502. Fraud, Cybernetics, and the Architecture of Unaccountability with Dan Davies

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Why do our most complex systems—from financial markets to corporate behemoths—consistently produce outcomes that nobody intended, and what forgotten science might hold the key to fixing them?

Dan Davies is an economist and author of the books, Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World and most recently, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind.

Dan and Greg discuss the complexities of fraud in financial systems and why no individual seems accountable for major financial crises, how the historical and intellectual foundations of cybernetics and systems thinking can be applied to improving organizational design, and the role of information theory in management.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Payment protection insurance
• “Canadian university loses $10m in phishing scam” | BBC
• “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” by Claude Shannon
• Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener
• Alan Turing
• Kurt Gödel
• Stafford Beer
• Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.
• Michael C. Jensen
• W. Ross Ashby

His Work:

• Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World
• The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind
• The Brompton: Engineering for Change

Episode Quotes:

Fraud thrives where trust exists

13:58: If you want to commit a big fraud, you don't go somewhere where there's low trust. You go somewhere where, as long as you show up, wear a nice suit, smile, and say please and thank you, people will assume that you're honest. But the thing is, that's what you want to do if you want to run a legitimate business too. So, people always say that the cost of fraud is never the amount of money that's stolen; it's the amount of legitimate business that doesn't get done. And that's just really saying that trust is an incredibly efficient way of organizing your economy compared to checking. Checking and trust are basically the only two kinds of technologies we have to ensure the integrity of information. And of the two of them, trust is a lot more efficient.

How fraud disrupts an economy

03:48: Fraud happens when not only does your assumption of perfect information break down, but there's some actual anti-information there. There's some actively false and misleading information that's been injected intentionally.

Why investors and economists lead in a data-driven era

58:40: A lot of the reason why economists rule the world in policy is the same reason why more and more companies are run by their investors or their investor relations departments. It's because they collect the data, and the economists collect the numbers that are used to make up the world of facts.