Today’s papers are half full of buoyant commentaries (Phew!! Panic over!!) and half full of dire profits-warnings and redundancies (Boeing, Boeing, Bong!). One can’t help but think: hmmm.It is an eloquent reminder that things do not always change quite so profoundly as we believe. The same urges – greed, fear, love and envy – continue to shepherd us along familiar paths And bubbles always burst. “The crash was implicit in the speculation that went before,” he writes – adding that it was caused by nothing more than “the seminal lunacy which has always seized people who are seized in turn with the notion that they can become very rich”.A month ago the air was full of crash talk. The tiger economies of Asia were leaping about like scalded cats Russia was imploding Some weird hedge fund hybrid was collapsing in New York Latin America teetered on a cliff-edge of debt Hurricanes were smashing Central America A lot of bad news, by any standards.

That it has subsided in the public imagination is alarming in itself. Galbraith grows sober when he tells the story of the fateful plunge in October 1929 After some heavy falls the market had rallied. The smartest investors – those who had sold at the top – bought back in (feeling smug, no doubt). They were promptly crushed by the second stampede along with everybody else. The moment people began to believe that the worst was over was precisely the moment at which the worst was just beginning.Is that what is happening now? Probably not. Some things may recur: some megabank dealer – a Nick Leeson wannabe – might even now be rushing to protect his Christmas bonus with a whopping punt on Brazil, or Indonesia, or oil, or gold But a crash, by definition, comes as a surprise. If it were predictable then it would not have happened – the market would have reckoned it into the price.

Galbraith is a true connoisseur and calls his crash “a technically superlative disaster”, as if it were a rare wine But even he concedes that it was obvious only in hindsight. If it had been foreseeable, it wouldn’t have happened.Still, hindsight is anything but all-seeing. One of the most telling of the lessons from history in Galbraith’s excellent book concerns the sturdiness of our refusal to learn the lessons of history. Take the myth that the crash of 1929 provoked a bout of suicides: Galbraith exhumes the figures and discovers that the death rate did not climb: all that changed was the newspaper coverage. Before 1929 suicides did not rate a mention; afterwards they were “crash victims”. If the image of ruined brokers leaping from windows has endured longer than Galbraith’s patient refutation of it, that is partly because we love melodrama, but mainly because we do not often look back, as it were, in anger.. A poll published this week once again portrays a euro-sceptic Britain aligning itself with America against malign influences across the channel.

The difference this time is that the great divide is not political, but philosophical. It is not Brussels and eurocrats which are the target of Anglo-Saxon wrath, but writers and intellectuals such as Derrida, Marx and Nietzsche. The evidence of this continental divide comes from a poll we conducted at the Philosophers’ Magazine, which asked academics, students and enthusiasts of the subject whom they thought had made the greatest contribution to philosophy, and whose contributions had been most overrated (with Marx, astonishingly, coming second). As the magazine is an English-language publication you might well expect to get an Anglo-Saxon bias in the results, but you wouldn’t automatically expect such a hostile reaction to the modern European thinkers such as Derrida, Marx and Nietzsche who came first, second and third respectively in the overrated category.
Clearly, it wasn’t merely because they were foreign; rather, it was because they are modern. In the poll to find the most admired philosophers, modern Anglo-Saxon thinkers also made a very poor showing (Hume was our best performer, in sixth place). The top spots went to Aristotle and Plato, both dead over two millennia ago, while third place went to Kant, from the 18th century.Put the two results together and a not-particularly flattering portrait of contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophical priorities emerges.