Politics: An economy killed with kindness

About ten thousand years ago, man learned to control fire. That was one of the most important events in pre-history: a crucial part of the transition from a humanoid past to a human future. But the flames were domesticated, not tamed. Ten millennia later, fire is still a killer and a destroyer. In our cities, the sirens of the fire engine are part of the symphony of daily life. For fire, read credit, a more recent development, but one which is the economic equivalent of fire. Without it and its handmaiden, paper money, humanity would be much less prosperous: governments, less powerful. So which is more destructive — fire which has leapt free from the fireplace, or credit which has leapt free from reality?

It took several decades before academics reached a consensus about the causes of the Great Depression. It will be many years before there is an agreement on the causes of the current degringolade (probably just in time for the next one).