There are many films now about the "bad guys" in the financial crisis - starting with the classic Michael Douglas in Wall Street (1987). But few convey the systemic causes. Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail is about that only one. It's hard to do - for some of the same reasons it's hard to fix.
Writing about the battle to make the financial system safer, Robert Shiller, Yale economics professor and Nobel Laureate, nails one of the big incentive issues that thwarts good policy making everywhere, especially solutions to huge long term risks: lack of glamor. Quoting a Fed official, Shiller noted:
“Joseph Tracy of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York... put the problem succinctly: “Firefighting is more glamorous than fire prevention.” Just as most people are more interested in stories about fires than they are in the chemistry of fire retardants, they are more interested in stories about financial crashes than they are in the measures needed to prevent them. That is not a recipe for a happy ending.”
