Back in the days when I ran a record label, I noticed an interesting asymmetry. To the record-buying public, the charts were a musical race where the best song won. In reality, the song was only part of the story. We also have to factor in things like marketing strategy and budget, music video, payments to retailers (you didn’t think they just put a record in their windows because they liked it, did you?), music press, and
playlist committees.

So what was the asymmetry? Well, whenever a band’s record was a hit, they saw it as definitive proof of the quality of their song. However, if a record didn’t make it, it wasn’t seen as proof of a bad song; it was proof the label had screwed up the release. However, the really interesting asymmetry came to light when a band looked at the chart performances of rivals.

Whenever a rival band had a hit, it was always despite a “very ordinary” if not actually “crap”, song. It was all about the implementation; Creation Records (or whoever it was) “always get bands on Top of the Pops”.

When an economic policy we approve of fails, we blame the implementation: it wasn’t done properly

On the other hand, if a rival’s release didn’t chart, that was obviously because the song was terrible. Bands used different standards to explain their own successes and failures than those of their rivals: one rule for us; one rule for them.

No great surprise there – what can you expect from bloody musicians, eh?

Well, it isn’t just musicians who do this. I’ve seen it in authors, film directors, actors, copywriters, and economists. Economists? Yes, me!

I caught myself doing it a couple of weeks ago. I had to write an evaluation of an economic policy that had failed. I’d liked the policy, and that, I suddenly realised, had automatically led me to look for problems in its implementation. Yikes.

Once the scales had fallen from my eyes, I realised we all fall into this kind of asymmetric judgement all the time.

When an economic policy (or political idea) we approve of fails, we blame the implementation: it wasn’t done properly.

Yet, when an idea we don’t like fails, we don’t bother looking at the implementation at all. In these cases we’re certain it failed because it was a bad idea which now stands naked for all to see.

Asymmetric judgement isn’t a good route to truth. A particularly vivid example of its dangers is the collapse of Logical Positivism. The Positivists sought a secure foundation for knowledge, an important prerequisite of which was the elimination of “nonsense”.

Their approach was neatly encapsulated in the famous Verification Principle: “The meaning of a proposition is its method of verification.”

Accordingly, if a proposition has no conceivable method of verification, it’s meaningless. How would you verify something like: “There has always been an unknowable force guiding the history of mankind”?

The verification principle allowed the Positivists to eliminate great swathes of impressive sounding, but actually vacuous claims. It looked like real progress was being made.

However, guess what the Positivists forgot to do? They forgot to subject their own ideas to the same standards of judgement they set for everyone else. Specifically, how does one verify the verification principle? Urrr… you can’t. Ergo, it is, by its own standards, nonsense. When an idea we like fails, we blame the implementation. When an idea we don’t like fails, we blame the idea.

We must be on our guard against this way of thinking. Each of us is, or at least should be, the arbiter of the ideas with which we stock our belief system. If we don’t use consistent standards of judgement, we cheat ourselves and render our commitments effectively worthless. Here are a couple of deliberately contentious examples. First, the opponents of Communism will usually say it has never worked in practice. If you agree with that, it’s important to look at the specifics of any failures. Could it have been the implementation?

Second, a committed Remainer “always knew” Brexit would fail. Once again, if this is you, integrity demands you look dispassionately at the implementation. For instance, how many EU regulations have been removed from the UK’s statute books? Which ones? Is it possible the Civil Service never had any intention of allowing Brexit to work?

We all know that success and failure are determined by the combination of the quality of the idea or product and its implementation. However, when we think about ideas we like and ideas we do not, we all too easily turn into band members.

Peter Lawlor is the Principal Economic Advisor to 7Ridge Capital. He was formerly the Principal Economic Advisor to the German Stock Exchange (Deutsche Börse), and continues to act as an adviser to senior Wall St figures and political leaders. These are his own views and should not be imputed to any organisations with which he is, or has been, affiliated