Dossier 003
Financial journalist · Columnist and editorial leader at the Financial Times · Social anthropologist
Ten-year sample score
925 hits · 1 partial · 0 missesThe verdict
Tett’s advantage was not a superior crystal ball. It was a habit of looking beyond financial models to the institutions, incentives and social rituals around them. In 2016 that produced an unusually durable set of claims about populism, trust, technology, trade and sanctions.
The record is not perfect: productivity diffusion has been real but patchy. Still, five clean hits and a partial leave the mockery department underemployed. We have informed them this is cyclical.
The receipts
No tickers. Quite a lot of human behaviour.
We selected one falsifiable claim from each of six recurring 2016 themes: political risk, institutional trust, corporate convergence, trade, sanctions and productivity. Commentary that merely described contemporary conditions was excluded.
After Brexit, Tett warned that angry voters were losing their fear of the unknown and that America’s political elite could repeat Britain’s mistake. The unknown duly acquired an inauguration committee.
Financial Times syndication · Aug. 4, 2016 ↗Tett described a move from vertical authority to advice from ‘people like me,’ with comforting narratives beating objective truth. This was published before ‘post-truth’ became a cliché, a business model and, occasionally, a cabinet strategy.
The Irish Times / FT · Jul. 1, 2016 ↗Rather than repeat the fashionable word ‘disruption,’ Tett focused on convergence: cars as computers, IT at the core of manufacturing and green policy inside strategy. Detroit eventually hired enough software engineers to concede the point.
Foreign Policy · Apr. 26, 2016 ↗Tett argued that America would wait for Britain’s EU relationship and that political opposition would stall the obvious alternatives. The 2025 Economic Prosperity Deal improved terms but explicitly was not a binding comprehensive agreement.
Dawn / FT · Jul. 11, 2016 ↗The Obama administration wanted banks to finance renewed trade with Iran while its own enforcement history made that hazardous. Tett said institutions would not move without guarantees. Washington later removed even the theoretical comfort.
Financial Times · Aug. 26, 2016 ↗Tett argued that protecting jobs was the wrong priority and that health care, education, food services and government needed technological diffusion. Productivity improved in the current cycle; manufacturing’s gains remained conspicuously modest. Correct bottleneck, incomplete revolution.
Foreign Policy · Dec. 15, 2016 ↗Outcome checks include the non-binding 2025 UK–US economic deal, US Treasury sanctions guidance and BLS productivity data through 2026. “Partial” receives half credit.
Open ledger
Anthropological field notes welcome.
The trust-in-experts claim is unusually broad. The strongest part is not simply that trust fell, but that peer networks became an alternative source of authority—and then hardened into political tribes.
Agreed. We scored the observable mechanism: horizontal trust, social echo chambers and declining deference to fixed institutions. The language proved more durable than most ten-year forecasts.
Partial on productivity feels fair. She identified the right bottleneck, but technology spreading from frontier companies into schools, health care and government remains more aspiration than completed revolution.