improvidence

Two key factors in the SVB disaster can’t be overlooked: The incompetence of the bank’s management and the improvidence of its customers.

“The government should know everything and foresee everything in order to manage the lives of the people, and the people need only let themselves be taken care of. ... Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state ... to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.”

Travel magazine wrote, “The Osage Indian is today the prince of spendthrifts. Judged by his improvidence, the Prodigal Son was simply a frugal person with an inherent fondness for husks.”

Over the past year, as the effects of lifelong improvidence had begun to impose a final reckoning, my father had been obliged to liquidate the vast collections of stamps, coins, trading cards, autographs, comic books, and historical ephemera that he had amassed with methodical recklessness since his boyhood visits to the stamps-and-coins department of Abraham & Straus.

“The Earth is fast becoming an unfit home for its noblest inhabitant, and another era of equal human crime and human improvidence … would reduce it to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climactic excess, as to threaten the depravation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species,” he wrote.