I wonder what happened to ‘the information age’. Remember the information revolution? It seems very dated now, particularly in the light of the credit crunch and the news that a number of companies (including Bill Gates) have lost money as ‘…US ethanol boom dries up‘. But I’m sure I read an article in Scientific American about 2  years ago that threw a huge question up about ethanol production from corn and the real economics of this.

We now also discover that many councils had been warned some time ago that the credit rating of Iceland banks was falling.

And that there have been several warnings in general in recent times about the economy.

So despite an ‘information revolution’ and the advent of the ‘information age’ it seems people still believe what they want to believe, and disregard the rest. Banks, despite the evidence, and despite even ‘common sense’ continued to lend money to people who clearly had no way of paying it back. Councils invested in Icelandic banks despite being warned of the potential consequences. Companies invested in ethanol, despite the many questions about the economic viability of this as a fuel source. Why? Well it wasn’t a problem of information really, more a problem of greed and the drive for ever more and ever larger profits. 

It seems apparent that feeding information to people who behave like pigs at a trough doesn’t really make a huge heap of difference.