Ask questions, stupid!

Now that we’re in the midst of a financial crisis (in hundred years time we’ll know if it’s THE crisis of this century) I’ve had to let go of some of my naievity. Reading Noami Klein’s Shock Doctrine started it, reading more and more articles on how Wall Street functioned peels off more layers.

Rob referred to an article by Michael Lewis, someone who left Wall Street in the eighties, still in the earliest stages of his career and wrote a book about his experience. It took two decades longer for Wall Street to collapse than he thought it would. It is a story similar to Rob’s own experience.

Michael Lewis:

I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall.(page 1, paragraph 1)

I’m shocked to hear about people too young to have decent experience, getting responsible for amounts of money beyond imagination. In an interview programme on Dutch public TV Nick Leeson, the guy who bankrupted Barings Bank back in 1995 admitted that he was too young and didn’t know what he was doing. He was able to get money to play with, without being asked by the people in London how he was using it exactly. He was able to hide all his losses in Singapore.

I’m wondering what we need to learn from this situation. There have been plenty of people that knew the system was corrupt and
spoke about it, but the rest of the people involved ignored those voices. Is
there a way that we can incorporate having opposing voices into society’s systems?

One lesson that we could learn is that we should trust more on what the Dutch would call ‘Gezond
Boerenverstand’ (literally translates as: Healthy Farmers
Intelligence). If you know you’re smart and you don’t understand what
exactly is happening, you should be suspicious. If you’re suspicious,
start observing and asking yourself and the people around you questions. You’ll
probably notice more people who are running around clueless. Then, make the effort to mobilise those people and create a bigger voice together.

(Just my €0,02)