Travels in the new third worldAfter I read the book, I also tried to read books commented in the ‘Travels in the new third world’, like ‘Manias, panics and crashes’, ‘This time is different’, even if these books couldn’t help me much. Because I felt that it is just an essay after his trips.But, now I could get some hints following all the classes. I am not sure it is true or not, I think the root of all the problems is ‘trust’ and ‘individualism’.Trust and individualism is closely connected. All the financial systems are fundamentally based on ‘trust’. It means that to sustain the system, everyone has to sacrifice partly in order to pursue the agreed objective. The more someone focuses on his own interest, the faster the system gets crushed.First gold standard system was sustained better than any others, because countries were willing to defend the exchange rate agreed. But as time went on, countries were turning to their own country’s problems like unemployment, inflations rather than defending international agreements. Therefore following systems couldn’t exist for a long time stably.The book shows that, nowadays, we do focus more on individual things, so we have gone through it (having new system and break downing it) again and again at a much faster speed. That is, we are getting more and more egoists. Everyone knows what they have to do but they are busy doing right-now-things such as consumption, keeping their place ignoring not only others happiness but also their own country’s, their town’s and believing they are right. (an individual level of beggar-thy-neighbouring policy)Maybe we are not rationale as we assumed. Like prisoner’s dilemma, we know what will happen, but we can’t believe each other any more so get to the worst answer repeatedly. Though this is the time to have paradigm shift, it seems to be not easy. However, like Korea and Germany (despite the fact that Germany is mentioned in the book), countries experienced a huge crisis used to pass through the next crisis well. Therefore I think, learning from history, being risk-averse, so easing fluctuations can be an alternative instead of paradigm shift(because, in my opinion, pursuing their own interest is one of human being’s characteristic). It may be a too general answer but being moderate can be the second best against a crisis.