Here are three things:

- Andrew Hill says companies would rather "try something that seems uncontroversial and is self-servingly supported by a team of paid advisers - mega-merger, anybody? - even if it is fraught with greater cost and peril" than introduce greater worker autonomy.

- In the IC, I note that professional asset allocators prefer mindless futurology to the "sell on May Day, buy on Halloween" rule, despite the overwhelming empirical evidence in favour of the latter.

- The ECB is considering more QE, even though the policy is of dubious efficacy especially when bond yields are already low.

These are all examples of Keynes' famous saying, it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. (The context in which he says this is also still relevant today - the tendency of professional investors to follow short-term fashions.)

The question is: why is this?

One reason is simple self-interest. The CEO who thinks that his minions know better than he does, or the fund manager who thinks that asset allocation can be done by the calendar rather than by professional judgment or fancy optimization tools, will lose his raison d'etre. And as Upton Sinclair said,"it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The same thing explains Keynes' example. The fund manager who bets against the market risks under-performing and hence losing his job - as Phillips and Drew's Tony Dye famously discovered during the tech bubble. The one who goes with the herd keeps his job.

There might, though, be a second reason.

The Overton Window doesn't just exist in politics, but in finance, economics and management too. Some things are inside the window and acceptable - such as mergers, "professional judgment" and orthodox QE - whilst others, such as worker management, simple investment heuristics or helicopter money*, are outside it. Bosses, fund managers and experts want to maintain their image as Very Serious People - defined by Paul Krugman as "someone distinguished by his faith in received orthodoxy no matter the evidence". To signal this, they support for policies within the Overton Window, regardless of their merits. In doing so, they are exercising expressive rationality - signalling that they are proper members of the elite.

Identity politics isn't just the province of silly teenage students. It can be found in boardrooms too.

* In fairness to the ECB the politics of helicopter money for the euro area would be monstrous.