Connectivity, transparency, agency, choices, accountability, responsibility.

From a review of Niall Ferguson's The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, a book which I happen to have by my bedside, waiting to be read.

Niall Ferguson belongs to a whole class of author's who puzzle me. Or rather, my approach to them puzzles me. Niall Ferguson, Steven Pinker, Jan Morris, John McPhee, Garrison Keillor, John Keegan are all authors whose topics and writing fascinate me. I buy their books. And then I don't read them. Well. I have read at least one or more by each of them. But all the others, I usually read a few pages, park it for a while to come back to. And then never do. Or at least not yet. Between those six authors, I have 35 books of theirs, just over half a dozen have I read, and all the rest are waiting. But thats by the by.

In the review:

What the financial crisis shows is that, though the market can go through decades of growth, the world financial system is, indeed, fragile in ways not observed by market players. As a champion of markets and their ability to self-correct, I don’t make such a concession lightly. What became clear during the crisis is that large, interconnected financial institutions were holding securities based on underlying assets whose value was not transparent. When prices and quantities are not transparent, markets do not work. And in finance, where so many of the assets consist of promises for future payment, this can create havoc in very short order.

No regulation or set of regulations or lack of regulations can bear the primary blame for that inherent fragility. Ferguson is right that the complex modern economy is best governed by simple rules—rather than by the hubris of government officials who think they can match that complexity with a correspondingly complex set of rules. But two questions remain: what rules, and who is to oversee it all? This book shows why the simple blame-deregulation story is not convincing, but there are so many rules and actors involved in this saga that the case Ferguson wants to make that over-regulation was the primary cause of the crisis falls short. There were just too many moving pieces to account for in such a small amount of space.

Connectivity, transparency, agency, choices, accountability, responsibility. They keep coming back to bite us. We know they are important but we keep not understanding how important and in what ways.