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~ Posted by Robert Butler, December 30th 2011

In 1992, Bill Clinton beat George Bush to the presidency with the slogan "It's the economy, stupid". Twenty years later, this phrase looks even more of a simplification than when it first surfaced. The current financial crisis has shown us the economy is part of something much wider: it's the culture, stupid.

Readers of Michael Lewis's new book "Boomerang" have been taken on a hair-raising tour of Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland and America during the financial crisis. "Boomerang" shows how the economies are very different because the countries themselves—and their attitudes towards finance—are very different.

But this is a crisis for financial experts too. Gillian Tett, US managing editor at the Financial Times, told the BBC this week that for the last 20 or 30 years people had been trained to think that if they had a computer spread sheet and lots of numbers and equations they could not only predict the future but also control the economic environment.

The great wake-up call of the last year is that it's actually about the social and political fabric and the question of what's going to happen next to the Eurozone or the UK or the US really depends on politics and culture and the way that societies behave, and people just aren't trained to understand that or analyse it.

Tett, tipped as a future editor of the FT, may have a head start: she has a PhD in social anthropology.

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

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