This weekend, David Brooks opines on the two narratives that have dominated media on the subject of how we got into this economic mess. Brooks discusses how both have played their respective roles, but gets down to another peculiar and interesting idea which explains some of the mindlessness:
To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. You'd think that with thousands of ideas flowing at light speed around the world, you'd get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time.
Its an idea that's thought provoking, in the sense that it makes you wonder if, in fact, our thoughts are of our own making, or if we just believe they are.
Read the whole op-ed piece here or download it here.
David Brooks's Op-Ed column in The New York Times started in September 2003. He has been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly, and he is currently a commentator on "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer." He is the author of "Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There" and "On Paradise Drive : How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense," both published by Simon & Schuster.
Source: New York Times, NYTimes.com
David Brooks, Greed and Stupidity, April 3, 2009
