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The Times and others have an early look at the bailout compromise hashed out late Saturday. The situation is still being treated like a leaky dike rather than a long-term infrastructure-building program, as is visible from the management structure and architecture (an oversight committee and a focused financial group; amelioration of current ills, without specific 1, 5, or 20 year plans, and with no timeline for designing same).
If one is not careful, one can spend far more than the cost of a better design on patching a faulty one. Indeed, there is no patching of a truly misconceived design, which it is entirely possible we now have.
Of course there have been hundreds of similar visionless compromises just over the course of my lifetime, in different regions of the world. I am at once fascinated and horrified that I don’t know who should be responsible for learning from those mistakes, or who thinks they have done so.