No. They asked an expert, or a panel of experts.
Herein lies danger. There are lots of experts on things where we have no real expertise yet. What should be your ration of EV to ICE sales per year? Well there’s experts who will tell you, but we don’t really KNOW because this is the first time we are facing this question.
My employers recently had a workshop to help men be better men, or something. They weren’t just looking at things like accepting that you may have to report to a woman, or GBV (though they spoke to the latter), but also problems that men have but won’t talk about (this is broader than erectile dysfunction) and a higher rate of suicide in men of a certain age.
The chair was somebody who has expertise in “facilitating”. One of the experts was a medical doctor but not specialising in men’s health. The other was a well known TV actor (those were his qualifications).
They had no data. Which was very unhelpful. The suicide rate in men is higher? OK. By how much? What is the variance with age? Who is at risk here? What are the likely drivers of this? No answers.
They did sort of touch on how it was OK to talk to your bros if you were having a tough time, but didn’t have a way of dealing with a possible situation where your bro doesn’t want to hear that, or has nothing to offer.
They did spend a lot of time talking about how much allowance you should pay your girl friend each month. This was in the section about “black tax”.
Now I don’t doubt that the employers had genuine concern and empathy, even if only because happy staff will work better than unhappy staff, and are less likely to look for a better situation because their current situation is a happy one. I don’t doubt their motives. I don’t doubt that they went looking for people who could give good advice.
But this bunch of experts didn’t have much expertise when push came to shove. A question was raised about what to do when the tables are turned. A male employee had been inappropriately touched by a female employee. What should he do? Would anybody even believe him and take the report seriously? This was supported by other members of the audience, I’m guessing because the same woman had fondled more than one man (though maybe rubbing a guy’s thigh to see the look on his face is some sort of odd joke). It got shut down very quickly because of course none of the panel really had a clue.
Ah there. I feel so much better now.
But it’s like COVID. A lot of what was done when that disease started spreading was a mix of best practice (hand washing) and guess work because nobody had had to deal with a pandemic for decades. Scientists had warned that there would be one, but could not predict the nature of the virus. Nobody knew how it would mutate. Nobody knew what the mortality rates would be.
As time went by we learned more about it and could modify our approach.
And this is really how humanity deals with a lot of things: we improvise, we muddle along, hopefully we take the advice of John Maynard Keynes: “when the facts change, I change my mind.”
I sometimes wish that governments would be honest about not having answers, or that they may have to shift their position as more is learned. But we don’t like that. We like a politician who says it’s all the fault of A, and so my government will do B, C and D. This is before they’ve got into government and actually seen all that stuff that is kept for goverment eyes only.
Example: When the Tory/LibDem coalition took power in the UK, David Cameron and particularly Nick Clegg quickly came under fire for doing a U-turn on campaign promises they had made. A seasoned political reporter from (IIRC) the Telegraph wrote a sympathetic piece in which he pointed out that the men had had no part of government despite having several years in Parliament, that there was information, mostly financial and security, that is reserved for PMs and their inner circles only, that in their first few days they would have had briefings from the reserve bank, from MI-5, from MI-6, from the chief of the Army, and so on, and been told things that they would not have even imagined, that would have had their hair standing up and their eyes popping out of their sockets. And at that point they had to abandon some of what they’d promised because now they understood the real nature of the game they were playing.
We are buskers. If we’re honest, that’s what we do. There’s a problem, we chip away at it, and we find that we’re chipping in the wrong direction or with too heavy a hand (or not heavy enough) and so the better thing to do is to shift policy rather than do what you promised because you promised it even though it’s now clear that another approach will give you better results.
According to the experts.
