I had a great little discussion with a colleague yesterday about the economic troubles in the United States and around the world right now.
He mentioned that if you go to the Wiki for The Great Depression, many of reasons cited there correlate strongly with what is going on right now…. but more than that, apparently, and I don’t have confirmation of this yet, apparently in 2000, one of the last regulations on the stock market that was brought in by FDR and the New Deal, expired. 8 years later, here we are.
So that got me to thinking. Is this just a manifestation of human instinct? Left completely boundless, is our natural impulse simply to expand and grow and consume as much and as quickly as possible… moreover, is this Natures way of ensuring there is still some measure of Darwins theory of survival of the fittest embedded inside us? When food is bountiful, deer and caribou populations can explode, until finally when there is a lean year, a great percentage die, or are eaten by increased numbers of predators and in the end the deer or caribou diminish from their original number… humans do not have the benefit of that cycle to control population, so is this our built in cycle?
Humans are unique on the planet in being the only species capable of overcoming their instincts a great majority of the time through thought, desire, and most importantly, logic. When you really think about it, is it logical to have a stock market that is completely free of regulation?
Probably not right? Or at least not in certain ways.
So when we ignore that logic at some sort of level we remove one last barrier, and it sets off events in human interaction and behaviour that ultimately leads to our [economys’] demise.
Let us hope that the coming Recession, or Depression, does not take Darwinism any farther than our corporate beings.