Robert Samuelson, business and financial journalist for the Washington Post and Newsweek, is tired of the blame game.  He sees a lot of people trying to explain the cause of the the global economic crisis and the great recession by looking for clear villains and victims.  And while he agrees that there is a lot of blame to go around, he argues, the the latest Wilson Quarterly, that the story of this recession is more one of boom and bust cycles. It is a narrative that is more complicated and less satisfactory for some.  But, he writes, this telling of the story "is more understandable and innocent than the standard tale of calculated greed and dishonesty."

But the story is also more disturbing in that it batters our faith that modern economics—whether of the Left or Right—can protect us against great instability and insecurity. The financial panic and subsequent Great Recession have demonstrated that the advances in economic management and financial understanding that supposedly protected us from violent business cycles—ruling out another Great Depression—were oversold, exposing us to larger economic reversals than we thought possible. It’s true that we’ve so far avoided another depression, but it was a close call, and the fact that all the standard weapons (low interest rates, huge government budget deficits) have already been deployed leaves open the disquieting question of what would happen if the economic system again lurched violently into reverse. The economic theorems and tools that we thought could forewarn and protect us are more primitive than we imagined. We have not traveled so far from the panic-prone economies of 1857, 1893, and 1907 as we supposed.

Our experience since 2007 has also revealed a huge contradiction at the center of our politics. Prosperity is almost everyone’s goal, but too much prosperity enjoyed for too long tends to destroy itself. It seems that periodic recessions and burst bubbles—at least those of modest proportions—serve a social purpose by reminding people of economic and financial hazards and by rewarding prudence. Milder setbacks may avert less frequent but larger and more damaging convulsions—such as the one we’re now experiencing—that shake the country’s very political and social foundations. But hardly anyone wants to admit this publicly. What politician is going to campaign on the slogan, “More Recessions, Please”?

In a more honest telling of the story, avaricious Wall Street types, fumbling government regulators, and clueless economists become supporting players in a larger tragedy that is not mainly of their making. If you ask who did make it, the most honest answer is: We all did. Put differently, the widely shared quest for ever-improving prosperity contributed to the conditions that led to the financial and economic collapse. Our economic technocrats as well as our politicians and the general public constantly strive for expansions that last longer, unemployment that falls lower, economic growth that increases faster. Americans crave booms, which bring on busts. That is the unspoken contradiction.

Read Rethinking the Great Recession here.