You say "Americans deserve to hear much more detail about how the candidates would reform the financial system to prevent another crisis like this one."
I think we desperately need to expand the frame in which "this problem" is perceived. That discussion should precede solutions within that frame.
For one thing, this cannot be isolated to be a "financial system" problem. It involves other economic and social systems, including trust, social decision-making, governance, jobs, social safety nets, education, attitudes towards expertise, sources of blindness in how humans see the world, etc.
They are all tangled. They cannot be solved "separately", or put into a priority order. If there are 200 holes in the bottom of the boat, addressing the "three most important ones" doesn't really cut it. Causes, effects, symptoms, are in tangled feedback loops.
Most of all, I don't think that 200 bright people can "solve" this while the rest of the country and world watches TV, or that it will be solved by voting to pick the best of the two solutions they come up with in some back room somewhere.
A billion people are willing to help. How can that work? THAT's the question we should be addressing.
— Raymond, Detroit
See also:
Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)
Active strength through emergent synthesis
Why more math and science are not the answer.
OECD PISA - Our education system should teach collaboration not competition
US - Economy of arrogance (and blindness)
Virtue drives the bottom line - secrets of high-reliability systemsHigh-Relability Organizations and asking for help
Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper)
High-Reliability.org web site
Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety
Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)
Houston - we have another problem (on complexity and limits of one person's mind)
Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)
Pathways to Peace - beautiful slides and reflections to music on the value of virtues
You say "No system can be smart enough to survive this level of incompetence and recklessness by the people charged to run it."
T.S. Eliot, writing in the last Great Depression, in "Choruses from 'The Rock'", said it well.
"They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be."
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MIT's John Sterman, in his book "System Dynamics - Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World", describes how poor intuition is at predicting the behavior of "complex adaptive systems."
Books like Gene Franklin's textbook for control system engineering, "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" describe the universally applicable conditions for any system of any type to be stable, and I don't see them met or even discussed.
The only thing that seems CLEAR to me is that a whole new feedback loop has been added, responding with almost certainly short-range horizons to events that used to be decoupled and now that will be coupled by that unpredictable response.
We are way past the point where well intentioned humans can follow their "insight" and improve things with that strategy.
I have a number of relevant quotes from Sterman's book on my weblog post on the credit crunch that I made in August, 2007: http://newbricks.blogspot.com/
At risk of running on, I briefly quote that paper: The classic paper in this field is Jay Forrester's congressional testimony: "The Counterintutive Behavior of Social Systems", http://web.mit.edu/sdg/www/D-
Quoting the abstract: Society becomes frustrated as repeated attacks on deficiencies in social systems lead only to worse symptoms. Legislation is debated and passed with great hope, but many programs prove to be ineffective. Results are often far short of expectations Because dynamic behavior of social systems is not understood, government programs often cause exactly the reverse of desired results.
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