from Prof Dani Rodrik.
So what will the post-mortem on Wall Street show? That it was a case of suicide? Murder? Accidental death? Or was it a rare instance of generalized organ failure? We will likely never know.
The regulations and precautions that lawmakers will enact to prevent its recurrence will therefore necessarily remain blunt and of uncertain effectiveness.
That is why you can be sure that we will have another major financial crisis sometime in the future, once this one has disappeared into the recesses of our memory. You can bet your life savings on it. In fact, you probably will.
Who Killed Wall Street?.
A never ending cycle of trouble-solution-trouble again.
In the end few people can forsee the big problems of tomorrow, thus we are forever preparing for the last war, but there are things that prove to be scarier. The speed at which information travels has exceeded our capability to make sense of it. This is true for financial innovation, and almost all other forms of innovation fueling our modern world! What we have is I think similar to what programmers have to face.
Agile programming was born as a result of frustrations with alot of the management styles that programmers are forced to adhere to. It designs the process ofsoftware development to be more responsive to changes. The processes are designed to help produce code that is easily or more readily tested and responsive to the ever changing user requirements. This is mostly done because of a structure where trust in the abilities of your co-workers and supervisors/team leads are present in abundance.
The thing is because of the fema fication of government we just don’t have that level of trust in the abilities of the people who run the government (Ben Bernanke exempted).
Going back to my main point, The technology is there, hearing Larry Lessig talk (reading on the web but hearing talk is more dramatic) of a more responsive techology enabled democracy, I cannot help but think of how much we need to restructure government to be adaptive, to be more agile.
This is because we will almost always be prepared for the last war, massive leverege, predatory lending, etc those things will be solved eventually, albeit slowly, but if we have structures/processes/agencies that are geared towards minimizing the hurt and maximizing the returns from the new challenges that face us then maybe just maybe we could live as if nothing changes because we have changed ourselves and our government to function in a way where only change is constant.