I say “only” because, as recently as 2009, the corresponding fraction would have been 60%. This year’s graduate cohort is drawn from diverse disciplines ranging from particle physics to aerospace engineering to ancient history. Disciplinary diversity is on the rise. That in part reflects changes to the Bank’s responsibilities, as over recent years it has taken on new staff and new tasks. Those tasks require different skills and experience – commercial and operational skills, as well as analytical. That has changed the cognitive make-up of the Bank, potentially quite significantly. Bringing together those different skills and experiences in cross-Bank teams – for example, our recently published work on the implications of the UK’s EU membership for monetary and financial stability – is a good way of making use of cognitive diversity across the Bank, collectivising the creativity process. The Bank has also been encouraging intellectual diversity through its new research programme. 66 This has extended the range of topics on which the Bank is researching – for example, to embrace the impact of technology, demography and climate change on the economy and financial system. And because expertise on those issues often does not reside in-house, the Bank is encouraging cross-disciplinary and unorthodox approaches to research, including through outside collaboration and through crowd-sourcing research. When it comes to publishing those ideas, through its blog Bank Underground Bank staff are now unshackled from the constraint of only publishing material which chimes with the prevailing policy orthodoxy. This provides room for divergent thinking, the cradle of creativity.

These biases in behaviour are similar in spirit, but different in form, to those of primitive man. Both generate negative sentiment towards strangers or the “out-group”. In ancient times, biases were based on the physical identity of strangers; they were overt and visible. Today, many biases are based on the social identity of strangers; they are often covert and subtle. Where primitive man had conscious biases, modern man often has unconscious ones too. 14 That these biases are sometimes covert, rather than overt, does not diminish their importance for society. Unconscious biases are likely to be just as prevalent, and sometimes as pernicious, as conscious one. And precisely because they are harder to detect, sometimes even among those exhibiting these behaviours, unconscious biases are more likely to go unnoticed, and thus unchallenged, than conscious ones. As conscious biases were violent and visible, unconscious biases are silent and invisible. The Sneetches is, at one level, a children’s story with a moral message. At another, it is a case study in social identity theory, a parable for modern times. Even in advanced economies with little fear of conflict or infection, with laws against discrimination and with social norms favouring diversity, we all remain Sneetches. Our biased minds are in part a neurological hangover from our hunter-gatherer past and in part a sociological side-effect of our multicultural present. Either way, these biases are embedded in our brains and behaviours. Diversity as a social good Saying that behavioural biases among individuals are understandable is one thing.