Trust

A week or so ago we got a paper brochure about changed terms & conditions from Halifax. While this morning we got an electronic brochure from HSBC - complete with instructions that it was very important for us to read all this stuff.

On this occasion I actually went as far as downloading a pdf, but rapidly decided that I had better things to do.

I also thought that in the olden days one could just trust one's bank to behave properly: ordinary people with ordinary affairs did not need to spend quality time reading the contract - or even to pay some financial adviser to do it for one. There was some trust in the system. And a bit of slack at the margins to cope with special cases which the standard terms & conditions made a bit of a mess of - remembering here that there will always be such cases: terms & conditions will always suffer from their own special version of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

I suppose the government, in its wisdom, has instructed entities like banks and utilities to be honest & open and to tell their customers exactly what they are up to. But the entities are well ahead of this game, knowing full well that information overkill, while costing them a bit in posting & packaging, is very nearly effective as no information at all. A trick well known to employers in the days when we had trade unions who demanded to be kept fully in the picture.

All that said, whether banks are any more greedy now than they were in the days of pipes, bowlers, pin-stripes and fat ledgers with marbled covers is a difficult question. They are certainly more centralised, which means that perks and profits can be concentrated in the hands of the few, a bad thing in itself, never mind the amounts involved. Looking at it from the other side, there is also the appetite of the paying public for not paying; we love the free and are suckers for services which are free up-front but which recover their costs discretely, perhaps in some devious, roundabout way. So we love the excellent services provided without charge by google, while also loving to complain about their roundabout ways.

Clearly something for the Guardian, or perhaps the LSE, to get its teeth into.

PS: regarding Gödel's incompleteness theorem, I read recently that unprovable statements in the mathematical and physical sciences are really quite thick on the ground. Rather more than philosophical curiosities.