"A culture in denial"

Wonderful musings in today's WaPo from Joel Lovell: What Do They Know? Some excerpts:

It's weird and disconcerting that after all that has happened there are still so many experts out there willing to dispense wisdom with utter assuredness, day after day, despite having been so spectacularly wrong in the past. Their confidence saps my own. For those of us in the advice business -- and this extends beyond just investment advice to everything else in our lives that now exists in the firm grip of uncertainty -- the challenge is: How do I tell people what to do when prospects are so grim and outcomes so completely unpredictable?.....

Maybe some of you witnessed the surreal scene a few weeks ago when the economists Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Dr. Doom and Black Swan, as they're now routinely called in the media) appeared on the network and outlined the end of global finance as we know it. In response to their extraordinarily downbeat assessment, Roubini and Taleb were asked repeatedly for . . . stock tips. Really. The conversation boiled down to: There's a profound crisis in the essential structure upon which the world's economy is built, potentially unlike anything we've witnessed before. Okay, great, thanks for that, Doom and Swan! So what should folks do with their kids' college funds?

It is truly stunning how few people really have come to grips with how profoundly the world is changing, and how truly dire conditions are. Almost all of the worst stuff that can happen is ahead of us, not behind us. But in most of my travels over the past year, speaking to all sorts of business and financial services insiders, most of whom were very intelligent, it was rare indeed to come upon someone who really understood the true nature of the mess we're in, and to have the proper sense of urgency therefore. But, of course, there are indeed those who see things clearly - and they tend to be the very brightest minds out there. In his foreign affairs column in today's Times, Tom Friedman quotes Ian Bremmer, author of "The Fat Tail" thusly (emphasis mine):

“As we look at 2009, on every issue, with the single exception of Iraq, everything is worse... Pakistan is worse. Afghanistan is worse. Russia is worse. Emerging markets are worse. Everything big out there is worse, and some will be made even worse by the economic crisis." There is a geopolitical storm coming, concluded Bremmer, “and it is not priced into the market yet.”

"Not priced into the market" is an understatement. Or perhaps it's just a polite way of saying that we as a culture are still in denial, even as the signs of the growing disaster are abundant and stark