Salad days and a little discipline…
Our current financial crisis has several obvious themes. We were undisciplined. We were overly optimistic. We were greedy. Sometimes, we were criminals. These are all universal human qualities that we are not likely to overcome anytime soon. Consequently, it is uninformative to point out these traits as the cause of the current crisis. We did not magically start buying houses we couldn’t afford. We did not magically start lending credit when it was not prudent to do so. We did not magically become too optimistic to be at least somewhat realistic.
Economists have a complicated subject matter to say the least; just try reading their books. The economy is really just an abstraction of standard Machiavellian (Hobbesian, if you prefer) human interaction. So how did it get so out of whack? We didn’t change, I assure you. The “globalization” of everything is also uninformative, I’d argue. For one thing, everyone with a Masters degree and a camera-ready mug has been yakking about “the global economy” for over 15 years…we would have seen that from around the corner. Somebody wake up and figure it out. Please?