[billsimms]

The thin book "The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations" by Dietrich Dorner offers one explanation of how and why we got where we are today. If I remember correctly, he says that a million years ago we were so few and the world so large that there was nothing we could do that would make a dent in the world, it was all about grabbing everything you could to just survive and side effects meant nothing. Fast forward to the present, the teeter totter has tipped, the situation has reversed, side effects far outweigh getting what you need to survive. But our brains haven't caught up with the changes in last 2000 years, let alone a million. He goes on to show lots of current examples of our intuition being no match for current complex problems and how to try to learn to better deal with that.