Knowing and Making

In a difficult moral situation, we like to have someone to tell us what to do. The hard work of weighing up factors and working through the consequences of our choices is confronting - not least when the conclusions risk conflicting with some existing assumptions about the world or ourselves. This is where I find myself with respect to the Icelandic banking crisis. I generally think the UK government - especially the civil service - is pretty sensible, well-intentioned and respectful of markets and the rule of law. Thus, the idea that they might have attempted to extort money out of an innocent little third-world country like Iceland raises my cognitive dissonance hackles. The Icelandic government has done what most governments would have done in their situation - put a hold on everything while they try to sort it out and decide how much of their banks' liabilities they will stand behind. The UK's reaction - invoking anti-terrorism legislation to freeze several billion po...

According to this article , you wouldn't want to be a woman in Iceland right now: Iceland, unlike many of the other nations that went mad for credit, has lots of things going for it: an average age of 37, a highly educated work force, a nearly positive birthrate... Ouch.