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Rafael Puyol

Estos primeros partidos de "Copa" entre grandes y pequeños son una excelente oportunidad para recuperar virtudes que hacen del fútbol el mayor espectáculo. En los partidos de primera asistimos a espectaculares detalles técnicos, sorpresivas jugadas ensayadas, inteligentes desmarques sin balón o arrojadas diabluras de "crack". Pero en los encuentros coperos en los que un modesto recibe a un grande, la sofisticación del juego da paso a otras bondades que devuelven la emoción a un deporte demasiado estereotipado.

Es lo que pasó el martes en Alcorcón. Dios me libre de culpar a nadie. Ni es tiempo, ni soy quién para hacerlo. Pero déjenme desgranar mi argumento sobre lo que aconteció y le sucede al Madrid. El Alcorcón es un equipo sin figuras, ni florituras. Pero como David, supo usar su honda para derribar al gigante. Un tirachinas confeccionado con grandes dosis de ilusión, entrega, pundonor, vergüenza propia, humildad, respeto al rival, sacrificio, sentido del riesgo, responsabilidad, trabajo en equipo, vinculación a los colores y ganas de divertirse. ¡Qué difícil es comprar esas cosas con dinero! Por lo menos al Madrid del Alcorcón le faltaron todas ellas. Decir que el equipo merengue tiene grandes individualidades y que no encuentra su esquema de juego es describir el Mediterráneo.

Si no lo tienen ya lo descubrirán, pero ¿Será suficiente?. Al Madrid de las figuras le siguen faltando las dosis suficientes de aquellos hábitos que sólo algunos jugadores "de la casa" poseen. A la mayoría de los jugadores foráneos les da lo mismo competir con los "mileuristas" de un equipo suburbano que con un conjunto mormón del estado americano de Utah. Las estrellas no salen al campo a desplegar virtudes, ni a divertirse, sino sólo a ganar dinero. Pellegrini puede ser un buen técnico, pero no sé si sabe inculcar a sus chicos la exigible responsabilidad corporativa y la emoción y la ilusión necesaria de saberse integrantes de uno de los equipos más emblemáticos del planeta.

Madrid, Nov 3 (EFE).- Spanish essayist and novelist Francisco Ayala died Tuesday in Madrid. He was 103.

Peu de savants se sont aventurés aussi loin que Claude Lévi-Strauss dans l'exploration des mécanismes cachés de la culture. Par des voies diverses et convergentes, il s'est efforcé de comprendre cette grande machine symbolique qui rassemble tous les plans de la vie humaine, de la famille aux croyances religieuses, des œuvres d'art aux manières de table. Le paradoxe des très grandes œuvres, celles qui sont vraiment décisives et novatrices, est de pouvoir se caractériser en peu de mots.

Ainsi pourrait-on dire qu'il déchiffra le solfège de l'esprit. A tout le moins, il s'en approcha, et de fort près, à force de rigueur et d'invention conceptuelle. Parler d'un solfège de l'esprit n'est pas seulement le prolongement de cette métaphore musicale toujours présente dans l'œuvre de l'anthropologue. Or il faut entendre cette formule littéralement. Même si nous chantions, quotidiennement, les ritournelles de la vie en société, même si nous connaissions par cœur les mélodies des mythes ou des mariages, nous ne savions pas ce qui organisait ces systèmes. Notre conscience ne nous révèle rien, spontanément, des processus qui sont à l'œuvre dans le vaste domaine de la symbolique sociale. C'est pourquoi nous ignorions leurs règles de fonctionnement, les lois de leurs combinaisons. Il nous manquait un solfège.

Derrière la diversité des mélodies, celui-ci explicite les règles qui les engendrent : accord, renversement, transformations. Il définit des formes (canon, fugue, sonate…). Il n'est pas faux de dire que la démarche de Claude Lévi-Strauss visait un but analogue. Ce qui l'attirait avant toute chose était de découvrir les organisations cachées, les lois sous-jacentes au chatoiement des apparences sociales. Il était de ceux qui pensent à la géologie en contemplant un paysage ou songent aux classements botaniques face aux massifs de fleurs.

C'est pourquoi, derrière le foisonnement déconcertant des règles de parenté, des totems ou des mythes, derrière l'apparent tohu-bohu des échanges économiques et des créations artistiques, il s'est consacré à découvrir, plus qu'une partition unique et isolée, certaines des structures qui les engendrent, indépendamment de la volonté des acteurs et de leurs consciences.

Cette démarche, toujours semblable en son fond, connut plusieurs époques et une succession de points d'application. Elle s'attacha d'abord à la parenté, dont Claude Lévi-Strauss, dans sa thèse, abandonna la face visible pour en dégager les "structures élémentaires". Elle se focalisa ensuite sur le totem, dont il éclaira l'énigme en quittant le terrain des analogies apparentes pour mieux saisir les jeux globaux. Elle se fixa longuement sur la mythologie, dont quatre volumes monumentaux, de 1964 à 1971, scrutèrent les transformations et le fonctionnement propre, indépendant des décisions individuelles, des langues, des peuples, voire des lieux et des temps.

Ce souci des structures, des combinatoires, des codes de transformation, rapproche Claude Lévi-Strauss des scientifiques, principalement des mathématiciens. Il le rattache aussi à la lignée des philosophes qui, de Platon à Kant, ont reconnu la place centrale des processus formels.

LES MYTHES "SE PENSENT ENTRE EUX"

Là se trouve le cœur de l'œuvre, et ce qu'elle a, à sa manière, de vertigineux. Car, dans l'analyse de ces milliers de mythes qui "se pensent entre eux", se répondent sans se connaître, se combinent sans que personne l'ait décidé, on voit s'esquisser des procédures mentales universelles.

Cette approche d'un solfège de l'esprit humain prolonge ou accompagne le schématisme de Kant, la linguistique structurale de Roman Jakobson ou, en psychanalyse, la théorie lacanienne du signifiant. Le résultat est d'autant plus impressionnant que cette analyse convoque des peuples et des cultures sans contacts connus les uns avec les autres. L'historien – comme Georges Dumézil, féru lui aussi de perspective structurale – ne compare que des mythes issus de peuples entretenant des liens attestés. En s'affranchissant de cette limite, en confrontant, par exemple, les mythes amérindiens avec ceux du Japon, Lévi-Strauss a ouvert des perspectives théoriques qui intéressent, au-delà de l'ethnologie restreinte, l'anthropologie générale, l'étude de l'esprit des hommes.

Sans doute est-ce là une marque persistante, à travers détours et exils, de son attachement profond à la rigueur des philosophes. Ils ne cessèrent en fait d'avoir sa préférence. Très jeune, cet enfant d'artiste (son père était peintre) porta son attention vers les concepts. Normalien, il choisit en 1927 la philosophie. Agrégé, il commença à l'enseigner en 1932. L'ennui toutefois le gagna vite, et le désir de "l'expérience vécue des sociétés indigènes" l'emporta : il partit en 1935 pour Sao Paulo, où il enseigna durant trois ans en menant plusieurs missions d'étude chez les Bororo, puis les Nambikawara, en compagnie de Dina Dreyfus, sa première femme, épousée en 1932.

Ils se séparèrent à leur retour en France, en 1939, et l'anthropologue connut ensuite deux autres mariages, en 1945 et en 1954.

Révoqué de l'enseignement au titre des lois antijuives de Vichy, il se retrouva à New York, où il fréquenta les surréalistes, et se lia avec Jakobson, dont l'apport fut déterminant dans la construction de son œuvre. L'après-guerre fut une période instable pour ce chercheur dont les œuvres maîtresses commençaient seulement à s'imprimer et que les institutions savantes ne reconnaissaient pas encore. Attaché culturel à New York, puis en mission en Inde et au Pakistan pour l'Unesco, il fut nommé en 1950 à l'Ecole pratique des hautes études avec l'appui de Dumézil.

En 1955, Tristes Tropiques le fit connaître du grand public. Journal de voyage soutenu par une écriture limpide et sensible, méditation sur le savoir et sur l'époque d'une grande liberté de ton, le livre est une réussite littéraire et devint aussitôt un succès de librairie, bientôt une référence. Bien des pages de ce livre appartiennent depuis aux anthologies en usage dans les classes. On y découvre un voyageur déjà préoccupé des désastres de la planète, tourmenté par la destruction de la diversité humaine, soucieux d'écologie bien avant que l'époque ne se saisisse du terme. On discerne également son penchant pour le bouddhisme et sa réticence envers l'islam. Cette dernière est si forte que certaines pages de Tristes Tropiques, peu remarquées à l'époque, vaudraient sûrement à leur auteur de virulentes protestations si elles paraissaient aujourd'hui.

Après la publication d'Anthropologie structurale (1958) et l'élection au Collège de France (1959), Lévi-Strauss déploya une activité exceptionnelle d'organisateur et d'auteur qui lui valut une reconnaissance internationale croissante. Après La Pensée sauvage (1962) et les quatre volumes des Mythologiques, il devint évident que cette œuvre était l'une des grandes de son siècle. Il est désormais difficile de parler de l'homme, de la société, des échanges sans tenir compte de son apport.

La voie des honneurs, parallèlement, se poursuivit. En 1973, Claude Lévi-Strauss fut élu à l'Académie française, il accompagna François Mitterrand au Brésil en 1985, ses collections d'objets furent exposées au Musée de l'homme en 1989, ses photographies du Brésil éditées en 1994, son 90e anniversaire célébré par des numéros spéciaux.

En 2005, l'Unesco fêta les 60 ans de sa fondation en confiant à son ancien collaborateur un discours d'ouverture qui restera, bien que l'orateur ait alors approché le siècle, un modèle de pertinence et de lucidité. Il y rappela notamment, en se référant à Rousseau – l'un de ses maîtres, avec Montaigne –, les menaces que notre expansion effrénée fait peser sur la nature et sur l'humanité. Car Claude Lévi-Strauss, en fin de compte, ne dissociait pas la défense de la diversité culturelle et celle de la diversité naturelle.

Dans une époque pressée, confuse, massivement portée à la veulerie et au simplisme, l'homme passait fréquemment pour distant. Tous ceux qui eurent la chance de l'approcher peu ou prou savent combien cet esprit universel, profondément attaché à la dignité de tous peuples, savait être proche, amical, fidèle et chaleureux, surtout si l'on avait su tenir le coup sous son regard, le plus acéré qui fût.

Hautain ? Non. Seulement exigeant, suprêmement intelligent, et peu enclin au mensonge. Cela fait évidemment beaucoup de défauts, surtout si l'on est en outre l'auteur d'une des œuvres majeures du XXe siècle. Dans la cacophonie de l'heure, une partition exemplaire. Et l'élégance altière, à côté du solfège, d'un musicien de l'esprit.

Roger-Pol Droit

Al morir el príncipe de Ligne en 1814, en pleno Congreso de Viena, las señales que indicaban un vertiginoso deterioro del mundo en que había nacido ya estaban encendidas, pero sólo a unos pocos les fue dado advertirlas. Metternich, arquitecto de la Restauración, se encontraba entre esos privilegiados. Y quizá por eso, junto a su pensamiento más secreto - que la vieja Europa estaba al principio del fin- anotó en su diario personal que el entierro en Viena del príncipe de Ligne, seguido por emperadores, reyes, ministros y grandes nombres de la nobleza europea, era igualmente el sepelio de un mundo ya insalvable.

Una vez más, confesó Metternich aquel año de 1814, «noté como una sombra que desaparecía». Un sentimiento que en 1902, un año después de los funerales de la Reina Victoria, también vivieron muchos ingleses ante el féretro del escéptico, melancólico y conservador lord Salisbury, primer ministro del último gobierno británico que poseyó todos los atributos de la aristocracia gobernante. Lo que entonces se extinguía, como más tarde comprobaría Winston Churchill, era todo una época: el mundo rígido y elitista de la Reina Victoria, que Salisbury simbolizaba mejor que nadie, el tiempo del imperialismo triunfante y de las aterradoras desigualdades, que daría paso a una Inglaterra democratizada de libertades incontenibles.

Decía Azorín que todas las cosas tienen durante el día un breve instante en que irradian su verdadero espíritu, y que es inútil visitarlas y contemplarlas a otra hora distinta. En esos momentos precisos, todos lo detalles, la luz, el color, el aire, los ruidos, las líneas, forman una síntesis perfecta, algo como una armonía, que adquiere su máximo en un punto y que poco a poco va disipándose, fundiéndose en el ambiente vulgar del resto del tiempo. Así los jardines, los museos, los viejos palacios, las iglesias, las calles... Así también el siglo XVIII en el entierro del príncipe de Ligne o la era victoriana en la muerte lord Salisbury. Porque hay personajes de la historia que son como esos instantes, capaces de resumir una época, de simbolizar un período, de arrastrar consigo una era.

Dante, por ejemplo, ¿no se eleva como la catedral gótica por encima del mundo medieval, no resume con su figura una época en que la Iglesia era, a un tiempo, la fuerza y la ciencia, no representa el gran sueño del reino de Dios temporal y espiritual, que ni los emperadores ni los papas pudieron consumar en el mundo y él culmina en el gran monumento literario de La Divina Comedia?

Lo mismo, pero con respecto a la epopeya de las Indias, puede decirse del soldado y cronista Bernal Díaz del Castillo, que participó en la gran conquista de México y que, al final de su vida, a sus ochenta y cuatro años, quiso despedirse del mundo con las fabulosas imágenes de una juventud aventurera: los días de gloria y abyección en que menos de seiscientos esforzados españoles sometieron un imperio nueve veces mayor que España, la caída de la gran capital azteca en medio del rumor de los atabales y el fuego de los cañones castellanos, el agua quemada de la laguna sobre la cual se asentó Tenochtitlan.

Hay personajes de la historia que aceptan su condición de creadores y abarcan en sus obras el mundo que ellos conocieron. Piensen en Cervantes, en Balzac, en Dickens, en Galdós. Hay otros que son la memoria misma de la época que vivieron, que encarnan los rasgos precisos y distintivos de un período concreto de la historia. Ahí está Scott Fitzgerald, quien es a los años veinte del siglo pasado lo que Ligne al Antiguo Régimen, el símbolo de una edad dorada de fiestas y jazz, el emblema de aquellos tiempos de opulencia y prosperidad que sepultaría la Gran Depresión del 29. Ahí está el escurridizo y legendario John Dillinger, que a ráfagas de ametralladora y a persecuciones, personifica una etapa desesperada y feroz de los Estados Unidos, cuando los caminos se llenaban de gente pobre y huidiza, decenas de miles de brazos se ofrecían por los pueblos para labores de sol a sol, a cambio de comida y un pedazo de cielo como techo, y la vida era literalmente una pesadilla.

En el tiempo de las vanguardias, después de ver la luna de Nueva York en su viaje de novios y preguntarse en su diario, «¿Es la luna o el anuncio de la luna?», Juan Ramón Jiménez le pidió a la inteligencia que dijera el nombre exacto de las cosas. En los años que precedieron a la Segunda Guerra Mundial y durante la misma, el nombre exacto de «estadista» era Winston Churchill, por su mucha insistencia en el peligro que suponía la Alemania de Hitler y la convicción, puesta de manifiesto en sus discursos más famosos, de que si las democracias occidentales renunciaban a la lucha, si buscaban un acuerdo con los dirigentes nazis, sería el final; el final definitivo, no sólo de su independencia, sino de la civilización occidental, para siempre.

La historia universal no se reduce a la biografía de los grandes hombres, como quería Thomas Carlyle en el siglo XIX. Pero esto no significa que no exista la grandeza; y mucho menos que no haya algunos personajes excepcionales de la historia capaces de resumir, por sí solos, toda una época.

¿Quién negaría que la muerte de Edward Kennedy ha cerrado una página del siglo XX? El león del Senado no sólo era el celo de la coherencia, la intención constante o el frío compromiso del mejor liberalismo americano. También era la cara dulce de una América que había empezado a perder su inocencia y a desengañar a muchos; y el último reflejo de una dinastía de políticos que enseñó al mundo que el proceso de redescubrir Estados Unidos no concluye jamás, haciendo que el país de Jefferson o Walt Whitman volviera a encontrarse a sí mismo, borrando la impresión de una nación vieja de hombres viejos, gastados, cansados, temerosos de las ideas, de los cambios, del futuro.

No... Metternich no se equivocaba. Hay personajes de la historia que arrastran consigo épocas enteras. Algunos mueren con las botas puestas, en el mismo escenario donde se convirtieron en leyenda. Otros desaparecen entre las sombras silenciosas y familiares del retiro. Así cerró los ojos al mundo este pasado verano Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, arquitecto del diálogo en los tiempos del tardo-franquismo, muñidor de la reconciliación entre las dos caducas Españas que helaban el corazón de Machado, precursor de la Transición. Un soñador para una democracia

Macarena Ventosa 

I really would like to share this vision of the joy of art as what is not evident, what has to be invented with each reading, with each feeling, with each look at things as if it were the first time.

As John Berger says: "The whole poem is about what is not evident"

Y aquí tenéis la traducción al español, ¡o más bien el poema original en español!

"La dicha"

El que abraza a una mujer es Adán. La mujer es Eva.
Todo sucede por primera vez.
He visto una cosa blanca en el cielo. Me dicen que es la
luna, pero qué puedo hacer con una palabra y con una mitología.
Los árboles me dan un poco de miedo. Son tan hermosos.
Los tranquilos animales se acercan para que yo les diga su nombre.
Los libros de la biblioteca no tienen letras. Cuando los abro surgen.
Al hojear el atlas proyecto la forma de Sumatra.
El que prende un fósforo en el oscuro está inventando el fuego.
En el espejo hay otro que acecha.
El que mira el mar ve a Inglaterra.
El que profiere un verso de Liliencron ha entrado en la batalla.
He soñado a Cartago y a las legiones que desolaron a Cartago.
He soñado la espada y la balanza.
Loado sea el amor en el que no hay poseedor ni poseída,
pero los dos se entregan.

Loada sea la pesadilla, que nos revela que podemos crear el infierno.
El que desciende a un río desciende al Ganges.
El que mira un reloj de arena ve la disolución de un imperio.
El que juega con un puñal presagia la muerte de César.
El que duerme es todos los hombres.
En el desierto vi la joven Esfinge, que acaban de labrar.
Nada hay tan antiguo bajo el sol.
Todo sucede por primera vez, pero de un modo eterno.
El que lee mis palabras está inventándolas.

Jorge Luis Borges

IE School of Arts and Humanities en colaboración con la Asociación de Antiguos Alumnos del IE tiene el honor de invitarle a la conferencia titulada "Don Juan o Casanova: el mito del seductor" el martes 3 de noviembre a las 19.30h.

Dña. Marta Rivera de la Cruz, escritora y finalista del Premio Planeta 2008, compartirá sus ideas sobre el personaje de Don Juan. Don Juan es el mito del seductor por excelencia, aunque las letras universales han dado otros caracteres que podemos identificar con la figura del conquistador. Casanova o el vizconde de Valmont son buen ejemplo del diferente tratamiento que el  arquetipo del seductor ha recibido sobre el papel. Rivera de la Cruz explorará esta y otras cuestiones invitándonos a reflexionar sobre un tema apasionante.

La conferencia se impartirá  en el aula B-203 del Instituto de Empresa situada en c/ María de Molina 13.

En caso de ser de su interés, ruego confirme su asistencia a ArtsHumanities@ie.edu

Rafael Puyol

Afirma aquel sabio dicho popular que "el dinero no lo es todo en la vida". A lo que, socarronamente, alguien contestó ¿Pero quién lo quiere todo?. Recuerdo la sentencia y su apostilla a propósito del gasto público sobre la educación en España.

Son tantos los indicadores manejados y con tantas intenciones que al final resulta difícil saber el estado real de la cuestión. Pasa lo mismo que con las opiniones emitidas por los líderes políticos tras conocer los resultados la noche electoral: todos han ganado algo y nadie ha perdido nada. Por eso conviene citar la clase de datos y la fuente que los emite para saber de qué estamos hablando. En mi caso, y para medir el gasto público en educación manejo los datos de Eurostat que lo miden en porcentaje del PIB. Una reciente hoja informativa del Instituto de Estudios Económicos, que recogía los indicadores para la Europa de los 27, señalaba que el gasto medio europeo era del 5,05%, El máximo lo tenía Dinamarca (8%) y el mínimo Rumanía (3,8%), ocupando España en esta clasificación el lugar 23 con el 4,28%. Ciertamente los datos corresponden al 2006 y hoy probablemente son algo mejores, pero ello no supone que nuestra posición relativa haya mejorado mucho.

Todos sabemos que no tenemos el sistema educativo adecuado y que, aunque hayamos mejorado en la mayoría de los índices que miden nuestro nivel, nos queda un largo camino por recorrer. A veces miramos con admiración a los países nórdicos (a Suecia o Finlandia) o a otros vecinos europeos (Inglaterra, Francia) con mejores resultados en los rankings que miden la calidad formativa. Es verdad que tenemos distintas situaciones de partida, pero es cierto igualmente que esos países dedican más recursos a financiar la educación.

El dinero sólo, no permite alcanzar la felicidad educativa… pero ayuda a conseguirla. Ahora que hablamos de un Pacto sobre la Educación debería haber acuerdos básicos para subirle el sueldo al sistema.

The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.

By John Cassidy

In finance, actions can be both individually prudent and collectively disastrous.

On June 10, 2000, Queen Elizabeth II opened the high-tech Millennium Bridge, which traverses the River Thames from the Tate Modern to St. Paul's Cathedral. Thousands of people lined up to walk across the new structure, which consisted of a narrow aluminum footbridge surrounded by steel balustrades projecting out at obtuse angles. Within minutes of the official opening, the footway started to tilt and sway alarmingly, forcing some of the pedestrians to cling to the side rails. Some reported feeling seasick. The authorities shut the bridge, claiming that too many people were using it. The next day, the bridge reopened with strict limits on the number of pedestrians, but it began to shake again. Two days after it had opened, with the source of the wobble still a mystery, the bridge was closed for an indefinite period.

Some commentators suspected the bridge's foundations, others an unusual air pattern. The real problem was that the designers of the bridge, who included the architect Sir Norman Foster and the engineering firm Ove Arup, had not taken into account how the footway would react to all the pedestrians walking on it. When a person walks, lifting and dropping each foot in turn, he or she produces a slight sideways force. If hundreds of people are walking in a confined space, and some happen to walk in step, they can generate enough lateral momentum to move a footbridge—just a little. Once the footway starts swaying, however subtly, more and more pedestrians adjust their gait to get comfortable, stepping to and fro in synch. As a positive-feedback loop develops between the bridge's swing and the pedestrians' stride, the sideways forces can increase dramatically and the bridge can lurch violently. The investigating engineers termed this process "synchronous lateral excitation," and came up with a mathematical formula to describe it.

What does all this have to do with financial markets? Quite a lot, as the Princeton economist Hyun Song Shin pointed out in a prescient 2005 paper. Most of the time, financial markets are pretty calm, trading is orderly, and participants can buy and sell in large quantities. Whenever a crisis hits, however, the biggest players—banks, investment banks, hedge funds—rush to reduce their exposure, buyers disappear, and liquidity dries up. Where previously there were diverse views, now there is unanimity: everybody's moving in lockstep. "The pedestrians on the bridge are like banks adjusting their stance and the movements of the bridge itself are like price changes," Shin wrote. And the process is self-reinforcing: once liquidity falls below a certain threshold, "all the elements that formed a virtuous circle to promote stability now will conspire to undermine it." The financial markets can become highly unstable.

This is essentially what happened in the lead-up to the Great Crunch. The trigger was, of course, the market for subprime-mortgage bonds—bonds backed by the monthly payments from pools of loans that had been made to poor and middle-income home buyers. In August, 2007, with house prices falling and mortgage delinquencies rising, the market for subprime securities froze. By itself, this shouldn't have caused too many problems: the entire stock of outstanding subprime mortgages was about a trillion dollars, a figure dwarfed by nearly twelve trillion dollars in total outstanding mortgages, not to mention the eighteen-trillion-dollar value of the stock market. But then banks, which couldn't estimate how much exposure other firms had to losses, started to pull back credit lines and hoard their capital—and they did so en masse, confirming Shin's point about the market imposing uniformity. An immediate collapse was averted when the European Central Bank and the Fed announced that they would pump more money into the financial system. Still, the global economic crisis didn't ease up until early this year, and by then governments had committed an estimated nine trillion dollars to propping up the system.

A number of explanations have been proposed for the great boom and bust, most of which focus on greed, overconfidence, and downright stupidity on the part of mortgage lenders, investment bankers, and Wall Street C.E.O.s. According to a common narrative, we have lived through a textbook instance of the madness of crowds. If this were all there was to it, we could rest more comfortably: greed can be controlled, with some difficulty, admittedly; overconfidence gets punctured; even stupid people can be educated. Unfortunately, the real causes of the crisis are much scarier and less amenable to reform: they have to do with the inner logic of an economy like ours. The root problem is what might be termed "rational irrationality"—behavior that, on the individual level, is perfectly reasonable but that, when aggregated in the marketplace, produces calamity.

Consider the freeze that started in August of 2007. Each bank was adopting a prudent course by turning away questionable borrowers and holding on to its capital. But the results were mutually ruinous: once credit stopped flowing, many financial firms—the banks included—were forced to sell off assets in order to raise cash. This round of selling caused stocks, bonds, and other assets to decline in value, which generated a new round of losses.

A similar feedback loop was at work during the boom stage of the cycle, when many mortgage companies extended home loans to low- and middle-income applicants who couldn't afford to repay them. In hindsight, that looks like reckless lending. It didn't at the time. In most cases, lenders had no intention of holding on to the mortgages they issued. After taking a generous fee for originating the loans, they planned to sell them to Wall Street banks, such as Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, which were in the business of pooling mortgages and using the monthly payments they generated to issue mortgage bonds. When a borrower whose home loan has been "securitized" in this way defaults on his payments, it is the buyer of the mortgage bond who suffers a loss, not the issuer of the mortgage.

This was the climate that produced business successes like New Century Financial Corporation, of Orange County, which originated $51.6 billion in subprime mortgages in 2006, making it the second-largest subprime lender in the United States, and which filed for Chapter 11 on April 2, 2007. More than forty per cent of the loans it issued were stated-income loans, also known as liar loans, which didn't require applicants to provide documentation of their supposed earnings. Michael J. Missal, a bankruptcy-court examiner who carried out a detailed inquiry into New Century's business, quoted a chief credit officer who said that the company had "no standard for loan quality." Some employees queried its lax approach to lending, without effect. Senior management's primary concern was that the loans it originated could be sold to Wall Street. As long as investors were eager to buy subprime securities, with few questions asked, expanding credit recklessly was a highly rewarding strategy.

When the subprime-mortgage market faltered, the business model of giving loans to all comers no longer made sense. Nobody wanted mortgage-backed securities any longer; nobody wanted to buy the underlying mortgages. Some of the Wall Street firms that had financed New Century's operations, such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, made margin calls. Federal investigators began looking into New Century's accounts, and the company rapidly became one of the first major casualties of the subprime crisis. Then again, New Century's executives were hardly the only ones who failed to predict the subprime crash; Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke didn't, either. Sharp-dealing companies like New Century may have been reprehensible. But they weren't simply irrational.

The same logic applies to the decisions made by Wall Street C.E.O.s like Citigroup's Charles Prince and Merrill Lynch's Stanley O'Neal. They've been roundly denounced for leading their companies into the mortgage business, where they suffered heavy losses. In the midst of a credit bubble, though, somebody running a big financial institution seldom has the option of sitting it out. What boosts a firm's stock price, and the boss's standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don't have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than for maintaining product quality and protecting their firm's reputation.

Prince's experience at Citigroup provides an illuminating case study. A corporate lawyer by profession, he had risen to prominence as the legal adviser to Citigroup's creator, Sandy Weill. After Weill got caught up in Eliot Spitzer's investigation of Wall Street analysts and resigned, in 2003, Prince took over as C.E.O. He was under pressure to boost Citigroup's investment-banking division, which was widely perceived to be falling behind its competitors. At the start of 2005, Citigroup's board reportedly asked Prince and his colleagues to develop a growth strategy for the bank's bond business. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary, who served as the chairman of the board's executive committee, advised Prince that the company could take on more risk. "We could afford to seek more opportunities through intelligent risk-taking," Rubin later told the Times. "The key word is 'intelligent.' "

Prince could have rejected Rubin's advice and told the board that he didn't think it was a good idea for Citigroup to take on more risk, however intelligently it was done. But Citigroup's stock price hadn't moved much in five years, and maintaining a cautious approach would have involved forgoing the kind of growth that some of the firm's rivals—UBS and Bank of America—were already enjoying. To somebody in Prince's position, the risky choice would have been standing aloof from the subprime craze, not joining the crowd.

In July, 2007, he intimated as much, in an interview with the Financial Times. At that stage, three months after New Century's collapse, the problems in the subprime market could no longer be ignored. But the private-equity business, in which Citigroup had become a major presence, was still thriving, and Blackstone, one of the biggest buyout firms, had just issued stock on the New York Stock Exchange. Prince conceded that a collapse in the credit markets could leave Citigroup and other banks exposed to the prospect of large losses. Despite the danger, he insisted that he had no intention of pulling back. "When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated," Prince said. "But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance."

The reference to the game of musical chairs was a remarkably candid description of the situation in which executives like Prince found themselves, and of the logic of rational irrationality. Whether Prince knew it or not, he was channelling John Maynard Keynes, who, in "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money," pointed to the inconvenient fact that "there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole." Whatever the asset class may be—stocks, bonds, real estate, or commodities—the market will seize up if everybody tries to sell at the same time. Financiers were accordingly obliged to keep a close eye on the "mass psychology of the market," which could change at any moment. Keynes wrote, "It is, so to speak, a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs—a pastime in which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who passes the Old Maid to his neighbour before the game is over, who secures a chair for himself when the music stops."

Keynes's jaundiced view of finance reflected his own experience as an investor and as a director of an insurance company. Every morning, in his rooms at King's College, Cambridge, he spent about half an hour in bed studying the financial pages and various brokerage reports. He compared investing to newspaper competitions in which "the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view." If you want to win such a contest, you'd better try to select the outcome on which others will converge, whatever your personal opinion might be. "It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest," Keynes explained. "We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees."

The beauty-contest analogy helps explain why real-estate developers, condo flippers, and financial investors continued to invest in the real-estate market and in the mortgage-securities market, even though many of them may have believed that home prices had risen too far. Alan Greenspan and other free-market economists failed to recognize that, during a speculative mania, attempting to "surf" the bubble can be a perfectly rational strategy. According to orthodox economics, professional speculators play a stabilizing role in the financial markets: whenever prices rise above fundamentals, they step in and sell; whenever prices fall too far, they step in and buy. But history has demonstrated that much of the so-called "smart money" aims at getting in ahead of the crowd, and that only adds to the mispricing.

Markus Brunnermeier, an economist at Princeton, and Stefan Nagel, an economist at Stanford, obtained data from S.E.C. filings for fifty-three hedge-fund managers during the dot-com bubble. In the third quarter of 1999, they discovered, the funds raised their portfolio weightings in technology stocks from sixteen to twenty-nine per cent. By March of 2000, when the Nasdaq peaked, the funds had invested roughly a third of their assets in tech. "From an efficient-markets perspective, these results are puzzling," Brunnermeier and Nagel noted. "Why would some of the most sophisticated investors in the market hold these overpriced technology stocks?" We know that many such investors had no illusions about the prospects of the financial products they traded. But their strategy was to capture the upside of the bubble while avoiding most of the downside—and, with timely selling, many of them succeeded.

Because financial markets consist of individuals who react to what others are doing, the theories of free-market economics are often less illuminating than the Prisoner's Dilemma, an analysis of strategic behavior that game theorists associated with the RAND Corporation developed during the early nineteen-fifties. Much of the work done at RAND was initially applied to the logic of nuclear warfare, but it has proved extremely useful in understanding another explosion-prone arena: Wall Street.

Imagine that you and another armed man have been arrested and charged with jointly carrying out a robbery. The two of you are being held and questioned separately, with no means of communicating. You know that, if you both confess, each of you will get ten years in jail, whereas if you both deny the crime you will be charged only with the lesser offense of gun possession, which carries a sentence of just three years in jail. The best scenario for you is if you confess and your partner doesn't: you'll be rewarded for your betrayal by being released, and he'll get a sentence of fifteen years. The worst scenario, accordingly, is if you keep quiet and he confesses.

What should you do? The optimal joint result would require the two of you to keep quiet, so that you both got a light sentence, amounting to a combined six years of jail time. Any other strategy means more collective jail time. But you know that you're risking the maximum penalty if you keep quiet, because your partner could seize a chance for freedom and betray you. And you know that your partner is bound to be making the same calculation. Hence, the rational strategy, for both of you, is to confess, and serve ten years in jail. In the language of game theory, confessing is a "dominant strategy," even though it leads to a disastrous outcome.

In a situation like this, what I do affects your welfare; what you do affects mine. The same applies in business. When General Motors cuts its prices or offers interest-free loans, Ford and Chrysler come under pressure to match G.M.'s deals, even if their finances are already stretched. If Merrill Lynch sets up a hedge fund to invest in collateralized debt obligations, or some other shiny new kind of security, Morgan Stanley will feel obliged to launch a similar fund to keep its wealthy clients from defecting. A hedge fund that eschews an overinflated sector can lag behind its rivals, and lose its major clients. So you can go bust by avoiding a bubble. As Charles Prince and others discovered, there's no good way out of this dilemma. Attempts to act responsibly and achieve a coöperative solution cannot be sustained, because they leave you vulnerable to exploitation by others. If Citigroup had sat out the credit boom while its rivals made huge profits, Prince would probably have been out of a job earlier. The same goes for individual traders at Wall Street firms. If a trader has one bad quarter, perhaps because he refused to participate in a bubble, the results can be career-threatening.

As the credit bubble continued, even the credit-rating agencies, which exist to provide investors with objective advice, got caught up in the same sort of competitive behavior that had persuaded banks like Citigroup, UBS, and Merrill Lynch to plunge into the subprime sector. Instead of adopting an arms-length approach and establishing a uniform set of standards for issuers of mortgage securities, the big three rating agencies—Fitch, Moody's, and Standard & Poor's—worked closely with Wall Street banks, and ended up giving AAA ratings to financial junk. But under the rating industry's business model, in which the issuers of securities pay the agencies for rating them, the agencies are dependent on Wall Street for their revenues.

Before Goldman Sachs, say, issued a hundred million dollars of residential-mortgage bonds, it would pay an agency like Moody's at least thirty or forty thousand dollars to issue a credit rating on the deal. As the boom continued, investment bankers played the agencies off one another, shopping around for a favorable rating. If one agency didn't think a bond deserved an investment-grade rating, the business would go to a more generously disposed rival. To stay in business, and certainly to maintain market share, credit analysts had to accentuate the positive.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is the obverse of Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand, in which the free market coördinates the behavior of self-seeking individuals to the benefit of all. Each businessman "intends only his own gain," Smith wrote in "The Wealth of Nations," "and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." But in a market environment the individual pursuit of self-interest, however rational, can give way to collective disaster. The invisible hand becomes a fist.

In February of 2002, the Millennium Bridge was reopened. The engineers at Ove Arup had figured out how the collective behavior of pedestrians caused the bridge to sway, and installed dozens of shock absorbers—under the bridge, around its supporting piers, and at one end of it. The embarrassing debacle of its début hasn't entirely faded from memory, but there have been no further problems.

It won't be as easy to deal with the bouts of instability to which our financial system is prone. But the first step is simply to recognize that they aren't aberrations; they are the inevitable result of individuals going about their normal business in a relatively unfettered marketplace. Our system of oversight fails to account for how sensible individual choices can add up to collective disaster. Rather than blaming the pedestrians for swarming the footway, governments need to reinforce the foundations of the structure, by installing more stabilizers. "Our system failed in basic fundamental ways," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner acknowledged earlier this year. "To address this will require comprehensive reform. Not modest repairs at the margin, but new rules of the game."

Despite this radical statement of intent, serious doubts remain over whether the Obama Administration's proposed regulatory overhaul goes far enough in dealing with the problem of rational irrationality. Much of what the Administration has proposed is welcome. It would force issuers of mortgage securities to keep some of the bonds on their own books, and it would impose new capital requirements on any financial firm "whose combination of size, leverage, and interconnectedness could pose a threat to financial stability if it failed." None of these terms have been defined explicitly, however, and it isn't clear what the new rules will mean for big hedge funds, private-equity firms, and the finance arms of industrial companies. If there is any wiggle room, excessive risk-taking and other damaging behavior will simply migrate to the unregulated sector.

A proposed central clearinghouse for derivatives transactions is another good idea that perhaps doesn't go far enough. The clearinghouse plan applies only to "standardized" derivatives. Firms like JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley would still be allowed to trade "customized" derivatives with limited public disclosure and no central clearing mechanism. Given the creativity of the Wall Street financial engineers, it wouldn't take them long to exploit this loophole.

The Administration has also proposed setting up a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to guard individuals against predatory behavior on the part of banks and other financial firms, but its remit won't extend to vetting complex securities—like those notorious collateralized debt obligations—that Wall Street firms trade among themselves. Limiting the development of those securities would stifle innovation, the financial industry contends. But that's precisely the point. "The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust," Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, two economists at N.Y.U.'s Stern School of Business, wrote in a recent paper. "That's no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don't use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable."

During the Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act was passed in order to separate the essential utility aspects of the financial system—customer deposits, check clearing, and other payment systems—from the casino aspects, such as investment banking and proprietary trading. That key provision was repealed in 1999. The Administration has shown no interest in reinstating it, which means that "too big to fail" financial supermarkets, like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, will continue to dominate the financial system. And, since the federal government has now demonstrated that it will do whatever is necessary to prevent the collapse of the largest financial firms, their top executives will have an even greater incentive to enter perilous lines of business. If things turn out well, they will receive big bonuses and the value of their stock options will increase. If things go wrong, the taxpayer will be left to pick up some of the tab.

Executive pay is yet another issue that remains to be tackled in any meaningful way. Even some top bankers have conceded that current Wall Street remuneration schemes lead to excessive risk-taking. Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, has suggested that traders and senior executives should receive some of their compensation in deferred payments. A few firms, including Morgan Stanley and UBS, have already introduced "clawback" schemes that allow the firm to rescind some or all of traders' bonuses if their investments turn sour. Without direct government involvement, however, the effort to reform Wall Street compensation won't survive the next market upturn. It's another version of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Although Wall Street as a whole has an interest in controlling rampant short-termism and irresponsible risk-taking, individual firms have an incentive to hire away star traders from rivals that have introduced pay limits. The compensation reforms are bound to break down. In this case, as in many others, the only way to reach a socially desirable outcome is to enforce compliance, and the only body that can do that is the government.

This doesn't mean that government regulators would be setting the pay of individual traders and executives. It does mean that the Fed, as the agency primarily responsible for insuring financial stability, should issue a set of uniform rules for Wall Street compensation. Firms might be obliged to hold some, or all, of their traders' bonuses in escrow accounts for a period of some years, or to give executive bonuses in the form of restricted stock that doesn't vest for five or ten years. (This was similar to one of Blankfein's suggestions.) In one encouraging sign, officials from the Fed and the Treasury are reportedly working on the details of Wall Street pay guidelines that would explicitly aim at preventing the reëmergence of rationally irrational behavior. "You don't want people being paid for taking too much risk, and you want to make sure that their compensation is tied to long-term performance," Geithner told the Times recently.

The Great Crunch wasn't just an indictment of Wall Street; it was a failure of economic analysis. From the late nineteen-nineties onward, the Fed stubbornly refused to recognize that speculative bubbles encourage the spread of rationally irrational behavior; convinced that the market was a self-regulating mechanism, it turned away from its traditional role, which is—in the words of a former Fed chairman, William McChesney Martin—"to take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going." A formal renunciation of the Greenspan doctrine is overdue. The Fed has a congressional mandate to insure maximum employment and stable prices. Morgan Stanley's Stephen Roach has suggested that Congress alter that mandate to include the preservation of financial stability. The addition of a third mandate would mesh with the Obama Administration's proposal to make the Fed the primary monitor of systemic risk, and it would also force the central bank's governors and staff to think more critically about the financial system and its role in the broader economy.

It's a pity that economists outside the Fed can't be legally obliged to acknowledge their errors. During the past few decades, much economic research has "tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and esthetic puzzles of established research programmes rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works—let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability," notes Willem Buiter, a professor at the London School of Economics who has also served on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee. "So the economics profession was caught unprepared when the crisis struck."

In creating this state of unreadiness, the role of free-market ideology cannot be ignored. Many leading economists still have a vision of the invisible hand satisfying wants, equating costs with benefits, and otherwise harmonizing the interests of the many. In a column that appeared in the Times in May, the Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the author of two leading textbooks, conceded that teachers of freshman economics would now have to mention some issues that were previously relegated to more advanced courses, such as the role of financial institutions, the dangers of leverage, and the perils of economic forecasting. And yet "despite the enormity of recent events, the principles of economics are largely unchanged," Mankiw stated. "Students still need to learn about the gains from trade, supply and demand, the efficiency properties of market outcomes, and so on. These topics will remain the bread-and-butter of introductory courses."

Note the phrase "the efficiency properties of market outcomes." What does that refer to? Builders constructing homes for which there is no demand? Mortgage lenders foisting costly subprime loans on the cash-strapped elderly? Wall Street banks levering up their equity capital by forty to one? The global economy entering its steepest downturn since the nineteen-thirties? Of course not. Mankiw was referring to the textbook economics that he and others have been teaching for decades: the economics of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. In the world of such utopian economics, the latest crisis of capitalism is always a blip.

As memories of September, 2008, fade, many will say that the Great Crunch wasn't so bad, after all, and skip over the vast government intervention that prevented a much, much worse outcome. Incentives for excessive risk-taking will revive, and so will the lobbying power of banks and other financial firms. "The window of opportunity for reform will not be open for long," Hyun Song Shin wrote recently. Before the political will for reform dissipates, it is essential to reckon with the financial system's fundamental design flaws. The next time the structure starts to lurch and sway, it could all fall down. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: JOHN RITTER

Rafael Puyol

Alguien pomposamente la definió como la milla de oro madrileña, el lugar del "shopping" cualificado para propios y extraños. Pero ahora tras el tsunami destructor se ha convertido en Sarajevo. Algunas tiendas han cerrado, otras se han trasladado y todas han perdido clientes. Ya sé que dentro de unos años estará de chupete, pero, por el momento, recorrer la calle exige de paciencia y arrojo.

El viajero debe ir pertrechado con un seguro de accidentes, un manual de supervivencia y un equipo como el de un soldados gastador y el que lleva Pasaban para superar los ocho mil. En esta indumentaria son imprescindibles la mascarilla para el polvo, los tapones para los oídos, zapatos blindados y un botiquín de urgencia. No sobra la brújula ni una escala flexible por si te caes en una zanja. Es inútil llevar mapas o planos detallados pues la configuración de la calle cambia cada día y por la noche más te vale orientarse con las estrellas que con las escasas y confusas señales de tierra.

Ciertamente no hay muchos transeúntes, pero a los pocos que veas, valerosos supervivientes de las trincheras, no les preguntes nada, porque te contarán su vida. Y qué decir de los serranitas, gente de rostro desdibujado por una nube de polvo permanente y de atuendo "gótico" provocado por una suciedad antilavadora.

 Los serranitas, ante el ensordecedor sonido de las máquinas, se han acostumbrado a expresarse a través de un lenguaje de gestos entre los que no falta uno cariñoso para el Alcalde. Cada día se confirma más la hipótesis de que nuestro munícipe contrató a Dédalo, el constructor del laberinto de Creta, para diseñar las obras de Serrano. Y que en el interior de la calle habita el Minotauro que periódicamente exige sacrificios humanos para aplacar su ira.

"De Madrid al cielo". Tengo para mí que los serranitas y todas las víctimas de la calle, alcanzarán la gloria sin más merecimientos que residir en ella o atraversarla.