Does The Puritan Gift shed light on the subject raised in the previous post?  Our book is ulimately about how decisions are made and put into practice. That being so, we have to say that is is very sad how the current crisis was allowed to come into being and then worsen while everybody sat on their hands. It has been plain for years that trouble for brewing. It would have been right and proper for the Fed to prepare a series of contingency plans for different courses of action based on different assumptions: if A occurs, then we do X; if B occurs, then we do Y; and if C occurs, we do Z. Instead the world economy flew into a dark cloud of uncertainty with its metaphorical radar switched off. One great lesson from this series of events is that the authorities responible for ruling this world must  engage in contingency planning in the future.

However, that is not where we are at present. There is an old Irish joke about a tourist who goes up to a peasant farmer and asks how to get to Dublin. ‘If I wanted to go to Dublin’, replied the peasnt, ‘I would not start from here!’ The point of the story is that the tourist had to start from ‘here’. Likewise we have to start from here, not from where we would like to be.

 

 

 

 

 

Meatime