What went wrong with change?

There are a few moments during a crisis when a person’s façade breaks away and admissions of cold and brutal truth are made. Such an occurrence happened in 2008 during the meltdown of the global financial system when Alan Greenspan was called to testify on Capitol Hill and admitted that his view of the world, the ideology which he had championed for decades, was wrong and that regulation of the financial sector could have staved off the financial crisis.

It is in moments such as these when the discourses that maintain the status quo shatter, that opportunities for real and meaningful change present themselves. Two years down the road, however, we find ourselves in much the same situation: the majority of the people and institutions which directly caused the crisis are still in power, economic recovery is moving slower than anticipated and world leaders still cannot agree what, if anything, needs to be done to safeguard against the next crisis – one that President Barack Obama warns may be just over the horizon.

So, what went wrong? Why have people not been able to enact meaningful change, choosing instead to sit by and angrily watch as the old status quo returns?

Perhaps the problem is not merely that a few greedy bankers are causing the complete collapse of the world’s financial system simply in order for them to become rich, but that the system itself is broken. Perhaps the ways we are taught to understand economics are inherently flawed and new mechanisms of analysis need to be developed which account for and explain instability and irrationality.

However, the silver lining to all this is that more and more people are asking these questions. The notions are starting to spread that finding new ways to understand economics is not only the responsibility of policy-makers, businesspeople and bankers, and if we are ever going to create safeguards against future crises, a better understanding of how the financial system works (or does not work) is an important task for everyone to undertake.

This article by Anthony Faramelli is from the website of openDemocracy at http://www.opendemocracy.net/anthony-faramelli/financial-crisis-and-its-representations