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For anyone keeping track, I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. At the American Economics Association / American Social Sciences Association Conference. Currently I'm sitting in the Atlanta Hard Rock Cafe. I'm typing this on a bluetooth keyboard connected to my iPhone. It's the first day of the conference so they have only had one session. It was Joseph Stiglitz, talking about what led to the recent crisis. His speech boiled down to the schism between the market system and the social good. Essentially bankers incentives were made in a way that led them to act counter to the good of society. This is counter to the qoute from Adam Smith about the Candlestick maker, the butcher and the baker. Everyone working towards their own self good, does not lead to the best outcome for society. At least not in modern systems. Don't be too hard on Adam Smith though, people quote without having read or understood him. I myself haven't read him, but I've read other quotes by him, and he didn't trust corporations, or any way of pooling money in a way that didn't die with the owners. His statement also wasn't as a matter of fact on his part, but an expression of astonishment that such a thing worked and produced a widely mutual beneficial outcome. Well, it does so no longer, and likely hasn't in decades. It's just taken the Ivory Tower a little while to see what was going on. Information works its way upstairs slowly after all.