‘Failure is good’
“Greed is good” became a popular phrase in the aftermath of the 1987 movie Wall Street, implying that the riches of individual financiers were justified by the role those people played initiating large-scale wealth creation throughout society.Two decades and several financial meltdowns later, that slogan could probably use an update, something gamely attempted by Simon Johnson in a talk on campus Friday, supporting his new book about the financial crisis, 13 Bankers (Knopf Doubleday, 2010).“Failure is good,” said Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “This country is based on our ability to take risks, to create new things — and our ability to fail, individually and in a corporate setting. If you become too big to fail, it’s no longer a market economy.”Over the last 18 months, Johnson has become one of America’s most prominent critics of both the banking...