The Pathological Organisation

It has long been remarked that society has become individualistic to a pathological extent. That it is now populated by selfish monads totally oblivious to the needs of others or any notion of solidarity. But while this is true, I think that over the past few decades individualism has undergone a subtle, though significant, change. It is no longer about individual freedom, however egotistical. Individualism is now primarily concerned with policing and correcting the behaviour of the individual – especially for those at the bottom of society – and positing futile personal solutions for patently social problems.

The former can be seen most vividly in the concept of “zero tolerance” which has spread like wildfire across the world since its birth in New York in the 1990s. In its original incarnation, zero tolerance claimed that violent and serious crime could be reduced by first cracking down on “incivilities” and minor offences, such as graffiti or fare dodging. Though crime did indeed fall concurrently, the role of zero tolerance policing in this is highly dubious. Crime also fell in other American cities that didn’t practice zero tolerance at the time and it was labelled by two criminologists as the “least plausible candidate” for contributing to the decrease in violent crime.

Nonetheless zero tolerance had an unstoppable momentum. Its precepts contributed to a colossal rise in the prison population in the USA. In 1975, there were 240,000 people in US jails. Last year there were 2.12 million with millions more on probation or parole. Prison populations have also risen spectacularly in other countries, though not to the same enormous extent. In Britain, for example, prison numbers have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. And this is in the context of a significant drop in crime.

The ascendancy of zero tolerance is not limited to swelling prisons. Its basic tenet – no excuses and no justification for adjudged misdemeanours – has been enforced in a variety of different settings. Sanctions for benefit recipients – unheard of before the 21^st century – are routinely dished out for missing appointments, not applying for enough jobs or even attending the birth of your child.

Countless institutions – from pubs to political parties – far beyond any connection to the criminal justice system now proclaim a zero tolerance approach to racism, abuse, harassment or bullying.

 

The blind spot

But this obsession with policing, condemning and penalising individual behaviour has gone hand in hand with boundless tolerance for, and seemingly zero interest in, the wrongdoings of organisations.

Such leniency could be seen in reactions to the financial crisis of more than a decade ago. Common responses to a crisis of the banking system ranged from pinning the blame on geeky savants who designed financial products no-one could understand to spotlighting gullible consumers who borrowed recklessly. We need to regulate ourselves, counselled conservative historian Niall Ferguson.

It is revealing that the UK government responded to the financial crisis – a crisis with systemic causes triggered by the actions of corporate organisations – by intensifying the regulation of individual behaviour (and not even of the individuals who were culpable). Between 2010 and 2013, over a million sanctions were imposed on disabled and poor benefit claimants, a 345% rise on the 2001-8 average.

 

Under the Horizon

That the same mentality still thrives can be seen by the muted reaction to one of the gravest ever miscarriages of justice in Britain – the prosecution, sacking or financial ruination of hundreds of sub-postmasters  by the Post Office. The criminalisation was justified by an IT system, Horizon, that produced non-existent cash shortfalls in Post Office branches. But despite knowing that Horizon was faulty, the Post Office – backed up by IT supplier Fujitsu – blamed and persecuted innocent workers for years. Dozens went to prison, many more were heavily fined and some committed suicide.

The problem with blaming bad people at the top for this horrendous injustice is that those leading the Post Office were, by contemporary standards, exemplars of ethical behaviour. Paula Vennells, CEO from 2012 to 2019, is an Anglican priest and was awarded a CBE two years ago for “services to business and charity”. Tim Parker, chairman of the Post Office since 2015, and charged with overseeing its senior management, is also chair of the National Trust.

Nonetheless, despite, according to Vennells, running a business that “genuinely cares about the people who work for us”, the Post Office was guilty, in the eyes of judges, of “oppressive behaviour” and behaving like a “mid-Victorian factory owner”. An MP described it as “feudal”.

It is only when viewed organisationally that its actions become explicable. According to the Private Eye investigation, under Vennells’ leadership, the Post Office, since its split from the privatised Royal Mail in 2012, was obsessed with the bottom line and achieving financial independence from the government by 2020. Nothing could get in the way of that objective and Horizon’s infallibility had to be upheld at all costs.

This “relentless focus” resulted in a culture of unquestioning loyalty. According to one insider quoted in Private Eye: “If you wanted to belong and fit in, you had to put the future of the Post Office first. If that meant turning a blind eye – or worse – that’s what people would do”.

But as soon as the failings at the Post Office are viewed in this light, the problems become so overwhelming they have to be – from the perspective of a supporter of this corporate capitalist system – deliberately ignored. How many other organisations have a “relentless focus” on the bottom line? How many others reify ‘leadership’ and inculcate a rigid culture of loyalty among their senior management? Notwithstanding the stakeholder rhetoric, these are attributes that all hierarchically-run organisations – be they private, public or ‘voluntary’ – are, after decades of neoliberalism and the tutelage of business schools, expected to have.

Toxic Operations

We have become accustomed to exposés of toxic cultures within organisations. But these invariably apply to the head office, senior staff or vestigial practices among the workforce (individual failings again). They rarely apply to the toxic manner in which an organisation’s management treats its workers or the public in general. This is despite such problems being endemic.

In April, an academic study based on interviews with civil servants found that top-down pressure from management in the Department of Work and Pensions during the Cameron coalition years resulted in the deliberate perpetration of “psychological harm” on claimants. Expectations “from above”, the authors noted, acted as a “moral anaesthetic” and resulted in local targets for sanctions, a process which “made invisible the needs and interests” of the claimants subject to such withdrawals of income.

Since they were bailed out in the financial crisis, banks have colluded to manipulate interest rates, rigged the foreign exchange market, plundered small businesses, laundered money for drug cartels, and helped thousands of wealthy clients evade tax (apologies this list is not exhaustive).

Phone hacking and other forms of harassment by newspapers resulted in a long-drawn out public investigation into ‘press ethics’ a decade ago. But a recommendation for an independent press regulator was rejected by David Cameron and in 2018 the Conservatives scrapped the scheduled second part of the inquiry (Leveson 2) on the grounds that the press “had cleaned up its act”. Presumably, clearing out “all the bad people” was sufficient.

And according to a report leaked last year, the permanent officials of the Labour party viewed members and its elected leadership with withering contempt and undermined the party’s 2017 General Election campaign, conceivably scuppering Labour’s chances of becoming the largest party in the Commons.

If not denied or ignored, these organisational scandals have resulted in, at best, grudging apologies, the removal of miscreants and heartfelt promises that ‘it won’t happen again’. But, strangely, it always does.

Fleeting Obedience

In the 2019 book The Disobedient Society, I attempted to chart the extent to which – despite protests to the contrary – obedience still plays a dominant role in social affairs. Taking a cue from the American psychologist Stanley Milgram, I stressed the importance, for obedience to work, of people freely choosing to follow the instructions of others above them in hierarchical organisations. This is now primarily evident in the employment contract, which lays great weight on its voluntary nature to morally differentiate it from forms of forced labour, such as ‘modern slavery’.

However, the subjects in Milgram’s experiments – and in all subsequent ‘Milgramesque’studies – had a very fleeting relationship with authority. Though many were faultlessly obedient, their actual contact with, in Milgram’s phrase, “the person of higher status”, lasted no more than an hour. Their equivalent in today’s society is probably the ‘on-demand’ worker who carries out tasks in line with instructions, but remains self-employed and does permanently join any organisation.

All the cases above of organisational dereliction were perpetrated by a cadre permanently ensconced within a hierarchical set up. This does not diminish obedience. If anything, it enhances it as obedience becomes strengthened by notions of loyalty, reciprocity, “fitting in” or fear of reprisal if behaviour does not meet expectations.

Given that most people in putatively rich countries have to rent themselves out to hierarchical organisations in order to procure the means of survival, obedience, though widely ignored, is an expected and real form of behaviour. However, the power of entrenched vested interests at the top of organisations is equally palpable.  Whether motivated by profit maximisation, competitive rivalry or other metrics of success, these tight-knit groups can – and do – act pathologically, treating employees or the wider public as if they were insentient obstacles to be overcome or exploited.

It’s just that in a society obsessed with the moral failings of individuals, if the spotlight happens to fall on them it is only for a brief moment.

 

 

 

 

Not So Great Expectations

Recently I was struck by a quote from geographer Danny Dorling on the fact that, in 2020, the UK recorded the highest number of excess deaths since the Second World War.

“All these excess death calculations that are being made, we’re comparing ourselves in 2020 with five truly awful years,” said Dorling last month, “whereas other countries are comparing themselves with the best years they’ve ever had.”

Excess deaths are defined as deaths above what could be expected based on an average of the previous five years. Because of Covid-19, there were nearly 85,000 excess deaths last year. In the first three months of 2021, there were over 32,000 excess deaths.

However, the problem in using excess deaths in the UK as an indicator of the unprecedented nature of the Covid pandemic is that, because of the political choice of austerity, between 2014 and 2019 – the previous five years – excess deaths were already rising. There were, for example, over 32,000 excess deaths in 2015, over 20,000 excess deaths in 2016 and 2017 and over 22,000 excess deaths in 2018.

In other words, because of the preceding “five truly awful years”, the huge rise in excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 was less pronounced than it would otherwise have been. In yet other words, the true extent of the present human catastrophe overseen Conservatives has been masked by the previous human catastrophe overseen by the Conservatives. You might call that ironic.

Lifting the veil

This can happen because a veil of denialism still surrounds austerity. With Covid, the bare facts are generally accepted even if the reasons for the enormous death toll – at the time of writing the sixth highest in the world – are blotted out. Austerity does not even have that chink of light. A cheer-leading consensus has blinded a rational acceptance of its effects. The entire political class was in cahoots – though austerity was carried out by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, the pre-Corbyn Labour opposition voiced its support from the sidelines.

Austerity was largely implemented through swingeing cuts to benefits and central government funding to local authorities. A combination of the popular and the invisible.

The ground for the former was prepared by a massive, and effective, propaganda campaign, portraying benefit claimants – especially allegedly sick claimants – as scroungers living off the naive generosity of the taxpayer. In addition to direct cuts in benefits – the benefits cap and freeze – there was a huge increase in the sanctioning (the withdrawal of all financial support) of claimants. Over a million sanctions were imposed in 2013, a 345% rise on their 2001-2008 average (they had been introduced by the previous Labour government).

Local authorities, however, bore the brunt. The central government grant to local councils was cut by 49%. Given that most local government spending (around 60%) goes on social care, this is where the axe fell, with palpable consequences for mortality rates. In 2014, there were a million fewer social care visits to the elderly than there had been five years before.

There is nothing painless about cuts; they don’t just eradicate ‘waste’. “ … the more cuts there have been to public health, social services and benefits – particularly for people in old age – the more earlier deaths there have been in the UK,” says Dorling. “Cuts that prevent visits by social workers to elderly people reduce their chances of being found after a fall. Cuts that make it harder to rehouse someone who is currently in a hospital bed back into the community result in hospital beds not being available for others.”

All this was compounded by what was happening to the NHS. Though formally “protected” from austerity, between 2010 and 2015 health spending rose by an average of 0.5% compared to an annual uprating of 4% since 1950.

In 2017, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that the post-2010 squeeze on public finances was linked to around 120,000 excess deaths in England alone, with the over 60s and care home residents most affected. The researchers estimated there were more than 45,000 excess deaths between 2010 and 2014 and over 152,000 people could die between 2015 and 2020 unless the “mortality gap” was closed by more funding.

Mind the gap

But such was the size of the mortality gap, it was starting to eat into life expectancy. In autumn 2017, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revised its predictions for life expectancy for both women and men, cutting the estimate for both by about a year – an estimate that had been made just two years previously. Life expectancy was flatlining. After rising consistently for decade after decade, it was now barely creeping upwards. During David Cameron’s time in office it rose by a month a year for men and by just two weeks for women. By contrast, in the 1940s and early 1950s life expectancy rose by a year every three years and accelerated again in the 1970s and ‘80s.

This means, explains Dorling, “that 110 years of improving life expectancy in the UK are now officially over. The implications for this are huge and the reasons the statistics were revised is a tragedy on an enormous scale.”

The evidence kept accruing. In February 2020, the Marmot Review, an investigation into health inequalities originally commissioned by the Brown government, found that overall life expectancy had failed to increase for a decade and had actually declined for the poorest 10% of women. The author, Michael Marmot, blamed austerity for taking a “significant toll” on the nation’s health and being responsible for “flatlining life expectancy”.

And the pension industry believes life expectancy is actually falling. In 2018, The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries cut adult life expectancy by six months in what it said was “a trend as opposed to a blip”. In March 2019, Continuous Mortality Investigation, a company owned by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, found that the life expectancy of men and women aged 65 had fallen by five months from 2017. According to one group of analysts, the main reason was that deaths in 2018 were “particularly high”.

However, there is a silver lining. In 2017 the Financial Times had reported that the “sharp slowdown” in life expectancy could wipe £310 billion from the deficits of large companies’ final salary pension schemes.

In an irony typical of this economic system, deteriorating public health is actually good for the financial health of big firms.

At present, official life expectancy is stalling, as opposed to actually declining as it is in the US, but further revisions are not unlikely.

For whom the bell tolls

Changes in life expectancy such as these are momentous. Besides the human cost, they signal that something very significant is happening to an economic and social system. The collapse of the Soviet Union was preceded by rising mortality and declining health spending. In 1976, a French demographer – widely ignored at the time – correctly predicted the demise of the Soviet system on the basis of rising infant mortality figures. Coincidentally, since 2014 infant mortality has started increasing in England.

But despite our free institutions and allegedly adversarial media, stagnating life expectancy here and now has created nothing more than a faint murmur. The ONS’s downward revisions referred to earlier were buried in an appendix to a press release. The BBC can claim that Covid “has undone the progress made in the last decade or so” and ignore the pre-Covid rise in excess deaths (that its own graphs show!). Matt Hancock can pontificate about adding five years to life expectancy through healthy eating.

Nothing is being suppressed. All the information contradicting official complacency can be readily collated (I just have). But in the absence of mass exposure and repetition – the secret of news becoming received wisdom – the truth about austerity and life expectancy reaches, at best, a minority who want to hear about it.

And far from the damage being repaired, austerity – as enshrined by Rishi Sunak’s last budget – will continue. With the evidence about the effect of austerity in 2010s now clear, the government is responding by upping the dose.

Meanwhile, the land of make believe strides on, brimming with absolutely unwarranted self-confidence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Banality of Obedience

 

In trying to understand the Milgram obedience experiments, the most important thing, in my opinion, is not to be dazzled by what they purport to show. The surface narrative – still loyally recounted in popular renditions every time the name Stanley Milgram is uttered – is that ordinary people can effortlessly be transformed into heartless torturers, that beneath our civilised veneers lurk potential concentration camp guards. In the next breath there are, invariably, earnest warnings about the Nazis and the Holocaust.

In fact, the truth is simultaneously more mundane and more disturbing.

What Milgram actually said was that we easily allow ourselves to be turned into agents for those above us in hierarchical organisations, doing what they want rather than what we ourselves would do. “Relationship,” as he put it, “overwhelms content”. That content can involve inflicting pain and death but – and this is rarely remarked upon – it can also involve content that is neutral, even benevolent or merely one link in a chain whose ultimate purpose is destructive or damaging. The specific action might appear innocuous but when placed together with other innocent looking parts of the whole, the ‘end product’ might be immensely harmful.

The crucial element is the relationship. Clearly the Milgram experiment (s) would not have achieved lasting fame had he asked volunteers if they wouldn’t mind passing a stapler (‘Psychology professor reveals we are all stapler-passers under the surface!’). Though it would have been interesting to know if anyone would have refused.

Commonplace obedience

This little noticed element in obedience to authority in fact produced the highest obedience rates. When Milgram’s subjects were merely asked to read out the word-pairs while a confederate of the experimenter actually pressed the buzzer supposedly inflicting electric shocks (the experiment was presented as a test of the effect of punishment on memory), obedience levels went through the roof. They registered 92.5%, the highest in the entire series of experiments.

Most replications of Milgram in the 1960s and ‘70s produced broadly similar results. One study didn’t however. That was by Wesley Kilham and Leon Mann in Australia in 1974. They reported obedience as low as 40% (and 16% for female subjects). This was the “notable exception” alluded to in Part One. However, when Kilham’s and Mann’s subjects became mere ‘runners’ – transmitting the experimenter’s instructions to a person playing the role of the teacher/shocker – disobedience was transformed into obedience. It hit 68% for men and 40% for women.

This is how contemporary obedience researchers, Dariusz Doliński and Tomasz Grzyb, describe this variation of the Kilham and Mann study:

As it turned out, people whose task was simply to transmit successive instructions to press the generator’s switches were even more pliant than those who – as in Milgram’s original experiment – were supposed to be the direct (physical) culprits responsible for causing physical pain to another person. This demonstrates that the role of being a cog in the bureaucratic machine facilitates the sense that one is neither the instigator of anything evil, nor directly causing any harm. As can be seen, in this particular type of situation, it is particularly easy to generate submissiveness and obedience. (From The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, pp 39-40)

The “particular type of situation” which lends itself so effortlessly to kindling submissiveness and obedience, is as emblematic of the corporation – which is in essence a private bureaucracy – as it is of the state machine. This is difficult to see in part because of the vehement ideology of freedom that accompanies corporate capitalism. But it is also obscured by the image, assiduously developed over the last 40 years or so, of the individual as a self-interested aggrandizer, always on the look-out for the best online deals, demanding faultless service, perpetually seeking fitness and attractiveness, constantly honing their CV. We may be irredeemably selfish but under a ‘free market’ system, we answer only to ourselves and our own desires.

However this was never true and still isn’t. As noted by the mid-20^th century economic historian Karl Polanyi, if we were purely self-interested negotiators always seeking the highest price for selling the commodity of our own labour, as theoretically we should do under the ‘laws’ of the market economy, we would be “almost continually on strike”. This obviously isn’t the case and is not solely due to coercion and the power of the law and the police. The added ingredient is the power of obedience.

The vast majority of us willingly enter – or we think we do – Milgram’s agentic state, where we temporarily become instruments for the wishes of people above us in the hierarchy (as they are instruments for people above them). The crucial element, as Milgram observed, is the sense of voluntary choice. This creates a sense of obligation, allied to a feeling of being absolved of any real responsibility, which is a powerful and dangerous brew.

The element of our economy which is always stressed by the media and the powerful is our freedom as consumers. But this, as the book elaborates, is at best half the story. We also spend much of our lives within – or bound to – hierarchical organisations which operate under the expectation of unquestioning obedience.  

As above, so below

It would be a mistake to think this cast of mind is restricted to the lower half of the economy, though it may be more explicit there. Most of us are agents for others. Since the 1970s, for example, ‘the agency theory of the firm’ has grown in popularity. This asserts that a company’s senior managers (chief exec, head of finance etc., often on salaries which place them in the 0.01%) are mere ‘agents’ of its ‘principals’, the shareholders, and should be expected to do their bidding. Whether these managers are in fact genuine agents for the company’s owners is open to question. At the higher echelons of the economy, people often have the power and wealth to pursue their own interests. But what is interesting is that they’re expected to be٭.

If anything obedience has grown in intensity since Milgram’s time, though not in the way that might be first thought. It occupies an unrecognised, though essential, space in the economy. Thanks to burgeoning information technology, ‘scientific management’ can control and keep tabs on employees’ behaviour in ways never dreamed of by its 20^th century pioneers. In efforts to increase productivity and minimize ‘loafing’, workers are regularly spied on and tracked by their own smartphones, with data compiled about their activities. Online wanderings are subject to screen capture and keystroke monitoring.  In some cases, a worker’s every action is planned out by headsets or hand-held devices, with punishment for deviation.

As one writer observes, this is not just about maximising profitability but “a vision of obedience and acquiescence”.

Gratefully oppressed

What makes these developments especially sinister is that they are accompanied by a powerful feeling that, beyond extreme infractions, this is the way things should be. In a market economy, where we freely choose which little dictatorship to rent ourselves out to, it is only natural that we obey the instructions of superiors.

In The Social Psychology of Obedience Towards Authority, Doliński and Grzyb give numerous examples of employees, or people assuming the role of employees in psychological experiments, obeying the instructions of superiors to carry out ethically dubious actions. For instance, racially selecting new employees or marketing an unsafe drug. Interestingly, the crucial factor does not seem to be an inherent desire to maximise profits, but fulfilling the wishes of senior figures in the organization of which these ‘employees’ are a part.

In my opinion, this is a form of obedience unique to the corporate capitalism societies we inhabit. There is an often fervent identification with the interests and aims of employers but one that can be seamlessly transferred to a competitor. This is serial obedience – in contrast to older types of obedience, around a nation or a religion for example, which tend to be quite fixed.

This feeling of habitual obedience is stiffened by a pervasive aura of disposability – the fear that if we don’t live up to expectations there is always someone else, maybe a robot, who can replace us. In this mindset, there is nothing wrong with obedience. Quite the opposite, it is questioning obedience that is pathological.

Evolution’s children

The natural objection to this thesis is that obedience is not imposed on us, but evident throughout history – so much so that it might be thought of as part of human nature.  In The Disobedient Society I refute Milgram’s contention (which echoes historical giants like Darwin) that obedience is an “evolutionary adaptation”. Actually, the evidence suggests that early humanity was able to knowingly flit between hierarchical and egalitarian social relations. Features such elite rule, social ranking or territoriality might be put into effect at certain times of the year and then dissolved. This indicates an element of choice in obedience which debars it from being a genetic flaw, or depending on your view, an innate advantage.

I refer also to Murray Bookchin’s distinction between first and second nature. Evolution, in the form of first nature, endows humans with the capacity to develop extra-biological tools and to consciously intervene in the natural world through a sophisticated collective organisation. However, the nature of this collective organisation is not determined by first nature. It lies in the realm of second nature – the domain of experimentation which can take many forms and is not governed by the ‘laws’ of natural selection.

The belief that obedience is immovable really relies on a different contention, however. That with the fragmentation of tasks within the complex organisations of the modern world, a degree of obedience is essential. We can never return to the simple freedom of earlier stages of human development, where a person might undertake an action and see it through to completion without the input of others. In short, if we want civilisation, we have to have obedience.

I don’t believe, however, that obedience is synonymous with the division of labour. Rather it is a kind of reflex, an unthinking giving away of authority and ethical responsibility to others. Obedience has a habitual character – it is a form of behaviour it is easy to slip into without noticing.

But the habit can be broken, just as a person who is lightly dozing can be jolted into wakefulness. Despite its tenacious hold, the origins of obedience are not evolutionary. And disobedience, does not, in spite of its reputation, repudiate complex organisation and discipline. Murray Bookchin coined the phrase “episodic sovereignty” – in reference to the Indian Crow societies of North America – to indicate how the yielding of individual initiative can be temporary and limited to rational and well-defined ends. Permanent institutions based on the expectation of command and obedience are not inevitable.

Basic disobedience

Not inevitable, but certainly well-entrenched, however.  I would suggest that if the grip of obedience is to be loosened, radical steps need to be taken. One is a basic income set at a level that a person can live well on without the need to become an “agent” for the hierarchical organisations that pepper and essentially control society. This would instil a sense of confidence and security, a willingness to breach conformist norms and the self-assurance to resist the demands of ‘the economy’. The cowed and malleable workforce of today would be transcended and more genuine forms of democracy might follow.

Secondly the perpetual motion machine of capitalism needs to be halted. At its molecular level capitalism entails the re-investment of profits which leads (usually) to more profits which have to be reinvested again, and so on ad infinitum. This leads to an irresistible imperative to meet existing consumer demand, and create new needs to satisfy this ever-growing “wall of money”. Thus the signature institutions of capitalist society embody obedience – hierarchical organisation with employees obeying precise instructions from above – as simply the most efficient means to achieve the task in hand. If society is ever to advance beyond command and obedience, this background fixation needs to change.

I am not suggesting that obedience did not exist before capitalism or that it may not infuse the kind of society that will exist after capitalism. But Milgram’s insistence on the essentially voluntary nature of obedience makes him, sixty years after his original obedience experiments, presciently relevant.

 

٭ The problem of a corporation’s executives not actually being genuine agents for its owners was thought to have been circumvented by paying them partly in stock options. This, it was believed, would align their interests with those of the shareholders, in that both would want a high share price. However this ‘solution’ also managed to subvert a core principle of the market economy. Theoretically, a company share price should reflect whether investors think it will make healthy profits – and thus pay healthy dividends – in the future.  However, paying executives partly in stock options encouraged the practice of share buy backs, whereby a company buys its own shares to jack up the overall price. This practice was legalised in Britain in 1981 and in the US the following year. Share buys backs are now a huge ‘industry’, ironically diverting funds which may have gone into actual industry.