2009 Year-Ed Punditry

Bookended by the twin calamities of 9/11 and the 2008 Financial Meltdown, this 2009 year-end punditry had an easier time of it. If you are a pundit, you can hardly go wrong by choosing one or the other as the reason for the American predicaments. No one will make a big fuss about it, because we have all shared the sufferings stemming from both.

However, for a nuanced explanation of a slow but sure decline of American preeminence in the world, what we need is a small-sieve -- but an extended -- examination of the causes of the failures.

In wars, Vietnam would be a good place to start, because many of us have lived through it and certainly can related to it viscerally and intellectually. It is the same for Iraq and Afghanistan. We can ask: Why Iraq? Why Afghanistan? Why one after the other?

In economic and finance, we have had any numbers of small but significant failures that can be considered as the precursors of the current Big One. That is if we had the intelligence to learn from such failures. Most of us lived through these failures, and there isn’t much excuse for not learning.

What did or should we have learned? We could have learned that

Savings and loan crisis of the late 80s and early 90s was an old-fashioned chicanery involving bankers and certain senators, whereas the failures of Long Term Capital in late 90s, Dot-com bubble in 2000, and Enron a year later in 2001 were a modern-day versions of an old-fashioned snake oils, cloaked within the claims of triumphalist technological sophistication of computers and computations. A new form of scientism gone wild.

The next question that we need to ask is “Is there a common thread to all these failures, large and small?”