Purposive Drift

Listen for the silences

I missed Laura Barton's Guardian interview with the FT's Gillian Bett, but thanks to the ever alert Russell Davies I've now picked it up. I've been following Gillian Bett for some time, because she was one the first journalists to warn about the dangers of derivatives, but I didn't know much about her or her background. What I hadn't realised was that she trained as an anthropologist and attributes her insights into derivatives to that training:

"'I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,' she reasons. "Firstly, you're trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don't do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.'

'But the other thing is, if you come from an anthropology background, you also try and put finance in a cultural context. Bankers like to imagine that money and the profit motive is as universal as gravity. They think it's basically a given and they think it's completely apersonal. And it's not. What they do in finance is all about culture and interaction.'"

She goes on to say, "... one of the things I learned as an anthropologist is that to understand how a society works you need to not just look at the areas of what we call 'social noise' - ie what everyone likes to talk about, so the equity markets and M&A and all the high-profile areas everyone can see. But you need to look at the social silences as well."

Do go on to read the whole interview, as I said in an earlier post,this one is "Not just for anthropologists", nor for that matter just for people interested in finance or business, but for all of us, particularly her admonition that "you need to look at the social silences". Advice we would all do well to notice.