Rational Irrationality: This Week's New Yorker

In this week's The New Yorker John Cassidy has an article about the financial crisis and the rational -if reprehensible --decisions that drove it. At first I was all, "Do I have to read another article about this?" And then reading it, I was like, "There's nothing RATIONAL about making loans to people who can't afford to pay them back and that's the base of the whole pyramid." But of course Cassidy's point is that it's not nice, but it's rational if you plan to sell those loans to eager Wall Street buyers at a nice fat profit. And that's just what happened; Cassidy himself explains here. If everyone looks the other way no one has to see a thing. Of course the same thing can be said about climate change. Here Elizabeth Kolbert begs our leadership to start looking.