Frederick Betz – författare

At both a micro-information level and a macro-societal level, the concepts of “knowledge” and “wisdom” are complementary – in both decisions and in social structures and institutions.  At the decision level, knowledge is concerned with how to make a proper choice of means, where “best” is measured as the efficiency toward achieving an end.  Wisdom is concerned with how to make a proper choice of ends  that attain “best” values.

At a societal level, knowledge is managed through science/technology and innovation.  And while science/technology is society''s way to create new means with high efficiencies, they reveal nothing about values.  Technology can be used for good or for evil, to make the world into a garden or to destroy all life.  It is societal wisdom which should influence the choice of proper ends -- ends to make the world a garden.

How can society make progress in wisdom as well as knowledge?  Historically, the disciplines of the physical sciences and biology have provided scientific foundations for societal knowledge  But the social science disciplines of sociology, economics, political science have not provided a similar scientific foundation for societal wisdom.  To redress this gap, Frederick Betz examines several cases in recent history that display a fundamental paradox between scientific/technological achievement with devastating social effects (i.e., historical events of ideological dictatorships in Russia, Germany, China, and Yugoslavia). He builds a new framework for applying social science perspectives to explain societal histories and social theory.  Emerging from this methodological and empirical investigation is a general topological theory of societal dynamics.  This theory andmethodology can be used to integrate history and social science toward establishing grounded principles of societal wisdom. 

Bank panics have always mattered because they create serious disruptions in economic and financial activity, depressing national economies.  But they matter even more now, as information and communications technologies have stitched together a global financial system that is more vulnerable to crisis on a large scale. For example, the global bank panic of 2007-08 froze up the national economies of the U.S., England, France, Iceland, Ireland, and Germany -- all at the same time.  And each of their governments had to act to bail out their own banks, without a consistent international regulatory framework.

In this volume, Fred Betz takes a unique, cross-disciplinary approach to understanding bank panics, with an emphasis on the U.S. Bank Panics of 1857, 1907, 1930-33, 2007-08 and the European Bank Panics of 2010-2013.  Despite over a hundred years of modern economic theory and many excellent historical studies about bank panics, they are still poorly understood and certainly not yet preventable.  Partly this has been a function of the limitations of modern economic theory, which cannot interpret bank panics as complex societal phenomena.   All societal phenomena are, in reality, multi-disciplinary in scope and cross-disciplinary in connections.  Bank panics can best be understood through the collective lenses of sociology, political science, psychology, management science, management of technology, among other disciplines.  Through this dynamic approach, the author identifies five key underlying triggers of bank panics: (1) funding excessive leverage in speculation, (2) lack of proper banking regulation, (3) bad banking practices, (4) lack of banking integrity, (5) corrupt banking practices.  In so doing, he suggests new strategies for avoiding and recovering from bank panics and other financial crises.