My Attitude on Risk Management

It is no coincidence that I dislike certain industries profoundly - insurance, stockbrokers, economists, and all but the most basic levels of banking.  I regard them as equivalent to snake oil, and symptomatic of the way our society has gone off the rails in a lot of ways.  Granted, it's also changed in ways that appear to be for the better (both the Internet and the burgeoning entertainment industry being stellar examples), and maybe the one is inextricably linked to the other.  But I'm not convinced that's true, and I often fear that our entire society is a house of cards waiting to fall, because nobody shares my conviction that things must be viewed as either substantial or untrustworthy, with no risk-taking or leaps of faith.

My attitude is that if things go straight to hell, someone will always find ways of shifting the blame and claiming that such things "just happen", that nothing about the way they operate needs to change as a result...but this is of absolutely no benefit to the unlucky saps who paid the price for their failed gamble or their confidence game.  I believe that when something goes wrong - and it ALWAYS does - you need to hold those responsible to account for their failure to do EVERYTHING right.  If you do, in fact, have perfect information to operate on, and make all your choices be absolutely the right ones, then you assume no fault if you still fail; it simply proves that the task was impossible.  But to induce someone into attempting a probably-impossible task because you've manufactured some apparent proof that it will work, and then to have it fail and say that person dies in the attempt, makes you a murderer IMO.

I believe that our society ought to adopt such a hard-line attitude toward absolutely everyone who holds responsibility for someone else's life or livelihood; on my watch, we'd never have had a sub-prime mortgage crisis or anything of similar ilk, because I would have made it a capital crime for the real estate industry to play with the value of people's homes in order to line their own pockets.