The Unaccountability Machine

was once an investment banker, and during the bouncingrubble period of the last global financial crisis, I wrote a book called Lying for Money, about the history and economics of financial fraud. One of the big questions people were asking at that time was why, despite there being a strong popular perception that hanging was too good for them, bankers were not going to jail. I ended up reaching a pretty surprising conclusion: that although there were a number of bad reasons why prosecutors were reluctant to take on the vested financial interests, the basic problem was that in a democratic society, if you want to put someone in prison then you need them to intentionally carry out a specific criminal act.

Ref. 4A7D-A

The historian and writer Adam Tooze refers to a ‘polycrisis’ of the twenty-first century. This is an umbrella term covering a lot of these phenomena, held together by a kind of structural resemblance. The defining characteristic of the polycrisis is a loss of control by the previously existing hierarchy. It’s often associated with an economic crisis of some sort, as in Greece in the early 2010s, but not always. There’s a sudden loss of prestige, as the professional and managerial class makes a high-profile mistake. And the populists and the merchants of rage step into that gap. So the questions that need to be answered are: how does this happen? And why?

Ref. 4D1A-B