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There are times when you have to believe that the world economy would function a whole lot better if business leaders had spent more time studying history and less time in business school.
One of these eureka moments occurred this week with the publication by the Economist intelligence Unit of a survey of global executive opinion which found that 60% of those questioned believed that the current financial crisis has “fundamentally changed” capitalism.
Sir John Templeton, the fund manager, once remarked that no one should expect to make money if they did what everyone else did.
He was talking in the context of stock markets and underlining the need for investors to do their own thinking because the market price already reflected conventional wisdom, so there was no opportunity to profit by saying “ me too”.
Sadly the same lesson has never really been taken on board in mainstream business, hence the group-think which makes too many people grossly over-estimate the importance of current events while failing to notice underlying trends which do indeed threaten to change their lives.
I don't believe for a moment that capitalism has been fundamentally changed by the current crisis. Capitalism was not fundamentally changed on the way up by the period of excess which took us through the dot com and then the credit bubbles, and no more is it likely to be changed on the way down.
All that happened in the boom was that a few lucky people who happened to be in the right place at the right time exploited the temporary market phenomenon of cheap credit caused by global imbalances.
This cheap credit did briefly appear to benefit large sections of the population — and Gordon Brown's government — by allowing them to confuse the temporary affordability of debt with the permanent spending power which comes from genuine wealth creation.
It allowed those skilled in financial engineering to spawn a series of transitory industries like private equity and hedge funds, now unlikely to survive. It allowed the gamblers in investment banks temporarily to forget that trading is a zero-sum game, and convince their employers that they had acquired a genuine skill at Russian roulette.
The odds have of course caught up with them, though unfortunately the bullets have not been confined to those who pulled the triggers.
Yet in spite of our preoccupation with it, most of what has gone on in banking is froth, albeit deep and expensive froth, which did not even penetrate into all the corners of finance.
Meanwhile the real economy, where capitalism also thrives, carried on more or less as it always did.
Nevertheless there seems to be a belief that government bailouts, rules on hedge funds and 50% tax rates will lead to a new social order which will see business forever shackled. It's unlikely.
Economic growth may be slow, particularly in this country where we struggle to come to terms with the new burden of government debt but it is unlikely that either government or regulators will have the staying power fundamentally to change the way business operates.
This will be true, even in banking, once the dust has settled. The four banking crises in the first 40 years of my working life all spawned new banking regulations, none of which stopped the fifth crisis last year.
Rules are just a Maginot line; the adaptable and enterprising go round under or over the top of it. Not for nothing did Professor Frank Portnoy point out years ago that the purpose of most financial innovation is to get round some law or other.
The trouble is that while executives are fretting about regulation, government shareholding and all the noise surrounding the current crisis they miss the fundamental shifts that are taking place in the world.
Lord Mandelson in a speech last week pointed out how the global economy is likely to double in the next decade and how the next 20 years will see the emergence of a stream of new businesses and new technologies which will redefine everything.
At the same time the west has to come to terms with a major shift in economic power towards China, and to southern hemisphere economies like Brazil.
The emerging geopolitical order is likely fundamentally to shift the terms of trade against the West meaning we pay more on a permanent basis for raw materials, energy, and food, and where we will on a permanent basis have to invest more in technology and consume less.
One would have more confidence in the ability of the west to adjust to these challenges if the business executives polled had been more concerned about them than on the possible impact of a few more laws on hedge funds or a requirement that banks hold more prudent levels of capital.
