Like algorithms humans can also produce peculiar and unjust decisions, and be almost just as faceless.
Sir, Gillian Tett writes: “as institutions increasingly rely on predictive algorithms to make decisions, peculiar — and often unjust — outcomes are being produced.” “The tragic failings of faceless algorithms”
Indeed, but humans are also capable of producing peculiar and unjust decisions.
What could be more peculiar than regulators wanting banks to hold more capital against what by being perceived as risky has been made innocous to the bank system, than against what, because it is perceived as safe, is so much more dangerous?
And what is more unjust than because of these regulation allowing easier financing to those who want to buy houses, than to those entrepreneurs who are looking for a possibly life changing opportunity of a credit.
Ms Tett quotes mathematician Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction with: “Ill-conceived mathematical models now micromanage the economy, from advertising to prisons,” she writes. “They’re opaque, unquestioned and unaccountable and they ‘sort’, target or optimise millions of people . . . exacerbating inequality.”
Well “opaque, unquestioned and unaccountable” that applies equally to the bank regulators who do all seem to follow late Robert McNamara’s advice of “Never answer the question that is asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you”
And on “exacerbating inequality”, the regulators de facto decreed inequality
@PerKurowski
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