Three hours on the phone trying vainly to change your broadband supplier. Waiting half an hour for customer service to be told ‘We’re very busy right now. Please hang up and try later.’ At the surgery: ‘Sorry, we can’t give you an appointment. You can only book a fortnight ahead.’ Who’s responsible? No one. And it’s not just in everyday life. Who signed up for pet hates like, at random, call-centres or supermarkets that stock what they want to sell not what you want to buy? Open-plan offices or hot desking? Did anyone ask us if the unimaginably rich should continue to get richer while everyone else gets poorer? That Elon Musk should be able to use X as a political weapon or to buy votes in the US election?

Common to this everyday story of the unreachable organisation are two elements. One is a broken or absent feedback link, the other frustration and rage. The two are linked in the fact that for anything to change, someone identifiable would have had to have made the decision in the first place. But no one did, so it doesn’t. It’s in the code, or the rule book, or ‘the system’. The phenomenon is what Dan Davies in his entertaining and elegantly written (how often can you say that about a management book?) The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions, calls an ‘accountability sink’ – the delegation of responsibility to rules, policy, convention, ideology – and increasingly to algorithms and AI, where no one can change it until something blows up or crashes, and it’s hastily escalated to a higher level.

Once you see it, accountability sinks are everywhere, from petty bureaucracy to world politics. Maximising shareholder value (MSV) is an accountability sink for self-interested management – the place where corporate ethics, morality or even the demands of long-term self-preservation go to die. The Washington consensus – a sink for rich globalists to rinse off responsibility for helping the global south. Politicians have long delegated swathes of policy to the market – remember Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’? – allowing consequences like deindustrialization or gross regional inequalities to be shrugged off as inevitable – just the way things are.

For Davies, the vacuum around accountability and the lack of agency it bequeaths to the rest of us is both the root cause of the rage now surging up among the world’s left behind and and the fertile breeding ground, diligently cultivated by the algorithms of social media, for conspiracy theories around the Deep State, shadowy world elites, and other imagined scapegoats, such as immigrants. Easy to see how it happens.

Of course, the world is too complicated to do without rules, bureaucracy and non-human decision-making. After all, we accept the law (mostly) as a framework for living together without overt conflict. But over time, the law has to change, even if slowly. And the urgent need now, Davies argues, is for missing feedback links to be restored in other areas, so that complaints can be addressed and bad decisions improved before the frustration boils over. How, in short, is the complexity of the world to be managed in ways that are receptive to feedback and thus can adapt and improve?

Certainly not through economics or management as they currently exist, snorts Davies – indeed, it’s their failings that have brought us to our current state of helpless frustration. Himself formerly a Bank of England economist, Davies excoriates his trade’s irrelevance to the real world – ‘the real blind spot of economics is the economy’ – and deplores its hegemonic influence on other social sciences, especially management, which thanks largely to Milton Friedman and his famous 1970 New York Times essay on the business of business being business, it largely annexed.

The problem with MSV, as the Friedman doctrine was synthesized, is that it dramatically oversimplifies the corporation’s multi-dimensional relationship with society, effectively crowding out any other concern, including considerations up to and including the survival of the planet. Management has largely gone along with this, partly out of self interest and partly because the maximisation of a single numerical value is easier to grasp and manage than trying to optimise the organisation for all its constituencies. Seizing on the potent enforcement weapon of debt, private equity and hedge funds have narrowed the focus still further, and are now hoovering up ever larger companies both good and bad, in every sector alike.

Not surprisingly, these developments have played havoc with ‘official’ versions of both economics and management. Revisionism is in full flow. In economics, on the IMF blog, no less, eminent economists queue up to describe what’s wrong with the discipline. In a striking mea culpa, Angus Deaton chides the profession for ignoring questions of power, without analysis of which ‘it is hard to understand inequality or much else in modern capitalism’. In management, the Global Peter Drucker Forum is trying to develop a ‘Next Management’, able to produce better commercial and social results in a world of AI and climate change. Notoriously, no economist or management expert predicted the 2007-2008 meltdown, or even appeared to notice the yawning inequalities engendered by globalisation, financialisation and the stupendous growth of big tech, let alone the consequences of the above in political terms – strongmen, plutarchy and a looming road to serfdom, not through socialism, as Friedrich Hayek predicted, but, lo and behold, the free market. Never have economics or management seemed to possess less predictive, explanatory or policy guidance power.

So where do we go from here? There are no simple answers. But Davies suggests a way forward in a surprising quarter: cybernetics and the writings of the engagingly eccentric but very serious Stafford Beer. Cybernetics, the science of control and communication in systems, emerged from operations research in WW2. It was highly influential in its day, with Beer, professor, consultant and information theorist, in high demand as adviser to organisations and even governments. Coming from a completely different place from the current accounting and finance-based model, cybernetic management is about information processing and variety rather than economics, and aims at viability rather than maximisation. It is one of a number of management roads not taken – perhaps to our cost now.

The first law of cybernetics is that in any control system, only variety can absorb variety; which in business translates as, the more variable and uncertain the operating environment, the more responsive and adaptable the organisation and its internal systems have to be. From a cybernetic angle, the kneejerk response of troubled companies to outsource, downsuze and purge middle management is often disastrously counterproductive, severing the feedback channels which could warn of things going wrong. Companies chasing MSV are particularly prone to this, Boeing and the UK water companies being eloquent current examples. From here it is a short step to Davies’ Darwinian conclusion that no system set up to maximise a single objective will survive in the long term, its single mindedness making it incapable of absorbing information that is putting its own life or even the life of humanity as a whole on the line, which is what it is doing now. In effect, it goes bonkers.

Davies argues that to open up space for new models of corporate governance and end today’s Gadarene rush to disaster, the starting point is to dismantle the private equity industry, MSV in its ‘purest’ form. How to do it? Simple: by making leveraged buyout firms responsible for the debts of the companies they buy out. By removing the accountability sink of limited liability, he suggests, ‘most of the attractiveness of using a company’s debt-servicing capacity to “buy it with its own money” is gone.’ Since viable systems seek stability, not maximisation, absent the all-consuming debt pressure ‘the natural equilibrium of corporate decision-making systems will be less hostile to human life.’

To be sure, in an ever more closely linked and complex world more non-human decision-making is inevitable. But if we can restore sufficient feedback links to to warn the system when life is becoming intolerable – AI and social media could be purposed to help here – people might be less furious, public debate less toxic and ‘the system’ less Kafkaesque. It would lighten the lot of the hard-pressed middle manager, too. As well as to his family, Davies dedicates his book to ‘the middle managers of the world, the designers of spreadsheets, and the writers of policies. Your work may be prosaic, but you are the ones who shape the world we live in.’