In the 1970s, psychologist Stanley Milgram instructed his students to board New York subway trains around the city, approach random members of the public and ask them for their seat without offering any justification. When the students returned, they reported that perhaps surprisingly, most people were willing to give up their seat. The students also said, somewhat less surprisingly, that they found the experiment almost impossibly difficult to conduct.
This was what’s known as a “breaching experiment”, an attempt to understand the rules of social life by briefly and deliberately breaking them. Over the past month, Britain has witnessed an extraordinary breaching experiment conducted at scale: what happens if a government acts without regard for financial markets? The results have been highly illuminating, not only for what they tell us about the likely trajectory of Liz Truss’s leadership, but for what they reveal about a host of other elites, experts and commentators who collectively get to define what counts as “sound” economic policy.
