ou could have chosen any other compelling title for this book. Why did you choose the title, The Age of Fallibility?
My publisher chose the title -- just as his publisher chose the title of Karl Popper's Open Society and Identities. It refers to the Age of Enlightenment; we are in the post-Enlightenment era. In the Enlightenment era, humanity put its faith in reason. But Popper and other thinkers have shown us reason's limits -- in essence, that our understanding of the world in which we live is inherently imperfect. Therefore, we are now in the Age of Fallibility. That is the argument the title highlights.
It is five years since the 9/11 attacks on America. Your new books discusses the events and the aftermath at length...
I developed a theory of 'boom and bust' in the financial markets, and I use the theory to show how the Bush administration's eventually counterproductive pursuit of American supremacy had the marking of a bubble. The theory is based on our fallibility. We have a biased view, but events may reinforce our bias and carry us further and further in a particular direction until it becomes unsustainable -- and reality provides a check. That's when the boom comes to an end, and is followed by a bust.
After 9/11, America got carried away with the war on terror. Of course, the terrorist attack was a traumatic event but the way we responded to it carried us into what I call far-from-equilibrium territory. The process was at first self-reinforcing, in the sense that the country lined up behind the President and supported him wholeheartedly.
Eventually, however, the original misconceptions became self-defeating, as evidenced by the very detrimental results of the war on terror. Those results include the invasion of Iraq and the precipitous decline in American power and influence in the world, results even more deleterious than I would have predicted.
It is after 9/11, with the misguided war on terror concept that we entered into this bubble. That is why I called my previous book The Bubble of American Supremacy: The Cost of Bush's War in Iraq.
Photograph: Sondeep Shankar/Saab Pictures
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