What the Rule-Book Cannot See: Codified Doctrine, the Epistemic Immune System, and the Distribution of Supervisory Attention

The endogenous-money debate is settled operationally: central banks set the price of reserves and accommodate the quantity, as the post-Keynesian literature argued and the Bank of England's 2014 account states publicly. Yet the codified rule-book (Basel risk-weights, the legal definition of money, stress-test taxonomies, the mandate) was written on opposite, veil-view assumptions and not rewritten. What does that lag do to supervision? Codified categories, the paper argues, shape the surveillance regime: a category-system makes some risks countable and others unrepresentable, so codified doctrine works as an epistemic immune system, specialised against the prior crisis and blind to risks of a different kind. Doctrine does not decide which settlement is codified (material interests and path dependence do that); the contribution is downstream, in the sociology of ignorance. It separates doctrinal blindness, where a risk has no category, from motivated blindness, where a recognised risk goes unwatched because a coalition benefits, distinguished in the record by a missing versus a suppressed category. The dependent variable, the distribution of supervisory attention, has four observable proxies. The mechanism is shown in three historical episodes and a set of contemporary gaps; a discriminating archival case (Competition and Credit Control 1971 and the Secondary Banking Crisis) is specified for a companion paper.