Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay

"Yes, but capitalism is a relatively recent event in that way. None of this was true in the middle ages . In John Lanchester’s book Whoops! , which is my next choice, he points out that during the Cold War communism and capitalism were balanced – so capitalist America did nice things to show that they were nicer than these horrible communists. And at the time a lot of people had put their hopes in communism. I know that my dad had. Out in Australia he was told and believed that all the wrongs that he and his family had suffered would be put right and it would be a fairer world – he couldn’t believe it when the news of the Stalin trials came out. That really was terrible for him. And Lanchester says that then, after the Cold War, the Americans didn’t have that balancing effect of competition with communism. And then with a whoosh capitalism took off and along came Milton Friedman [economist and champion of free markets with minimal intervention]. The reason I’m putting Whoops! in this list, is because it’s a beautiful read and it’s so funny. But also because he says at the end of his introduction: ‘The aftermath of the crisis is going to dominate the economics and politics of our societies for at least a decade to come. It’s important that we try to understand it and begin to think about what’s next.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s extremely readable, and a lot of it is about what I’ve been writing about from the other side – that we are incredibly bad at assessing risk. This is because we are very bad at assessing probability – every time I go into my newsagent I see people who obviously can’t afford it buying £20 worth of lottery tickets. And I tell them the odds and they say, ‘Oh well, somebody has got to win it.’ So many people are scared of flying when it is our safest form of transport – crossing the road is more dangerous here. And when it comes to our own personal life there is so much that we don’t want to see: when you look, for example, at all the failed marriages amongst your friends and your parents’ friends and you say, ‘My marriage is going to be different.’ Then there’s all the work that has been done by economists and mathematicians to eradicate risk – you cannot eradicate risk, risk is what life is. So Whoops! is a book everyone should read. Lanchester demonstrates that out there in the real world we go on and on making these mistakes because we don’t understand ourselves. I am writing about the reasons why we don’t understand ourselves, which is because we are too scared. If you understand that all you ever see or know is the constructions of your brain and that everything is a guess, then you can’t escape uncertainty. You could be wrong and that is frightening. The other part of it, therefore, is that we all live in our own world of meaning and no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way. What Chris Frith writes about, and what he and his wife Ute are now going on to research, is how, if this is the case, we manage to be able to communicate with other people. Chris and Ute are nice people and much more hopeful types, whereas I write about all our miscommunications – and there is no end of those. It is scary. You know, for example, when you are with someone who is a really good friend and then suddenly they say something and you realise there is no way of bridging your differences in how you see things. You feel so alone. Some of us see ourselves as alone, but others go from ‘alone’ to ‘lonely’, which is more frightening. But not acknowledging these facts is about as sensible as refusing to acknowledge that we live in a world that contains volcanoes."