Well I call it a review. I read the contents page and the epilogue, and dipped into one or two bits in between.
I'm sure it is a valuable historical record, and should be on the reading list of Economics courses for years to come. But if you have witnessed a car crash, watching a small family car hit by an oncoming sports car driven by a reckless driver, do you really need to know the name of the sports car driver and why he behaved that way? It's not an uncommon event. Recklessness and greed are not uncommon drivers of behaviour.
As a fan of Paul Ormerod, I'm more interested in 'Why most things fail'.
The underlying answer is that human beings vastly overestimate their own abilities. And the more intelligent and/or successful someone is, the more likely this is to be the case. Pack a group of such people together, and common sense goes entirely out the window, replaced by a massive dose of hubris.
So we go for the grand project, a massive centrally controlled state(communism-failed), control of global temperatures (will never happen), and a new global financial model where people only get rich, and 'bubbles' don't happen (subject of Tett's book).
What we really need, is a 'damage limitation' apprach. Manageable projects- a state that provides a structure to society in which individuals can maximise their potential, but leaves them free to choose how to do that- initiatives to limit the excesses of unrestrained economic growth, pollution, environmental destruction, but with specific, acheivable and measurable objectives- and in the financial world, I agree with Gillian Tett's epilogue, which (paraphrased) says that money and credit are too important to be left to bankers. I for one hope I never hear the words 'too big to fail' again.
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