Thinking, but not very originally

On Tuesday evening I went to the Hardman lecture at ICAEW. I wangled an invitation to this prestigious event because I wanted to hear Jolyon Maugham (see my post on 30 September). I was not disappointed: he speaks as well as he writes and his talk was full of excellent metaphors (I do enjoy a good metaphor, as well as having a professional interest in them: see also here) Having followed his blog, I understood much of what he said, even the initialisms. And it was those that set me thinking.

Initialisms act as shibboleths in terms of identifying groups and deterring outsiders. On this occasion, I was definitely an outsider. It is unusual these days for me to be in a large gathering of people where I only know one or two. I once horrified a rather shy acquaintance by saying that my idea of heaven was a roomful of people I'd never met before - all those wonderfully interesting possibilities! I get less excited about the prospect these days as my hearing is not as good as it used to be and conversations are more difficult, especially in this splendid room where many ICAEW receptions take place and where the acoustics make it necessary to stand very close to ones interlocutors.

But I was intrigued by the tribe I had fallen among and talked to a lot of people. For all of them, tax figured largely in their lives, but in different ways. There were tax practitioners of various sorts - accountants, consultants, barristers - and there were civil servants and policy makers. And there were a few academics. In conversation with my neighbour at dinner we noted a lack of diversity of both race and gender, although I thought that there were more women present than at similar events I have attended.

And on the bus home I realised that I had observed another form of homogeneity, beyond the pale faces and suits and ties: almost everyone I had spoken to had studied at Oxford or Cambridge. I hadn't asked any specific questions about their educational background but I had asked how they had ended up in their tax related jobs, and their accounts of their careers had begun with graduation.

So the movers and shakers in the tax world are an elite group and a rather good example of an epistemic community, a notion I have been thinking about for some time in the context of internal auditors and risk management. I made a mental note to return to that thought and went back to the book I was reading.

Today I turned to Jolyon's blog - another very interesting piece, about the influence of the Big Four on tax policy - and there in the comments I found that Martin Hearson had beaten me to it, and articulated the epistemic community idea far better than I could have done. This is not the first occasion that I have had a thought and found that someone at LSE had beaten me to it but it's usually been Mike Power who I've been trailing after :)

The book I was reading was "The Circle" by Dave Eggers, a dystopian vision in which a company with similarities to Google is effectively taking over the world. The characters were rather wooden and the plot unsurprising but the scenario described was quite compelling and it was a good read for the bus journey from Oxford to London and back again. (But the pedant in me was roused on reaching the penultimate page, when the word "prone" was used to describe the position of someone in a coma in a hospital bed. I rather think such a person would be lying on their back...)

Eggers doesn't mention any tax issues but in the world he envisages, -where everyone is constantly under surveillance by everyone else, knowledge has to be shared and privacy is a crime - there could be no tax avoidance. A lot of people would be out of work..