Gillian Tett had a column (may need registration) in this weekend’s Financial Times in which she reflected on trying to find a bar in upstate New York to watch one of the Presidential debates. It turned out the bars weren’t keen, and not just because there was a big football game on at the same time. The barmen observed that showing the   debate would cause unnecessar rancour between their customers.

She is a good reporter, and once she’d got over her surprise that others were less interested in the debate than she was, she reflected on the experience using her training as an anthropologist.

[O]ur biases are important. And that, in turn, suggests we could all benefit by looking at a concept that I first learnt about when I was studying anthropology: the “dirty lens” problem.

This “dirty lens” tag refers to the idea that when scientists peer at an object through a microscope, their view can be distorted by a clouded lens. In a laboratory, smudges and smears can usually be wiped away with a cloth. But in the social sciences, the “lens” is our mind, ears and eyes, and it is harder to spot and remove our mental smudges. There is no cloth.

There are, however, some exercises you can do to clean the lens.

In anthropology classes at university, we were urged to do four things. First, to take the obvious (but oft-forgotten) step of recognising that our lenses are dirty. Second, to consciously note our biases. Third, to attempt to offset these biases by trying to see the world from different perspectives; we must listen and look without preconception. Last but not least, to remember that our personal lens will never be perfectly clean, even if we take the first three steps. We must be humble and remember the limits of knowledge.

There are some obvious lessons here for futurists as well.

As he puts it in his column:

In picking on carbon, I take no position on its merits as a way of controlling emissions. Rather, the purpose is illustrative. If I were a risk manager, what danger signs would I look for as the market develops? Let us take three yardsticks of risk: simplicity, liquidity and leverage. The more a market has of the first two and the less of the third, the safer it should be. Derivatives based on subprime mortgages ticked all the danger boxes. So far at least, carbon does not.

His assessment is that, for the moment, the financial instruments in the carbon market are relatively straightforward, relatively liquid, and there currently is not much scope for arbitraging between markets. But he’s also honest enough to admit that when he first looked at credit derivatives in 2003, he concluded that they were fairly simple. As he notes, perhaps with hindsight, “as markets develop they become more complex and risky”. Even if the FoE is wrong at the moment on the risk part of the future carbon trading market (as opposed to their efficacy), they may still be right in the future.