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Anthropology of the bubble culture

In The Baffler, an indispensable journal now back from the dead, Moe Tkacik delivers a fascinating anthropology of the bubble culture on Wall Street, based on a reading not just of the big books out there but documents she points out are much more relevant to understanding the colossal failure – the correspondence and recollections of the mavericks who shorted the mortgage markets before they blew up.

What was easy to convey was that something about the past ten years had been unsustainable. But the truth—that an entire ideology had been unsustainable—is one that we have not yet grasped. And that is why so many journalists, economists, intellectuals and financiers now scramble to churn out books that for the most part read like the memoirs of people trying to make themselves feel less stupid. The current financial system was constructed to make us all feel stupid, and in the process of building it the architects allowed themselves to become stupid as well. That ignorance begat infantilization, which bred cowardice and systemic moral decay. The only sustainable way out is to reacquaint ourselves and our fellow citizens with the wisdom of asking stupid questions.

Her all-too-true lament is that banks let machines and formulas do the thinking for them, instead of relying on real knowledge about the world and judgments as human beings. But Tkacik says it better than me.

February 6th, 2010 | Posted in A Lot More | No Comments »