Terrence Patrick Hewett
terence patrick hewett
09 August 2009 at 14:44
That the political classes have run out of ideas comes
as no surprise. They are like First World War
Generals of Cavalry, struggling to come to terms with
poison gas, aeroplanes and tanks. They are, poor
dears, blundering about in a world that they do not
understand. Mathematicians within financial
institutions came up with models using the Black-
Scholes formula and the Gaussian copula function;
but the non-mathematical bankers and politicians, not
understanding their limitations, assumed everybody
knew what they were doing; after all, they were all
making money so nothing could go wrong.
it has to be a function of a political class that is drawn
from such a narrow set of experience that they do not
understand that an enormous part of our life is now
controlled by mathematical algorithms, once set in
motion, chunter on until they reach their conclusion.
The inability to understand the implications of this is
not a failure of the free-market system but a failure of
governance and a failure of leadership at the highest
levels, both financial and political.
But these are things that can be fixed; what is of
greater concern is that we no longer, unlike Mrs
Thatcher, have Big Ideas; and this has given birth to a
race of small men in politics. How right C P Snow was
when he proclaimed in his lecture The Two Cultures;
"If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the
traditional culture responds by wishing the future did
not exist." It is this smallness of vision, the
narrowness of intellect, the simple lack of courage and
curiosity that shames us.
|
Page mailing to a friend temporary disabled
