I can’t parse the fine details of the rejected bail-out bill, but it feels like there’s a direct analogy between the current crisis and forest fire management.
For example, read this article on the US Forest Service’s shift in policy, including this section:
Their reasoning [to just let fires burn] is that fire is a natural part of the landscape that clears out underbrush and small trees and creates forest openings in a mosaic pattern. Such conditions help keep small fires from growing into the kind of large, catastrophic blazes that have become increasingly common in recent years. They now say that decades of aggressively fighting fires was a mistake because it allowed forests to become overcrowded and ripe for fires nearly impossible to control.
This thinking might be applicable here.
Source:Fire Watch Company
Robert Cringely sees the same analogy in “The Cringely Plan: See the Light” http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080926_005422.html
“An unmanaged forest, one without the sort of fire control we attempted to provide, would naturally burn every few years. The undergrowth would build up, reach a critical mass, some source of ignition would come along — usually lightning — and all that undergrowth would burn. The redwoods themselves would be scarred but not really threatened, as we could see from the charring that marked them from countless such fires over centuries. Of course burning undergrowth threatened homes and property, too, so there was a natural desire on the part of that community to want the next burn to not come this year, please not this year. So there came a policy of aggressively fighting fires with the result that we eventually faced 60 (now 90!) years of flammable material growth rather than six or eight years. And the probable fire fueled by 60 years of undergrowth would have been so bad that our job changed to one of trying to prevent fires from happening, well, ever. This was an impossible task, of course. Eventually the stars would align the wrong way and the whole place would burn down, we all knew it. Just let it not happen on our watch.
Does this sound familiar?”
Sean: thanks for the comment, I missed that one from Cringley. It’s a good analogy!