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If It’s Not Your Fault, Then How Come You’re So Rich?
Matthew Yglesias — ... One notion gaining in popularity among writers for publications likely to be read by members of the financial elite is that maybe this whole “finding out who’s responsible for this giant catastrophe” business is a mistake. Ross Douthat rounds up a few examples of this kind of thing from his colleagues ...

The Great Crash Of 2063, Ctd.
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan — By Patrick Appel Ross counters Henry Blodget: [Blodget] runs through a typical housing bubble scenario - somebody buys a house late in the game and loses his shirt - and argues that almost everybody involved, from the homebuyer to the real-estate agent to the mortgage broker to the people on Wall Street and Washington who enabled the whole thing were making the same kind of mistakes, and indeed, were acting "just the way you would expect them to act under the circumstances." Now in a sense, this is convincing. But at a ...

12/17: Caroline And The Netroots
Blogometer — ... . Now obviously what I've said with regard to the financial crisis is also true in this arena: With great power comes the responsibility to exercise better judgment than, say, my twenty-three year old, pro-torture-lite self. But with great power comes a lot of pressures as well, starting with great fear: The fear that through inaction you'll be responsible for the deaths of thousands or even millions of the Americans whose lived you were personally charged to protect. This fear ran wild the post-9/11 Bush Administration, with often-appalling consequences, but it wasn't an ...

Does power breed arrogance, or do the arrogant seek power?
Classical Values — ... But will they deign to have tea with the common folk? Or will they imagine that they'll still be included among the elite if they "behave"? A secondary question is whether the new arrogant class deign to throw a few crumbs to those they've displaced. I guess the rest of us will have to stay tuned. Whether power breeds arrogance or the arrogant seek power (or a combination of both), I don't know. Has it ever been settled whether we live in an aristocracy or a meritocracy? Or has the distinction been erased? Obama's Ivy League appointments have ...

Republicans: To the Manor Born
J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles — ... Great Power, Great Responsibility: The mistakes that our elites made... also have their roots in flaws that I think are somewhat more particular to this [meritocratic] elite... like an overweening faith in technology's capacity to master contingency, a widespread assumption that the future doesn't have much to learn from the past, and above all a peculiar combination of smartest-guys-in-the-room entitlement (don't worry, we deserve to be moving millions of dollars around on the basis of totally speculative models, because we got really high SAT scores) and ferocious, grasping ...