‘No battle plan survives contact with the enemy’ was a sentiment expressed by Field Marshall von Moltke (the Elder), who knew a thing or two about military strategy. A transposition…

In a recent blog, the Insight Team highlighted the dangers of poorly constructed policies in terms of the increased distractions imposed on managers at the expense of a focus on business investment and innovation. In this follow-up, we consider recent financial market turbulence as another example of policy gone wrong. We argue that help in assessing and learning from it might lie in an appreciation of both history and the present – from the work of Adam Smith to recent developments in modern neuroscience, in particular the insights of Iain McGilchrist.

Routine and its limitations’ completes a short cycle of three blogs with a common, thematic root: dysfunctions in the division of labour within governmental systems. The focus in this case is on a temporal pattern that can be observed in the evolution of some regulatory agencies or systems. It adopts Daniel Kahneman’s metaphor of System 1 and System 2 thinking, but uses it to characterise institutional and organisational, rather than individual, thinking.

The latest Insights blog is concerned with narrowness of vision in economic policy/regulation and the distraction that is a contributory cause of it. It is motivated by the question: how might better institutional design counteract distraction? Features of Monasteries, Plato’s Academy and Roman Watchtowers are cited as examples of ancient institutional innovations from which insights might be gleaned.

The second in the new Insights into Regulation series of short blogs addresses the causes and effects of a highly dysfunctional ‘division of labour’ in government, with a focus on misdirection and distraction in the application of effort The title is taken from Hamlet’s soliloquy (“To be, or not to be …) and the notion of the insolence of officialdom was, at a later time, a repeated trope in the major works of Adam Smith.

In a new series of short blogs under the thematic title ‘Insights into Regulation’, members of the Regulatory Policy Institute Research Group will highlight a particular insight, idea or perspective that is salient to some or other aspect of regulatory policy. Given the observed limitations of quantitative emissions reduction agreements, we explore the role of complementary science and technology approaches based on sharing of knowledge and know-how in mitigating relevant externalities.