Part biography, part political thriller, The Unaccountability Machine is a rousing exposé of how management failures lead organizations to make catastrophic errors. When we avoid making a decision, what happens to it? In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies examines why markets, institutions, and even governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. He casts new light on the writing of Stafford Beer, a legendary economist who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organizations as artificial intelligences, capable of making decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members. Management cybernetics was Beer's science of applying self-regulation in organizational settings, but it was largely ignored--resulting in the political and economic crises that that we see today. With his signature blend of cynicism and journalistic rigor, Davies looks at what's gone wrong, and what might have been, had the world listened to Stafford Beer when it had the chance