Sal Paradise wrote:
How long do you think it is going to take to wash out the impact of some guy in China who liked eating bats? If we are still not feeling the impact of this I will be very surprised.
It was not a criticism of Labour - I know you lefties are very sensitive to any poke in the ribs
Global issues like this takes years to overcome.
Talking of the financial crisis, I read the Big Short recently. Some of the structural flaws in the system were ridiculous.
When the banks pulled together loads of rotten loans from different sources into bonds and their derivatives, they were able to get AAA ratings because they were ‘diversified’. And, y’know, they were paying Moody’s and S&P who were in competition to earn fees for providing the ratings. US federal bank regulators, of which there were several including the wonderfully-named Office of Thrift Supervision, did not receive a government budget, instead competing with each other to gain funding from the banks they regulated, with lax supervision being a selling point.
Increasingly, I don’t think economic and societal success, however measured, is so much about socialism versus capitalism, as it is about about avoiding (or at least minimising), in any system, loopholes, inconsistencies, bad incentives and structural defects that will be exploited for narrow benefit at wider cost.
