Interesting column from the FT’s Gillian Tett:
But if regulators and politicians are to have any hope of building a more effective financial system in future, it is crucial that they start thinking more about power structures, vested interests and social silence. That might sound like an irritatingly abstract or pious plea. However, it has some very practical implications about how policy is formulated. I will seek to flesh out some of those in next week’s column, in relation to some striking ideas being quietly developed by a few financial officials, such as Adair Turner, Britain’s chief regulator (and, by a happy chance, a former McKinsey consultant too).
Tett’s background as a social anthropologist is showing here. But of course part of the issue is that in our society economists have a lot more prestige than social anthropologists. For the economists who shape regulatory systems to admit the need to start thinking more about power structures, vested interests, and social silence would cut against their own vested interests and undermine the existing power structures.