Chaos or Community?: Seeking Solutions, Not Scapegoats for Bad Economics Book

One of the few times George W. Bush ever rose to quotability came during the 2008 credit crunch, when he was heard to mutter darkly: "This sucker could go down." He wasn't talking about the US banking system; he was talking about civilization as we know it. That's how close we were to the abyss. Another few days and you'd have seen armed mobs looting 7-Eleven's and Viggo Mortensen trudging down the Road.

Some day, decades from now, someone's going to write the definitive history of the financial crisis. Until then, John Lanchester's I.O.U. will probably stand as the go-to book. Written by an intelligent layman'or "civilian", as he sometimes prefers' it bristles with a kind of wtf, dude? incredulity. Which is only fitting. I mean, the world very nearly ended because a Chinese math geek published an equation in some obscure journal. That's just stupefying. The whole story is just stupefying.

At the end of the day, I'd still like to believe in capitalism, which, say what you will, has always picked up the tab for liberal democracy (a point made by Lanchester himself). It's just that, once a century or so, capitalism goes on a wild binge, maxes out the credit cards and wraps the Porsche around a utility pole. It's the Lindsay Lohan of economic systems, and we're married to it. Maybe we just need to accept that, in this relationship, the sexy fun times will always end in insolvency and despair, and that longish stretches of semi-normalcy are about all we can hope for.