were felt that some were representing a specific interest group. with experience of the mpc, i think that this argument has come to be accepted. the proposal that the minutes of mpc meetings should include more description of individual views i discussed earlier. the committee has been opposed to such a change for the reasons i gave. in its early days the committee was sensitive to the view that the minutes, then published six weeks after the meeting, should be published earlier, and it shortened that lag to 13 days in october 1998. the forecast process has attracted much attention, and was discussed at length in the kohn report. presenting the forecast in terms of a fan chart, in order to highlight the balance of risks to the outlook, has proved successful. but it has proved more difficult to explain the role of a projection conditioned on the assumption of constant official interest rates. so the committee also publishes a forecast conditioned on market interest rates, in order to provide a guide as to how the forecast depends upon the profile of short - term interest rates. the committee has had more problems in trying to explain that there is no mechanical link between the central projection of the forecast for inflation two years ahead and the policy decision. this is for several reasons. first, the view of inflation both prior to and after the two - year horizon is important too. the optimal horizon over which to bring inflation back to target depends on the shock which moved inflation above or below target. second, the risks to inflation around the central projection ( defined as the mode of the distribution of inflation at future points ) are also relevant to the policy decision. third, there may be some risks to which the committee does not wish to respond until they have materialised. but the committee will continue to explain how its outlook for inflation relates to the policy decision, and, over time, we hope that this educational effort will pay off. finally, there have been several miscellaneous suggestions for change to the mpc. first, the mpc has been accused of meeting too frequently and, as a result, changing rates too often. the eef report suggested that the committee meet only eight times a year, as does the federal reserve, because “ meeting once a month could lead a central bank into changing interest rates too often in response to potentially misleading monthly data ”. in fact, since june 1997 the mpc has changed interest rates 23 times and the fomc 20 times. changes in rates reflect economic developments, not the frequency of meetings. in any

’. but it is precisely the exploration of alternative views about what is happening in the british economy, and the discussion of these views by the committee in a spirit of investigation not advocacy, that is central to the pooling of knowledge through which committees reach decisions that are superior to those taken by individuals. i think that is increasingly understood by commentators, and helps to explain why split votes are now regarded as normal and not a source of great excitement. it is, nevertheless, important that there are no ideological differences among committee members that would make rational debate difficult, and, in this respect, the committee has so far been fortunate. a famous 1970s laboratory experiment also showed the value of a frank exchange of views within a committee. it featured groups of senior managers working together to solve a complicated problem in a game called ‘ lost on the moon ’. subjects were asked to rank a list of objects in order of their necessity for survival after their spaceship had inadvertently crash - landed on the moon. it was found that the best - performing groups - or those which got closest to the ranking suggested by experts at nasa - were those which were least consensual in the early stages of discussion, exploring all possible avenues and ideas. groups which established a common consensus quickly were often ineffective, suggesting that at least some disagreement is beneficial for committee performance because it stimulates discussion and hard thinking. differences of view on our committee are an honest reflection of the uncertainty about both the data and the structure of the economy. to date there have been 61 meetings of the monetary policy committee. the votes cast at those meetings are summarised in table 1. it includes the votes of this month ’ s meeting which were published this morning. at those 61 meetings, interest rates were raised on nine occasions, were lowered on 14 occasions, and left unchanged at 38. at the first seven meetings during 1997, decisions were reached unanimously. the number of voting members varied between five and eight as the membership of the committee built up. the first dissenting vote was cast in january 1998. since the beginning of 1998, the voting has been divided reasonably evenly among all possible combinations of votes ( remember that there were nine voting members only from june 1998 following the passage of the bank of england act. ) of the 54 meetings since january 1998, four dissenting votes have been cast on six occasions, three on seven occasions, two on eleven occasions and one on 16 occasions. at only 14 meetings has the vote been unanimous, and no one - sen