This baggage induced recession

The clearer I get about the dynamics of emotional baggage by writing this series of posts, the more useful it appears as an explanation. What got us into the current global recession now looks to me like baggage. Here's how I'd explain how widespread emotional baggage got us into this mess.

• The kind of work done inside big investment banks in financial centers around the world is ideal for people carrying lots of emotional baggage. The analysts, quants, traders and executives work with numbers all day. Their quantity of baggage would disqualify them for more demanding jobs that required them to serve clients with high quality relationships or to upgrade financial products with increased reliability, transparency and solidity. Their baggage made their being recklessly greedy into a big "can-do" and their secretive, off-the-books deceptions equally urgent.
• The kind of management called for in bygone industries (automobile manufacturing, print journalism, etc) is survival based. Their markets appear dangerous and ideal for baggage to take control of decisions, plans and projects. Their skewed judgment of changing demand, technologies and disruptive innovators would throw money at problems with no solution and miss opportunities to reinvent their business models. The activation of their baggage amidst so much danger would pre-empt their creativity, human intelligence and ability to really relate to their constituencies. They could only assist dying industries in achieving rigor mortis.
• The kind of employees getting laid off in droves might even by labeled "excess baggage" by their former employers. Their chronic over-reactions to workplace challenges would fail to contribute value, solutions or teamwork. They would feed their own victim stories, justify attacks on other employees, blame higher ups for problems and shirk responsibility for cleaning up their own messes. Their baggage from painful past histories would pre-empt their functioning like valuable employees that deserved respect, tenure and some job security.
• The broadcast and print media covering the recession could only make it worse by reporting on it "accurately". The journalists constantly feel the urge to catastrophize the latest setback, over-dramatize the newest numbers and dwell on the deepening recession. Baggage makes us feel like our misery loves company. These reporters could not halt their feeding a self-fulfilling prophesy because their own baggage keeps them inside deteriorating, vicious cycles. The bad news leaves them with no alternative but to fear it, to worry about it constantly and to forewarn others about it worsening.

Add these four factors together on a global scale and we get what we've got: a deepening recession.