Cock Ups and Conspiracies
A famous adage tells us “never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence”.
On that basis, the recent catalogue of catastrophric failures ranging from Brexit to the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse might suggest managerial incompetence is the real pandemic of our time. As opposed, that is, to the relatively mild virus we could surely have dealt with without shutting down the world economy in a way that precipitated ongoing runaway inflation.
Indeed in a country like the UK where Boris Johnson, the most incompetent prime minister in British history was immediately knocked off the top spot by a replacement so bad she managed to kill both the economy and t̸h̸e̸ ̸q̸u̸e̸e̸n̸ her premiership in a matter of weeks it is hard not to think that the adage has been conclusively proven.
That adage, known as Hanlon’s Razor, receives support from concepts like the Peter Principle which argues people have a tendency to rise to their “level of respective incompetence”. For example someone like Boris might have been a perfectly acceptable Mayor of London but when elevated to a position requiring genuine leadership found himself completely out of his depth, although surprisingly not quite as completely as Lizz Truss.
