The Taxonomy of Mistakes

Most of the good things that happen in history tend to be unplanned, whereas many of the bad things tend to be planned. They are the confluence of all kinds of influences and trends and schemes of individuals which often created the opposite of what they intended. The First World War was quite fresh in my mind when I was writing this book because it was the 2014 centenary of it. And I really did feel at that time that that and indeed the Great Depression based on the mistaken decisions essentially of central bankers were relatively few to many decisions rather than many to few.