Thursday, April 8, 2010

There Are Idiots

. Thursday, April 8, 2010

Ezra loves Michael Lewis' The Big Short because it offers a simple explanation for the financial crisis: There are idiots. It is true, there are idiots. Idiots believe that you can explain variation (shift from no crisis to crisis) with a constant (the fact that "idiots" work in finance). Idiots also believe, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that "government" is not run by "idiots" and thus can and will enact regulation that "anticipates...inevitable failure and limits the damage it can do."


Although I admit that it is fun to pick on Ezra, my point is broader. We are not going to address our current problems by attributing the crisis to idiocy and believing that government is capable of (much less interested in) rescuing us from it. I wish our public intellectuals were less, well, idiotic.

0 comments:

There Are Idiots
 

PageRank

SiteMeter

Technorati

Add to Technorati Favorites