Most of the institutions shaping the world today are incapable of imagining anything other than their everlasting existence. And so things carry on, no matter how toxic, how ridiculous, or how contrary to values that most people share.

But overall the profession does not excel at seeing trouble ahead and unlike engineering disciplines it doesn’t have a branch of forward-looking failure-mode analysis or of post-crash forensic analysis.

While quite a few economists identified the housing bubble as it occurred, fewer grasped the consequences of a housing-price collapse for the broader economy.

In his book Collapse, economist Jared Diamond lists five factors that can lead to social decay, including a failure to understand and to prevent causes of environmental damage; climate change; depredations by hostile neighbors; the inability of friendly neighbors to continue trade; and finally, how the society itself deals with the problems raised