Good politicians have a good sense of what their constituents feel is important. Our political leaders apparently understand that we think that this bonanza in the financial world at the expense of others should have been prevented. So a new order must be designed.
The interesting part is if they are able to think the unthinkable. Unthinkable according to the school of thought that has been prevailing the last 30 years, condensed in the simplistic rally "Government is the problem, the free market solves everything".
The originators of this school of thought saw quite correctly that the complexity of our
society has risen to a level where top-down Newtonian/Taylorian design and control is becoming ineffective. Too much energy spent on control, bogging down development, frustrating creativity. The answer (reduce interventions and control) has become an ideology instead of a means to an end. The ideology was also hijacked by shrewd operators who saw the possibility of getting rich by re-distribution of wealth , concentrating it in a smaller group.
The solution forward cannot be a return to the rigid centralized control systems of 30 years ago. Fortunately the concepts behind emergent systems analysis give us some handles to design a new paradigm. (More on that in a later post).
For the short term a rule of thumb could be used. Anything that is considerd vital infrastructure (like part of the banking systems: not the merchant banks but the simple oldfashioned handling of savings and lendings) must be isolated from the wild-west of the free market because we cannot afford to let that be hijacked by selfish greed. The price is too high, the originator of the problems does not pay the price (bail-outs are required, creating the moral hazard). We started this in the EU already with electricity networks, we should do the same with telecoms and proceed with contemplating what is vital
