(2024-07-12) Harford Whos Responsible For Our Accountability Problem

Tim Harford: Who’s responsible for our accountability problem? I was recently scheduled to present my Cautionary Tales podcast live on stage as a curtainraiser for a podcast conference

There was only one problem. Nobody seemed to have the authority to let me in.

lady there seemed puzzled: the conference wouldn’t officially open until tomorrow, so I didn’t need a pass. Just walk in, she said. The security guard had a different view. He had been given strict instructions that nobody gets in without a pass. Talk to the conference team, he told me. Nothing to do with us, they said — talk to security.

I realised I was facing what the writer Dan Davies has named an “accountability sink”, in which it was somehow nobody’s fault. In his recent book The Unaccountability Machine, Davies explains the basic logic of an accountability sink: decision-making power is removed from individuals you might want to shout at

matter of policy emerging from the Dutch department of agriculture. Policy is policy, not something that gets overruled by manual workers in airport sheds wearing protective gloves and standing next to an industrial shredder and a few crates of squirrels.

The policy itself was probably sensible. The problem was that there was no way to identify and deal with exceptional cases

Accountability sinks can have a legitimate purpose. When the pressure is on, it’s tempting to play favourites or take short-cuts, prioritising the noisiest complaints or putting off painful consequences. “Computer says no” may be a punchline, but the computer is a useful way to deflect awkward customers. It also often makes the right choice.

Yet all too often accountability sinks are created for the simple, ignoble reason that nobody wants to be held accountable if they can avoid it. Even worse, the sink may be fictional, a mere scapegoat.

Faced with such an enormous range of misfiring accountability sinks, is there anything useful we can say about what we could change to make things better? Perhaps there is. The common thread here is an imperviousness to feedback.