We often refer to values in argument even though we very rarely discuss what they are and what they mean. It is taken for granted that, “We all know what we mean” when, for example, an action is justified by reference to justice or freedom. This is a very large assumption when we remember that such concepts have been the stuff of philosophical debate for thousands of years. We hear expressions like “our values”; “Western values”; “the values of decent ordinary people” -- and to ask for details somehow implies that we are not ourselves decent ordinary people. Perhaps there were times in the past when a consensus on values could be assumed because, for example, the same religious beliefs were held across most of society. If that were the case, we might innocently have got into the habit of referring to values which never had to be made explicit. Personally, I doubt that there ever was such a golden age, not least because the links between religious beliefs and values are sufficiently complex that shared religious beliefs might never have generated widespread common values. But in the open and heterogenous society we now have it is extraordinary that anyone can honestly assume that values are so widely shared and understood that they do not need discussion but can simply be referred to by abstract nouns.

This tendency is present in everyday life but it is in political argument that it is most apparent. It is perfectly understandable that politicians are not (in the main) philosophers and their job is certainly not to analyse the meaning of words. Nevertheless, we do look to political leaders to articulate visions of what kind of society we will become and what kind of people we are, at least in our social aspects. So, is it asking too much that politicians should be able to spell out not merely practical policies, but the values which lie behind them, which is to say the vision of society that they represent? Increasingly however what we find is that politicians simply use value words like puppets in an old-fashioned Punch and Judy show. They hold up “Justice” and we cheer: they hold up “Privilege” and we boo. Perhaps we get the politicians we deserve, but with one or two honorable exceptions (I think of Robert Kennedy and Obama) we do not seem to get politicians who will articulate visions or values.

Perhaps though this complaint is to do with the medium and not the message. Perhaps it is simply the summarising and condensing of political messages into soundbites which gives the impression that no thought is given to values. Nevertheless, it remains true that people’s opinions, loyalties and allegiances are swayed on the basis of value words the meaning of which is never fully discussed. That in itself is a distortion of the democratic process.

But in recent years a worse habit has crept into political currency. Politicians use references to values not as a way of justifying their actions or of advancing discussion, but as a way of putting their actions beyond the need for justification and preventing discussion. The classic example is the defence of the invasion of Iraq. It seems to be enough for a politician to say, “I did what I thought was right”, to put the matter beyond further discussion.

Just think about this for a moment. What was done in this particular instance was, it is now agreed, done on false assumptions. There have been some significant benefits as a consequence for the people of Iraq, but there have also been very considerable hardships and difficulties, not least the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. A cruel dictator was overthrown, but the world is littered with cruel dictators and there is no general assumption that getting rid of them justifies external military intervention whenever the mood takes a country powerful enough to do it. This invasion was, on the very best and most generous interpretation, a huge mistake of a kind which should and usually would destroy a politician’s reputation and credibility.

But the defence is simply to say, “I did what I thought was right”. By appealing to values the discussion is apparently ended, the fox has gone to ground. It is considered inadmissible to question a person’s values, perhaps because it may seem to be an attack on their religious beliefs or perhaps because it may seem a personal attack, a person’s values being so intimately part of who they are. Not the least extraordinary aspect of this is the implicit assumption that our leaders act only in their own names and therefore need consider only their own values, not ours, in their decisions on our behalf. But public actions must surely be justified by reference to public values, to values that are open to public scrutiny, not simply by reference to anyone’s inscrutable conscience. “I did what I thought was right” is nowhere near good enough, unless it is the preamble to a full explanation of what made it seem so right.

We see the same pattern more and more as a justification of everyday political decisions. Leaders no longer say, “I think this is right because …” and go on to give a fuller explanation of the justification for their decision. They simply say, “I am doing this because it is right.” As soon as an ethical value is invoked further discussion or explanation is considered unnecessary. Values are being invoked not as part of an argument or an explanation but as a way of preventing them.

This tendency can only be harmful and it displays an astonishing arrogance on the part of those who use it. Of course values are an important part of the reasoning which supports any important political decision. But those values need to be explained and the more important the decision the more the values need to be explored. To use a value word like a trump card to end discussion shows a debasement of political language. It strongly reinforces the need to find ways of talking about values so that values can take their proper place in political discussion. “It is right” is not a proper justification of any action, it is at best an indication that an argument based on values may be about to follow. We need to talk about values to prevent this kind of political manipulation and take political discussion back to an honest level where both facts and values are open to challenge and discussion.

Is equality the answer?

Statistics on wealth and income distribution suggest that in the last decade our society has become less equal. Some members of the UK Government reportedly favour a drive towards equality as their USP for next year’s election. An interviewer for any job other than Government might ask why a decade heading in the opposite direction is a qualification for championing equality now, but that is not in fact the key question. The key question is whether equality should matter at all, even to the left.

It is easy to think that equality is what progressive politics has always been about. This is partly true, but when equality has been high on the progressive agenda the consequences have usually been disastrous. The cry for equality has been associated with the worst excesses of violent revolutions and the Terrors which usually follow them. It is of course true that inequality can be harmful to society, but usually only when other conditions are present, for example when people are so badly off they feel they no longer have a stake in society. Inequality is often a symptom of social problems rather than the disease and prescribing equality is a mistake which has often killed the patient, as in the aftermath of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions.

For several decades progressive thinking has been organised around the idea of social justice, often taking the work of John Rawls as its intellectual justification. But social justice is no more than equality disguised by hiding its ugliest consequences. Rawls saw social justice as fairness, where some inequality is allowed but has to be justified by the benefits it provides to the disadvantaged. In fact he put forward a sophisticated version of the childhood practice of ensuring that a cake is evenly divided by making the cutter choose their piece last. Rawls’ theory, as its critics have often pointed out, begs the question why equality is the only fair distribution anyway. As a snapshot of society at a particular moment a state of perfect equality might look fair, but only because all the dynamic elements, including the history which led up to that moment and the evolution which will then take place, have been taken out of the picture. It is dynamism which makes equality absurd, the whole business of what to do once everyone has been made equal and then some work harder, smarter or luckier than others. Must we constantly rebalance to maintain equality? If you accept this answer, you have either to explain why society will not grind to a halt because nothing is worth any effort, or else allow so much power to the State to effect constant redistribution that society will succumb to tyranny.

This last idea, that equality is incompatible with any degree of freedom, became associated in the eighties with the right-wing theorist Friedrich von Hayek. It was taken by Lady Thatcher’s circle as an argument against a socially active State, but that was a mistake which has discredited the underlying idea. It is only an argument against a State which attempts to impose the false goal of equality. The idea that the pursuit of equality leads to tyranny goes back at least two hundred years earlier to David Hume, the finest mind of the Scottish Enlightenment (writing, all the more impressively, before the excesses of the French Revolution). Equality cannot be maintained without the constant and intrusive exercise of power and is therefore incompatible with freedom. That is not a right wing theory, it is a fact supported by a great deal of evidence. It would be dishonest of the left to pretend otherwise just to mislead the disadvantaged into lending their support.

Political thinking is easily polarized by word pairs. It often happens that the negative form of a word has the real power and misleads us into going too far in the opposite direction. Equality is not a good thing just because inequality can be very bad. Injustice, by way of comparison, is the powerful concept of the justice/injustice pair. As Amartya Sen has recently argued, important though it is to remove injustice we should not conclude that perfect justice is a feasible aim, any more than we should conclude that history can have an end. As an aside, inequality itself is often caused by past injustice, but even then it does not automatically follow that it will be just to deal with inequality by trying to recreate what we think might have happened without the wrongs of the past. How many new injustices would we create by so doing?

So we might ask, heretically, why is inequality wrong? If I have sufficient, for example, does it even matter that you have more? To insist that it does verges on the unworthy but easily sold politics of envy. If I do not have sufficient the case is very different - but what surely needs to be addressed is how my lack can be put right. Insufficiency is what should concern us, not inequality. We cannot begin to find solutions until we see this clearly. Injustice might sometimes be at the root of the problem, but not every inequality, not even every insufficiency, is someone else’s fault. Redistribution might contribute to a solution, as everyone but the most rabid right wing apologist will accept. But redistribution which does not cure the insufficiency may be pointless and excessive redistribution may do damage of its own. Whenever equality becomes a political goal in its own right ideology has taken over from common sense. Insufficiency is the real enemy but the questions which need answering before action are empirical, not ideological.

We should be deeply concerned about genuine insufficiency, not only in our own society but around the world. As an expanding world population meets the effects of climate change that concern will become the key challenge of the future. But mistaking that challenge for a problem about equality helps no one and confuses issues which already wallow in interest politics and ideology. European politics has been arranged for a long time along a left/right, equality/freedom axis. A shift to an axis which has insufficiency at one extreme may already be under way, but it is much needed. Such a shift might help us to accept not only that insufficiency should be the focus of concern but that excess is at the other extreme. If that is so, the equilibrium position may be to learn how to be content with sufficient. That will be enough of a challenge.

Respect

I have come across a number of discussions recently about the idea of “respecting other people’s beliefs” which set me thinking about the strands of meaning that are tangled up in that much used phrase.

Political values and private values

Politics is usually about interests, about which group is to get what they want. Politicians constantly appeal to values in their rhetoric (generalities like our values, traditional values, family values, working class values, national values, even “the values of ordinary working people”: or particular values like fairness, equality, social justice, freedom etc.) but it is rare that values actually play a part in political decision making. Usually politics is a more cynical business. Unfortunately that means that our public world, our society, is also cynical and largely value-free. Many politicians like to pretend that values are the difference between their side and their opponents (“We have sound values, they are opportunists”) but nearly always such rhetoric is an attempt to make the majority feel good about pursuing their own interests, for example by rolling out or rolling back the power of the State. Perhaps we should not be surprised when politicians (deniably) sponsor torture, indiscriminate bombing or other acts which in private life would see them shamed and locked up, because values have all but been driven from the public arena.

The lack of values in real politics is nothing new. It was well known in principle and ancient in practice long before Machiavelli dared to put it in writing in pre-Reformation Florence. What was shocking about Machiavelli was that he suggested cynical opportunism in politics in a time and place when Christian values were held up as a model for both private and public morality. There was at least a pretence that the same values were shared and applied at every level and that departures from these values were aberrations and exceptions. Machiavelli, writing to curry favour with princely tyrants, let the cat out of the bag: politics was about power and interests, not values at all.

But is this really what we want? Perhaps bad behaviour is to be expected of tyrants but why should we condone such a lack of public values when we have democratic forms of government? Why do we not expect the upholding of values to be at the heart of politics? In private life of course we often put our own interests and desires above our values, even if we sometimes feel a little ashamed of so doing. But when it comes to public life, to creating the kind of society and indeed the kind of world we want to live in, why do we allow an even lower standard to apply?

One of the problems with public or political values is that we no longer have a clear shared base of private values. Our values are drawn from so many different sources that, although we have bits and pieces in common, there is no shared heart we all understand and can appeal to. A related problem is that we do not even know how to discuss and debate ethical questions. Groups within society may hold strong views about certain questions of value, but they cannot persuade the rest unless, for example, the rest share their religious beliefs or their ideology. Groups can’t really talk to each other (as opposed to shouting at each other) because they are making different assumptions and even using different concepts, different language. However, if there is no commonly accepted way of discussing ethical questions because discussion stops at the boundaries of belief or culture, then in practice society has no values. There is thus a real danger that a free, pluralist society becomes an amoral society, a society without values.

We all recognise that democratic arrangements do not settle ethical questions. No one says, on being outvoted, “Ah, now I see that I was wrong about this issue!” We come to political compromises or we just accept that a vote has gone against us but we can’t find the answers to ethical questions this way. If people share values (meaning they already agree at some level of principles) it’s easy, but if they don’t it just doesn't work. That of course is why it is so difficult to impose democracy on communities fundamentally divided about values. Genuine democracy, something that goes beyond mere head counting and doesn’t leave the minority feeling alienated and aggrieved every time, assumes that questions about values can be discussed. But discussion about values rarely happens now in any society: the best we get even from those who care about values is to label those who disagree as bad or evil or sinful.

The difficulty of taking collective ethical decisions is not, let us be clear, a criticism of democracy. Whatever the form of government, what is done in the public sphere rests on individual choices. In the many forms of modern tyranny (whether it be one-party rule, military dictatorship or theocracy) decisions depend on the particular interests, prejudices and perhaps principles of the tyrant(s). In democracy, people are likely to choose as their rulers those who promise to promote their interests or those whose values seem to approximate theirs. If values are to play a significant role it must happen at the level of the individual. We may suspect that politicians in general will only respect certain values if they believe that the people respect them and thus that to betray those values will end their power. Be that as it may, if there are to be such things as political or social values they have to rest on private values. If we are not clear about our values then no system of government will see them realised. If our personal values are incoherent or arbitrary what is the basis even of our personal decisions, the decisions we make every day and which shape the kind of lives we lead and the kind of people we are? There isn’t one. So how can our collective decisions be any better?

We pay lip service to the idea of values and ethical standards both in our private lives and in politics. We believe that values both shape our individual lives and hold society together. And yet we no longer have a coherent idea about what values are and where they come from. There is a void where our values should be. Or if you prefer a different metaphor, the house of values is built on sand. Quicksand.

A principle of sufficiency

(Extracted from notes for new book)

From Rousseau to Rawls people who think seriously about what politics ought to be doing have focused on equality. It has been a talisman or icon of progressive politics. Over time the idea has perhaps changed from flat-out equality (always a hard sell, even Marx shied away from it) into something more like “fairness” or “social justice” but the underlying idea is still the same, that differences have to be justified or there is something wrong about them. This leads us into straight into one of the (many) paradoxes of our economic system, particularly as it applies in the UK. We praise and applaud the free market and its operation but are suspicious or just plain envious of anyone who succeeds to a level we might think of as excess. It’s OK to strive to be rich, but not actually to be rich.

The scope of differences which need either justification or eradication to avoid being offences against equality has widened through time. Such widening is inevitable when the claim of inequality becomes, as it has become, sufficient to establish a political right to remedial action. “It’s not fair!” has become the battle cry of special interest politics of all shades and from all sides. Of course there are many things which genuinely are not fair but the boundaries are always difficult to draw if equality is the model of fairness we use. Where do we stop? It’s a question which is difficult to answer in terms both of quality and quantity. What kinds of difference call for collective action and social change? And what degree of inequality, if any, is tolerable?

There is so much inequality in the world and so much suffering caused by it that this emphasis on equality is more than understandable. If we just focus on material inequality we cannot turn away from the searing poverty which affects so many millions in the world. Most people would agree that such suffering is an affront to civilization although we seem unable to devise practical means of eradicating it. A call for equality, or even “more equality”, may nevertheless be a mistake and point us in the wrong direction. Suffering associated with inequality does not necessarily need equality for its eradication. In fact, this is increasingly accepted in political practice and even in political rhetoric. In domestic matters politicians on all sides tend to talk about their vision of a fairer society where once they might have talked of a fair society. It’s a quiet but sensible shift for many reasons. Aiming for incremental improvement is more realistic, in terms both of achievability and of managing expectations, than aiming for perfection. In any case, the point has repeatedly and bloodily been made by history that enforcing absolute equality requires some form of tyranny because complete equality is simply not an equilibrium state and will not maintain itself.

But if we abandon the idea of equality what principle can we stand on which can both explain our sense of outrage at gross poverty and provide an argument to move others? We can go back to first principles about happiness and the inner life. The desire to live happily can be taken as a common human aspiration, beyond differences of time and culture. Of course there are vast cultural differences in what a person may perceive as the happy life in different times and places but understanding the importance of the subjective, of the inner life, is a fundamental step away from total dependence on external conditions. Happiness can be based on taking personal responsibility for the development of one’s own inner life. From this basis we can build back up into external ethical and indeed political principles which can be applied (not as a matter of perfect deduction but) because they encapsulate sensible practice towards reinforcing positive aspects of the inner life.

One consequence of this approach is that external, material well-being takes a much more subsidiary place. Provided basic material needs are satisfied (and accepting that what counts as a basic need may be subject to some cultural variation) happiness is within everyone’s reach because it depends on their own inner life. From this point of view the idea that material equality is a necessary condition of fairness or justice seems very strange.

Instead we might suggest a principle of sufficiency. On the level of material resources what is needed for anyone’s practice, and what anyone who is serious about developing their own inner life would like to see available to all as a matter of sympathy and compassion, is not equality but sufficiency. It would be a huge improvement if everyone had sufficient to meet their basic needs, from which point the possibility of living a happy life would be as open to them as to the richest in the world. We are of course left with all the practical issues of how to achieve this but the idea frees us from a particularly vicious dilemma. If equality is our model it can seem that for any person and indeed any nation to be richer than another is somehow wrong, but then it can seem that more planet-damaging growth is the only answer. Sufficiency is a more practical target.

But sufficiency is a subtle knife which cuts both ways, because the richest might also accept that there is a point at which enough really is enough, even though there might be disagreement over where that point was located. Indeed, the charitable trusts which have long been created by those who have won the race to maximise capital are an example of this principle in action, perhaps best exemplified today by the Gates’ trust. If compassion is an important practice then there are without doubt obligations on the rich to help the poor, on the national as on the personal level. But those obligations end at sufficiency, not equality.

There is much more to this argument than can be set out [in a blog]. But try it out, not as a doctrine but as a way of looking at the world. It accommodates that sense of outrage we feel at gross inequality, without courting the whole raft of new injustices which enforced equality would produce. It accommodates, if you like, the view that everyone has an equal right to develop their own happiness but that consumption is not the point of our existence. It is one of those simple shifts in point of view which makes everything look different.

Holiday reading

[I’m more than a little horrified to realise I haven’t added anything to this blog since February. Even allowing for a lot of work on the new book, a month’s silent meditation retreat, two major birthdays (one of which was actually mine) and a new grandchild, it’s not good. Must try harder! Will try harder!]

Right now I’ve just returned from a holiday in Menorca, my favourite kind of holiday where you just sit by water in the heat and shade and read all the things you have been meaning to read for ages. Apart from the obligatory trashy thrillers I spent a lot of time reading Mary Midgley who has become a new hero(ine). It’s very rare to find someone who thinks so clearly but laterally and can express all the nuances of a complicated argument without ever lapsing into any kind of jargon or, a common fault among even the best philosophers, burdening her prose with so many qualifications in an attempt to reach perfect precision that the text becomes almost unreadable. (She wouldn’t have written that sentence for a start…) She’s particular good on the peculiar superstition we have that we are better and less savage than other animals and on the confusion of the “mind-body” split but she has interesting and enlightening things to say about many areas of ethics and politics. And her now famous metaphor of philosophy as plumbing (you don’t notice concepts/pipework when things are working but when things go wrong you have to get a philosopher/plumber to take the floorboards up and sort out the mess) is even better than Wittgenstein’s metaphor about showing the fly the way out of the fly bottle.

I also enjoyed Susan Nieman’s “Moral Clarity” which I gather was a great success in the US last year. It’s very US oriented and admits to being driven by indignation about US politics, namely the loss of moral clarity/moral courage among pre-Obama Democrats which allowed the neo-con right to claim that it alone was driven by traditional values. Nieman thinks that progressive politics can rediscover its way from the Enlightenment, particularly in an understanding of the proper scope of reason and importantly its limits, a point which usually gets less emphasis. The other key is the importance of ideals as understandings about how things should be as opposed to how they are. She backs her case not only with interesting analyses of Rousseau, Voltaire and particularly Kant but with Biblical stories about Abraham and Job. Like Midgley (currently my highest form of praise) she has a clear, uncluttered prose style. Is she right? Only partly, I think, but that’s pretty good and without doubt she’s illuminating. And the underlying problems are timely and need attention. What, other than naked self interest, should inform political choices? Are there such things as political principles and if so how can they be justified? People can answer these questions easily with ideology, religious and otherwise. The poignancy of our situation is that we are sceptical about ideology but still need answers.

Amartya Sen’s book on justice, by contrast, was very disappointing. It feels like a book by someone who is so thoroughly immersed in academic life, which of course the great man is, that everyday communication rather escapes him. There are lots of name checks and carefully nuanced disagreement with ideas we never thought were right anyway. The main thrust is that John Rawls 50-year old theory of justice won’t do, although Rawls was a thoroughly good chap, both of which views lots of people agree with. (Surely Rawls is the high watermark of social contract thinking, who unwittingly shows what contortions are necessary to make sense of the idea of a social contract and thus that it has limited appeal?) Sen is surely right that we can often say “This situation is unjust, it would be better if it were like this” without having a perfectly defined picture of what a perfect state of justice would look like. But did anyone really think we couldn’t? I’m not sure even John Rawls thought that there was nothing that could be said about justice in particular cases until the perfectly just society had been defined. Sen is on more interesting ground suggesting that we could and probably do operate with different criteria of what makes something just and that these criteria can clash with each other. To me that shows that justice, like many political concepts, is more of a metaphor than a precise concept when it is used outside its original (law based) context. A true “theory of justice” would illuminate how the concept works in different contexts without necessarily assuming that there is an underlying unity in these uses. If that is what Sen is suggesting, well and good, but the suggestion doesn’t amount to a theory of anything, it’s just a work proposal. But maybe I’m too dim to grasp what is being proposed.

“Always bet against the end of the world.”

I once discussed the Cuban missile crisis with a senior director of the City firm where I worked. He told me he had made pocket money at school by taking bets on whether a nuclear war would break out. His schoolmates were convinced destruction was imminent as Kennedy and Krushchev faced off but he was happy to take all bets. “Always bet against the end of the world” he told me. “If you lose, you won’t be there to pay and no one will be left to claim their winnings.”

Betting against the end of the world is the nearest thing to a free lunch. It’s what people do when they take large positions against a weak stock or currency, say. It is more or less what the mortgage bankers did. It’s not that they were all too stupid to see the systemic risk, although some may have been. They probably underestimated it, yes, but they understood that if the whole structure collapsed it would be the end of their world. Who would the winners be? And where would they collect their winnings?

That’s the frightening thing about the credit crunch. It was not just caused by pride, stupidity or irrational greed. Those things contributed, but the frightening thing is that the actions of the players involved were perfectly rational, provided the system did not collapse. But whose job was it to look after the system? Actually, not the bankers’. It’s hard to see why so many of them are justified in keeping knighthoods for services to the financial sector or services to banking which were clearly based on utterly mistaken assessments. Why hasn’t this been a focus of public anger? But still, it wasn’t their job to save the system. They bet against the end of the world, which is normally a clever move. They just lost.

Whose job is it to look after the system? People who work with markets tend to believe that the market knows best. They believe it mainly because they know how hard it is to beat the market. The market tells you the price, not the other way round. So when the market tells you that the price for a lot more risk is only an extra fifty basis points, say, that’s the price, take it or leave it. If it’s your job to trade such risk you may have no choice but to take it, whatever your misgivings. But markets are made by no more than the sum of everyone’s actions. If everyone is mistaken, or forced to go along by the pressures of their job, the market will mislead. Time and time again markets lead people astray because they provide prices based on other people’s mistakes.

For example, in the late seventies and into the eighties banks made loans to developing countries at tiny margins over the banks’ borrowing costs, because that is what the market said was the right price. You could choose not to be in that market, but you could not choose to participate at a different price. And the fact is that people made a lot of money as they went along from arrangement fees and syndication fees and suchlike, so it was a brave banker who was prepared to explain to the board why their bank was on the sidelines.

In the eighties shares in Japanese companies went up in price beyond everyone’s idea of what a share should cost, but kept on going. Japan was a large part of the world market in shares and no portfolio could hope to perform well if it did not invest in Japan. Many professional investors tried to stand aside, but “the market” proved them wrong by just going on up. It might not have mattered for one year, say, but the Japanese market outlasted the patience of trustees and asset owners by going up year after year, so that professionals got fired for not investing in Japan. People invented all kinds of reasons why shares were not overvalued until of course the market crashed, providing a foretaste of 2008.

We have financial regulators, but they mainly regulate companies not markets. In any case, they will always be confounded by banks who promise success provided the system works as it is. Regulators are unlikely even to spot a bet against the end of the world, such bets are apt to seem sensible if you are the one looking after the world. But markets don’t always work and it really matters when they don’t. That is why we need a different kind of market oversight. There is no invisible hand, just a lot of people making among them many small mistakes, which sometimes cancel out but sometimes add up to a big mistake. Of course there is an important role for detecting and deterring dishonesty. But someone has to stand back and look at the system as a whole. The question is, can anyone do the job? Too heavy a hand and enterprise and innovation are stifled: too light and the system crashes. Any regulator stands outside the pressures of the market, which is why he/she will always be secretly despised by participants anyway. But looking after the system means sometimes stopping the party when it is in full swing, before the partygoers get so drunk they fall out of the windows.

No politician would dare do it and every politician would be lobbied hard to tell such a regulator to back off when it really mattered. Can a democracy then provide effective financial oversight, moderating the risk in the system as a whole? It’s a difficult question, because the overseer would have huge responsibility and require enormous powers. Perhaps we should have an official whistleblower, preferably not a government appointee, preferably without executive responsibility and therefore without an incentive to report that they have everything in hand. This inspector would report regularly and require governments to give a full public account of why they accepted or rejected the advice. That way, power and accountability would remain where they should be, with the elected government. Would this help? Alas, maybe not, for perhaps the unlucky incumbent would either be lulled by decades of apparent success into not noticing danger ("Not My Fault" Gordon springs to mind), or ignored as a Cassandra. We may have to accept that markets will continue to boom and bust. If so, economies will follow them, whatever anyone says.