Crash course

"We were lulled into complacency by the expensive public relations companies and big corporate social responsibility programmes that promoted the nonsense of corporate citizenship. Politicians were wooed and tax coffers filled. This is an abject lesson in how groupthink can take hold of even developed societies that pride themselves on their freedom of thought, debate and lack of deference; even the highly educated can be seduced into the tyranny of a fashionable orthodoxy. A whole culture became so obsessed with making money through gambling that it lost an understanding of the kind of restraining principles needed to ensure stability in an economic system vastly more fragile than that of Keynes's day because of its complexity and globalisation. It was like putting kids at the wheels of Ferraris: how can we be surprised at the monumental pile-up?"

Madeleine Bunting, one of my favorite writers, on the economic pile-up.