Robert Schiller on the financial crisis

Robert Shiller is a professor at Yale. He's written this article (http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/shiller70/English) on the economic crisis, which makes some interesting (if underdeveloped) connections surrounding the idea of contingency. For example, he mentions Haiti, and seems (rightly, I think), to suggest that geographic, economic and political factors all contributed to the outcome (or, the situation which we are currently witnessing and dealing with). Outcomes, however, are somewhat different to causes: there seems, at least, to be a key factor in the Haiti affair, namely the earthquake itself. But there's little point in blaming an earthquake: we ought, in Haiti, to look to the infrastructural problems and the human error that allowed them to influence the tragic outcome of the whole thing. Likewise, with the current economic crisis, I expect there are very human lessons to be learnt, which we are in danger of ignoring if we put everything down to contingency, multiple-factors and chaos theory.