to moral judgments about important issues. social media exacerbates this tendency by providing the ability to communicate exclusively among the like - minded and with the shrillness enabled by anonymity. but we can all make an effort to engage with views that are different from our own and resist algorithmic channeling into an echo chamber. perhaps there could even be algorithms that enable such bubble bursting? at the end of the day, even when all of the facts are truthfully established, differences of opinion can legitimately exist, even amongst experts. institutions like the oxford union were established “ as a forum for discussion and debate at a time when the free exchange of ideas was a notion foreign to the restrictive university authorities. ” arguably we need such institutions in all parts of society more than ever where thesis can meet its antithesis and hopefully create a new synthesis. all of us as individuals have a responsibility to be more open and to engage respectfully with different views if we are to have a constructive political debate about the issues that matter to all of us. 5. manage the boundary between technocracy and democracy carefully how can we get the balance right between that which needs to be decided by experts versus politicians? not surprisingly, the growth in the space occupied by experts, in part because many decisions are increasingly technical, can foster resentment of unelected individuals making decisions that have huge social consequences. problems often arise when experts try to be politicians or when politicians try to be experts. clarity about these roles and accountability to reinforce that clarity are essential. i have spent much of my career managing that boundary. in the uk civil service, there is the northcote - trevelyan principle which ensures that recruits are selected on merit and not through political patronage and the well - established practice that “ civil servants advise and ministers decide. ” at both the world bank and the imf, the job of the “ expert ” staff was to provide the best technical advice and if there were political trade - offs to be made, they were done at the level of the board, which represented the 189 member country governments. if experts cross that line, they undermine the credibility of their expertise and evaluating information : the cornerstone of civic online reasoning, stanford history education group, pp 4 - 5. haidt, j ( 2013 ) the righteous mind : why good people are divided by politics and religion, london : penguin books a good example is the recent debate on whether or not migration was the cause of the fall of the roman empire between

. it makes it possible for the fdic to manage and run down a sifi from a bridge company. this could work well in some circumstances ; for example, where there are buyers for parts of the business in the wings, as with lehman. this is, therefore, a resolution instrument which we should seriously contemplate adopting in europe. i am not certain that it would definitely work in all circumstances ; eg if there were no buyers in prospect, the state ends up running the group, which could be quite a thing, with a risk that staff and counterparties may drift away. but even in those circumstances it would surely be preferable to a normal liquidation. the second tool that many of us believe really should be considered, and which the financial stability board is likely to urge countries in the g20 to consider seriously, is to be able to write down, or haircut, claims of unsecured, uninsured creditors and impose a partial conversion from debt to equity in conditions of distress while leaving the non - toxic parts of the bank or dealer as an otherwise viable concern. this is a technique sometimes called bail - in, although that term is also used for a purely contractual route for recapitalising banks which is rather different in some crucial respects ( both operationally and in terms of policy ). reduced to its bare essentials, it involves the following. you take the distressed bank or dealer, and examine whether it is rotten all the way through, or whether – as can easily be the case for highly - levered firms – its financial problems are concentrated in specific parts of the business. in other words, is there a viable underlying franchise once the toxic parts are written off? that will sometimes be the case, although by no means always. when it is, you also make an estimate of the firm ’ s loss. sometimes that may not be possible due to chaos in the firm or the breadth of its problems. but if you think about the sifi failures during this financial crisis, there are some instances where supervisors could, perhaps, have made estimates of the losses before the final curtain came down because they were on notice of accumulating stress. having made a conservative estimate of the loss, it must be absorbed by the firm ’ s capital structure, respecting the ranking of priority that would apply in liquidation. so you start by writing off the equity to the extent that that is needed. if the loss is bigger than the equity, you also write off the