The Credit Boom and the Global Financial Crisis

People in the middle to bottom of our societies were doing much less well than those at the top because they were not part of the technology revolution or the financial revolution. And then there was the financial crisis that came along, which basically showed to people not only were they not doing terribly well and being very unhappy about it, but the people in charge were incompetent crooks. People started looking for out of populace, but outsiders, people who weren't part of the respectable establishment class. That's classic populism, it's what happens when people lose confidence and trust in established systems. They attack institutions, some of them core institutions of democracy, and we're in trouble.