{"id":282,"date":"2010-05-10T21:49:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-10T20:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2010\/05\/whos-to-blame-for-the-financial-crisis.html"},"modified":"2014-11-12T05:09:34","modified_gmt":"2014-11-12T04:09:34","slug":"whos-to-blame-for-financial-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/epiphenom\/2010\/05\/whos-to-blame-for-financial-crisis.html","title":{"rendered":"Who’s to blame for the financial crisis?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Astute observers will have noticed that there\u2019s been something of a crisis in the financial world over the past couple of years. The EU\u2019s just coughed up \u20ac500 billion in the latest effort to stem the panic\u2026 or, in the alternative perspective, to fend off the predators<\/a>! <\/p>\n

And that gets to the heart of the matter. Is the crisis just one of those things \u2013 part of a natural economic cycle that is beyond anyone\u2019s ability to predict or control? Or is it a result of moral or intellectual failures among those who are are in charge of all the money.? Everyone has their own opinion, but what do most <\/b><\/i>people think?<\/p>\n

David Leiser and Rinat Benita, of Ben Gurion University, with Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde of the Institut Jean-Nicod, put this question via internet questionnaires to 1,707 people in France, the US, Russia, Germany, Israel, and sub-Saharan Africa.<\/p>\n

[A note on how the study was done: The questionnaire was quite complex, but they used factor analysis to boil it down to two groups of questions that seemed to sort out two different groups of people \u2013 those who thought the crisis is a \u201csystemic, global, unintended phenomenon\u201d and those who thought it was a \u201clocal, individually and intentionally motivated one\u201d]<\/span><\/p>\n

On average, people were more inclined to go for the \u2018individual failure\u2019 explanation, rather than the \u2018unintended consequence\u2019 explanation:<\/p>\n

\u2026 most people appear to construe an intentional, especially moral, reading of the crisis rather than conceive of it in terms of independent causal mechanisms. Purposiveness, be it under the guise of an intelligent design in nature or that of the secret interests of a vaguely identified group of businessmen, is the default explanation which seems to satisfy a primitive need for closure<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

People who are wealthier, or who are trained in in economics, were less likely to believe in the \u2018human failure\u2019 theory. People who had been personally affected were more likely to.<\/p>\n

But what about religious people? If, like me, you assumed that religious people would be more likely to put moral failings at the root of the crisis, you are in for a surprise.<\/p>\n

Because it turns out that although the religious are<\/b><\/i> more likely to blame moral failures, they are also more likely to subscribe to the \u2018economic storm\u2019 theory. As it happens, they actually were more likely than the non-religious to agree that \u201cThe current crisis comes as a punishment to all those who misbehaved in the past few years\u201d, but even here the difference was not huge<\/p>\n

In other words, what marks out the more religious is not that they have different views on the crisis, but that they hold them with more conviction!<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t clear what should drive such an association. Conceivably, it reflects a preference for clarity over ambiguity that is often seen in people attracted to the more fundamentalist religions. Perhaps the religious are simply less comfortable with admitting \u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d.<\/p>\n

\n

\"ResearchBlogging.org\"<\/a><\/span>
Leiser, D., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Benita, R. (2010). Human foibles or systemic failure\u2014Lay perceptions of the 2008\u20132009 financial crisis Journal of Socio-Economics, 39<\/span> (2), 132-141 DOI: 10.1016\/j.socec.2010.02.013<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Astute observers will have noticed that there\u2019s been something of a crisis in the financial world over the past couple of years. The EU\u2019s just coughed up \u20ac500 billion in the latest effort to stem the panic\u2026 or, in the alternative perspective, to fend off the predators! And that gets to the heart of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2091,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWho's to blame for the financial crisis?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Astute observers will have noticed that there's been something of a crisis in the financial world over the past couple of years. 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