Biased towards bosses

The two main parties are promising to do something about executive pay. I don’t expect much to come of this, because politicians are, by their very nature, too sympathetic to managers.

This is not simply because they come from the same social class. Nor is it because MPs are bought off by the rich. It’s also because of a selection effect.

The sort of people who want to enter politics - as MPs, advisors or even reporters - are generally those who think that society and the state can be managed for the better. They are, therefore, predisposed to believe that management is, or can be, a socially useful activity, which means they are biased to think that chief executives, on average, should earn a lot.

The counterpart to this bias is that they underweight reasons to be sceptical about management. They overlook the possibility that limited knowledge, cognitive biases (big pdf) and diseconomies of scale undermine the general effectiveness of management. Even more worryingly, these biases causes them to downplay the extent to which managers are rent-seekers who use their power not to improve organizational performance but to extract cash for themselves.

Worse still, politicians don’t realize they have this bias. Because they are surrounded by like-minded people, they don’t see that their perspective is a biased and partial one; they are afflicted by deformation professionnelle. And the media, far from correcting this bias actually reinforce it - partly because they themselves have biases towards hierarchy, and partly because their pretence that “balance” consists in merely giving equal weight to Tory and Labour MPs squeezes out alternative views.

The upshot of all this is that we have a political-media class which is excessively sympathetic to bosses - and unreflectively so. In this sense, the state helps to protect the interests of the rich not (merely) because it has been bought, but because of selection and ideological mechanisms.

Comments

[Paul0Evans1]

Aside from your arguments here, I can barely think of any reasons why Labour shouldn't embrace an attack on managerialism. It's not something that has any appeal to ordinary party members, it would be lapped up by most Trades Unionists once they understood what was happening. It would give the party an enemy (as with businesses, this is always a good thing) and it'd provide ideological consistency and focus.

I don't agree with you that Labour MPs necessarily come from the managerial class either. I just don't think they're yet as immune to the overtures of managers as they are of out-and-out capitalist bastards.

The one good thing about the way that the political class behaves is that they can turn quite quickly. A few spiky newspaper columns attacking managerialism is almost all that would be needed to get that particular ball rolling.