The tempting answer is to try to wriggle free from the dilemma with a compromise that would permit innovation but exert just enough control to squeeze out financial failure.

It is a nice idea; but it is a fantasy.

Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.

From the archive:

The most pervasive cultural characteristic influencing a nation's prosperity and ability to compete is the level of trust or cooperative behavior based upon shared norms.

The training in self-censorship starts, sensibly enough, with risque pictures on MySpace. It produces, decades later, the kind of silence that leads to violent insurgency halfway around the world.

Canada may be the source of modern multiculturalism, but I think it is simultaneously a model for the sort of national transformations required in Europe. Canada's English majority transformed their country's identity from one that was primarily tied to the British Empire to one which all of its citizens can connect with. I think there is something to learn from that.

Credit crisis | Fixing finance | The Economist