"This strange, weak obstinacy, this persistence in the wrong path of progress, grows weaker and worse, as do all such weak things. And by the time in which I write its moral attitude has taken on something of the sinister and even the horrible.
Our mistakes have become our secrets. Editors and journalists tear up with a guilty air all that reminds them of the party promises unfulfilled, or the party ideals reproaching them. It is true of our statesmen that socially in evidence they are intellectually in hiding. The society is heavy with unconfessed sins; its mind is sore and silent with painful subjects; it has a constipation of conscience.
There are many things it has done and allowed to be done which it does not really dare to think about; it calls them by other names and tries to talk itself into faith in a false past, as men make up the things they would have said in a quarrel. Of these sins one lies buried deepest but most noisome, and though it is stifled, stinks: the true story of the relations of the rich man and the poor in England. The half-starved English proletarian is not only nearly a skeleton but he is a skeleton in a cupboard."
G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils
That is a very good description of the credibility trap.
The ruling elite find themselves temporarily embarrassed, even shaken, by their repeated failures in economic and public policy over the past twenty years or so.
However, since they themselves are doing so well, they have not yet stirred themselves to do anything yet about it.
And so they continue to repeat their failures, from bubble to crash to bubble, stretching the fabric of society to hide their terrible errors, to blind themselves as they teeter towards the abyss.
Have a pleasant weekend.
