former regulatory economist's rigour with a journalist's eye for a story, he ranges across banking collapses, corporate scandals and government failures to show how process quietly replaces judgement. Praised as both funny and genuinely illuminating, the book has been longlisted for the FT & Schroders Business Book of the Year and named a New Statesman Book of the Year. It gives readers a genuine