How to waste a crisis

Last year, President Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emanuel remarked that a good crisis should never be wasted. Disaster is an opportunity for thinking of ways to make the world fundamentally better - and also prevent future crises. People do a great deal of thinking, but sometimes they think so much that they come up with contradictory responses.

Indeed, what really makes a crisis profound is precisely the broad variety of differing diagnoses and different remedies. The political passions aroused by the clashes of interpretation often make the crisis seemingly insoluble. It was those conflicts, rather than some technical flaw in the operation of the economy, which made the Great Depression of the 1930's such a dismal and destructive event.