How to Waste a Crisis

The global financial crisis is reaching a bottom, and yet political frustration is growing, because the low point of the collapse seems to offer a last opportunity to promote dramatic change, and that opportunity may be missed. 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.