BBC Interview with Profressor Mark Gertler

The BBC just had an excellent interview with an economics Professor Mark Gertler that got down to the basics of the "current economic crisis" as everyone is calling it, asking some direct questions and actually coming to some conclusions. It's well worth a listen.

There's a point in the interview that some might miss: full-blown communist control of an economy (religiously portrayed as "evil" in the US) such as occurred in the USSR does not work—but neither does complete laissez faire, for the same social-related reasons. It really comes down to an argument of how much regulation is appropriate. And unlike what happens in presidential campaigns, it shouldn't be a religious argument, but a pragmatic one of testing a system in which people are involved, and over time trying to better understand which approaches make it work most efficiently.