The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.

Great read. My two favorite quotes:

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is the obverse of Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, in which the free market coördinates the behavior of self-seeking individuals to the benefit of all. Each businessman “intends only his own gain,” Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations,” “and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” But in a market environment the individual pursuit of self-interest, however rational, can give way to collective disaster. The invisible hand becomes a fist.

and

Limiting the development of [complex] securities would stifle innovation, the financial industry contends. But that’s precisely the point. “The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust,” Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, two economists at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a recent paper. “That’s no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don’t use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable.”

The second seems quite applicable to software engineering as well.

"its idea of individual success reflects the nature of the animal the system is supposed to work on."

I don't quite follow you. Please explain.

Sure, what I mean is that the pursue for individual success is a key feature of Homo sapiens species. Traditional capitalism declares it as its main trait. The fact that participants of a capitalist system are encouraged to act according to their natural behavioral patterns makes capitalism the most stable system ever known.

Anything run by greed is crash-prone.