Recommended: Credit Crunch on TAL

I’m a few days behind on this, but I highly recommend listening to the May 9th episode of This American Life. It’s a TAL look at the stories behind the sub-prime/housing/credit crisis. It has the same elements of all the economic crises in recent years: tragedy of the commons, the few making obscene profits at the expense and suffering of others, neglected warning signs, fallacious thinking that went unquestioned, and of course, far-reaching implications that no one considered because they were getting rich in the short term.

One might think that we as a society would learn this lesson after The Great Depression, the S&L Scandal, Enron and the deregulation of the California electric grid, the dot com bubble, and the current gas crisis. But I’ve never been accused of optimism.

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