BLAME

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

Blame is a major factor in social and economic efficiency. You only have to remember how much time was wasted at school with teachers trying to find out who did something rather than putting right what was wrong.

The theory behind this was that we should learn to "Own up" to our misdemeanours but that was a tough order to carry out in the face of almost certain physical violence. I learned early in life that the only cohort of women more brutal than the Sisters of Charity were the Sisters of Mercy. Later the punishments were meted out by men, with the priests being as vigorous as the rest. This kind of violence has largely been abandoned but more out of fear of litigation than because it was seen to be a morally bankrupt method of helping children to understand the importance of honesty.

Contrary to the self-serving theory of the rich that poverty keeps people honest and out of temptation; it does the opposite. So in my case, as the contest was unequal I never owned up, in spite of my supposed precocity in many matters.

• First, I didn't fancy being beaten for a trivial misdemeanour.
  
  
• Secondly, the authorities rarely carried out their ritual threat to beat all of us because none of us would own up.
  
  
• Thirdly, I thought the terms of the social contract were grossly unfair as it seemed not to include generosity, mercy or even forgiveness which were watchwords of the classroom and the chapel.
  
  
• Finally, and this is the least attractive, there was simply no incentive; it didn't make sense.

The cane may have vanished from UK schools but the blame culture continues. We know that poor treatment is much more frequent in health services where the blame culture thrives than in those where people are allowed to admit mistakes which then do not count against their employment or prospects.

We know that the confidential reporting of airline near misses is one of the major reasons why air travel is so safe.

We know that either directly or indirectly we all waste more than we can afford on insurance; and we know that many of the ways in which insurance claims are settled revolves around blame.

I can understand why the parties in road accidents may be involved in claims and counter claims and why a court may need to hear evidence and give a verdict. The same system, however, is absurd in a hospital environment. If the patient goes in with a seriously damaged left eye and the right one is removed there may be some argument as to who within the health service was negligent but it can't in any way be seen to be a dispute between parties with equally strong claims. There is no reason whatsoever why the aggrieved patient should await his compensation until the lawyers have all finished; the money will have to come out of the health system, whether from the doctor's defence fund or the nurse's defence fund. Or will it?

What if it is, in the famous aphorism in Little Dorritt "...nobody's fault."

Are we going to compensate people just because we can legally resolve the issue of blame. A culture that can invent re-insurance and hedging funds can surely find a more sophisticated way of dealing with this situation.

Here are a few simple ideas culled from different compensation systems around the world. First, all professionals could pay much more modest fees than they do now into a no-fault compensation fund. This would cause anguish in the legal profession (and as there are now almost a million lawyers in the United States that's a lot of anguish) but many from it would find work on the compensation boards, assessing individual needs against compensation criteria. I would not wish it to be as crude as: "What's the price of a leg?" but there should be a range of compensation according to incapacity and its consequences for the sufferer and dependents.

Public authorities might put similar funding aside and the central government would then only be expected to cover cases not apparently belonging in any particular sector. A society's wealth and income could then determine the levels of compensation within a supply-driven framework rather than awards being demand-driven and arbitrarily dependent on the skill of lawyers and -- much more to the point -- juries who can award what they like without having to take any of the consequences themselves; there is nothing easier in this world than spending other people's money.

This is not to escape from the necessity of identifying negligence as well as learning from mistakes and taking preventive measures against accident. Series of misfortunes are almost always procedural rather than personal. The last thing I would want to do, however, is to have to make the choice of suing somebody for making a mistake which has ruined his life and not receiving the compensation I need to live a life as near as possible to the life I lived before the mistake.

This, of course, is only the mechanistic side of the agenda.

I think that we would all be a good deal more happy and efficient if we could steadily squeeze blame and guilt out of our daily lives.

I have always found the most dedicated workers those who are allowed to make mistakes in a supportive environment. This particularly applies to women who return to work after rearing children. Many of them move from fundamentally collaborative situations where mothers know that many things just go wrong because they always will where young children are learning and growing and they find the punitive environment of the fault culture incomprehensible. What's it for?

Whatever its origins, the blame culture blossomed in the era of industrial mass production when bullying was a standard management tool.

Its persistence provides yet more evidence that many people in business are simply not as good as they should be at making money.

Whenever I go into the pub I hear happy workers discussing their work in their free time, conducting a post mortem on this and suggesting a new model for that. The blame culture would drive such people out because they would not be free to experiment.

These, however, are likely to be the same kind of people who will not submit to bullying whereas somebody who lacks self-confidence is vulnerable.

This wouldn't be another example of the powerful persecuting the weak, would it? Yes, but it's much worse than that. The blame culture is preserved because it is an excellent way of frightening people into handing over their cash in order to protect them against a cruel fate which would not strike if we all agreed that it should not. A million lawyers in the USA and how many Congressmen are not lawyers? It isn't the principle of insurance or assurance that is objectionable, it is the intermediary rake-off, based on generating antagonism, that adds a layer of unnecessary pain to almost every major catastrophe.

And it's much worse still.

Many people now cannot believe that they are responsible for anything but they cannot either accept the Dorritt thesis. So they believe that it's always someone else. Enter the victim culture. Add to it the no-fault compensation system that more or less encourages anyone to sue whose lawyer thinks they have a good chance; and you have blame, irresponsibility, victimhood and greed. A fine quartet clogging up a system where economic efficiency is supposed to be the ultimate achievement.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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