He drew a salary north of £130,000 and lived in a house worth around two million pounds.

That is the moment to hold in your head. Not because Duncan Smith is uniquely unfeeling, he probably isn't, but because of what the moment reveals about the architecture of decision-making. The man redesigning the benefit system for an entire country could not perceive, even hypothetically, the gap between his life and the life of the person his policy was about to land on. And nobody in the room with him asked the prior question: is this the right person to be designing this?

That is the question I want to write about, because we already know how to ask it. We just don't, when it counts.

What the science actually shows

Dacher Keltner at UC Berkeley calls it the power paradox. Across a long arc of studies, as people gain wealth and power their measured capacity for empathy decreases. Not arguably. Not perhaps. Measurably. Michael Kraus and colleagues have shown that people from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are, on average, less accurate at reading emotion in other people's faces. Researchers in the Netherlands have associated wealth and power with reduced activity in the mirror neuron system, the neural architecture involved in modelling what others feel.

These are population-level patterns, not verdicts on individuals. Some wealthy people are exceptionally empathetic. Some people from poor backgrounds aren't empathetic at all. The variance inside any group is enormous. The point isn't to brand anyone. The point is that the pattern is real, the tendency is measurable, and when you build systems out of those individuals, parliaments, cabinets, policy committees, the systemic effect of the tendency does not wash out in the average. It compounds.

Now add homophily. The economist Matthew Jackson's work on social networks shows what we all already half-know: people associate with people like themselves. They marry across narrow bands, send their children to the same schools, draw advisers and trusted voices from the same pool. On its own, this is just a feature of human life. Combined with empathy reduction it does something specific. It produces decision-makers who underweight the experience of people unlike themselves and who never encounter the social pressure that would correct the underweighting.

That is not a conspiracy. It is a structural filtering effect. It means evidence of hardship, hard, factual, well-presented evidence, does not land in the room with the force the evidence deserves, and the room does not know that's what's happening.

We already account for this in other domains

In medicine we run double-blind trials. We don't trust researchers, however well-meaning, to observe outcomes accurately when their expectations are in the way. We design systems that route around the known weakness in human cognition. We don't call this an insult to researchers. We call it science.

In law we have recusal norms, jury selection, conflict-of-interest rules. We don't permit a judge to hear a case involving their own business partner, not because we think judges are corrupt, but because we accept that personal position warps judgment and structural safeguards work better than personal virtue.

In aviation we design cockpits and procedures around predictable cognitive failure modes. Pilots are not weak. Their brains, in certain conditions, make patterned errors, and the industry would rather engineer around those errors than pretend they are absent.

In economic and social policy we do none of this. We hold the debate as if the people in the room were equally calibrated instruments and the only question is which model wins, Keynesian or Austrian, redistribution or supply-side, this think tank or that one. We do not ask whether the room can perceive the problem.

The Irish version

The Dáil is not as elite as Westminster, where roughly forty percent of MPs went to private school against around seven percent of the public. Our gap runs along different axes. It still runs.

Look at the professional composition of Cabinet across the last decade. Solicitors, barristers, teachers, accountants, business inheritors, career party staff. Look at who is conspicuously not in the room: tenants in private rental, lone parents on Working Family Payment, full-time carers paid a fraction of the minimum wage equivalent for the hours they actually do, agricultural labourers, people on disability allowance, people in emergency accommodation. The gap is not only income. It is the texture of the week. It is whether a fifteen euro change in a weekly rate is a rounding error or a fortnight of decisions about which bills slip.

Then watch what happens when those brackets meet a Budget. Children's Allowance sits flat for years while childcare costs run away. Carer's Allowance moves a tenner. Fuel Allowance gets extended a fortnight in a hard winter. Means-test thresholds drift behind wage inflation, quietly clawing people out of supports without anyone having to vote to remove them. Each individual decision is defensible inside the room. Stitched together they describe a policy mind that cannot quite see the people it is paying. The instruments are calibrated for the instruments, not for the lives.

This is not because the people in the room are bad. It is because the room has a known cognitive profile and we refuse to design around it.

Ireland already proved the alternative works

Here is the thing we keep forgetting. The Irish deliberative-democracy experiment is one of the most successful in the modern world. We used sortition, randomly selected demographically representative panels of ordinary citizens, to do the heavy moral lifting on the Eighth Amendment, on the run-up to marriage equality through the Convention on the Constitution, on climate, on gender equality, on biodiversity loss, on drugs use. In each case the assembly arrived at recommendations that were more humane, more coherent, and more politically deliverable than the status-quo Oireachtas was producing on its own.

Why did it work? Because the room was different. The cognitive composition of the room changed, and the conclusions changed with it. People with lived experience of the question being decided were not advisers, not witnesses, not lobby-day attendees. They were the decision body.

We have the proof of concept. We have the constitutional and procedural muscle memory. What we don't have is the instinct to reach for it on economic policy. Welfare rates, housing supports, childcare subsidy structures, carer payments, disability supports, tax thresholds at the lower end. Every one of these is the kind of decision the Citizens' Assembly model is good at and the Cabinet model is structurally bad at.

What I'm not arguing

I am not arguing that wealthy people should be removed from politics. I am not arguing that personal virtue is impossible at the top of the income distribution. I am not arguing this is a left or right question, and the comments will prove that some readers will insist it is anyway.

I am arguing one specific thing. We have a body of neuroscience, psychology and network science that bears directly on how policy decisions go wrong, and we have decided, by default, not to bring it into the room. If we treated economic policy with the seriousness we treat a phase-three drug trial, we would be designing the room before we argued about the model. Instead we argue about the model and let the room compose itself out of habit.

The ask

Three concrete things, none of which require a new law.

One. Every time a budget measure that primarily lands on the poorest is debated, somebody in the room asks, on the record: who at this table has lived inside this measure? If the honest answer is nobody, that goes into the record too. The question itself is the intervention. It refuses the pretence that the room is neutral.

Two. Standing Citizens' Assembly capacity for economic and welfare policy. Not a one-off on a constitutional question every five years. A permanent deliberative body, sortition-selected, that the Oireachtas is required to consult on measures affecting the lowest two income deciles, with a reasoned-response obligation when its recommendations are declined. The Convention on the Constitution and successive Citizens' Assemblies have shown the model. Make it permanent. Aim it at the place the science says aim.

Three. Stop treating lived experience as decoration. Advisory groups that meet, are heard, and are politely thanked while the actual decision is taken in the next room are not lived-experience input. They are theatre. Move the body with lived experience into the decision chair, on the model that worked for the Eighth.

The bottom line

You can argue the Laffer curve until you go hoarse. You can argue Keynes against Hayek for the rest of your life. None of that argument is settled by the evidence I'm describing here, and I'm not trying to settle it. I'm saying we have left an entire category of evidence outside the door, and we have done so in exactly the area where it matters most: who gets to perceive the problem.

Economics is a social science. It is the science of human behaviour under constraint. It does not stop being a social science the moment a Minister stands up on Budget Day and reads numbers. The neuroscience, the psychology, the network research, that's not adjacent material. It is the upstream of every figure in the speech.

If we won't even ask whether the people deciding can see what they're deciding about, we are not having a serious policy debate. We are having a village meeting being chaired by the largest landowners in the parish, and calling the result democracy.

The science exists. The proof of concept exists. The room can be designed. We are choosing not to.

Overwatch Report is an independent publication. We have no financial positions in any entity mentioned.