It's worse than foolish to imagine that technologists will be able to fix the world if economists and politics have gone insane. We can't function alone. What we do is empower people. The world needs to be approximately sane for us to make any positive difference.

If homeowners with mortgages had been owed something resembling royalties whenever a mortgage was leveraged, then there would not have been overleveraging. The cost of risk would have been built in from the start, and would have been paid for by the investor creating the risk. Benefits would have been shared with those who were creating the fundamental value: homeowners who promised to pay the mortgages. Economic symmetry would have prevented investors from taking risks on other people's uninformed behavior, using yet other people's money.