There is a gap in the many analyses of the financial crisis: none of them, as far as I know, have blamed it on Victoria Coren. Let me remedy this omission.
Start with the premise that the crisis was due in part to a decline in trust and trustworthiness. The spread of self-certification mortgages - "liars' loans" - allowed mortgage borrowers to overstate their income. And mortgage originators were content to lend to bad risks in the belief that they could sell on bad loans. Untrustworthy behaviour thus contributed to high leverage. And then the collapse in interbank lending and freeze in the mortgage derivatives markets reflected a decline in trust; banks just didn't trust other banks or the assets they had created.
But what caused this decline in trust and trustworthiness? In Animal Spirits, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller point to a curious coincidence - that in the 00s more people played poker and fewer played bridge.This, they say, is culturally significant. Whereas bridge requires cooperation between partners, poker is a more individualistic game, in which bluffing is important.
It could be, then, that the rise of poker and decline of bridge is a sign of the growth of distrust and individualism that contributed to the crisis.
A new paper corroborates this. Italian researchers got bridge and poker players to play trust games, in which one player decides how much to send to a partner and the experimenter then triples the sum sent, and the trustee then decides how much to return. They found that bridge players were significantly more likely to trust their partner in the trust game than poker players. On average, they sent 17% more than poker players, and 31% of bridge players sent everything whereas only 20% of poker players did.
This difference was not because bridge players are more altruistic or risk-tolerant; in fact, the researchers show, they are less so. Instead, it reflects the fact that bridge players are more like "we-thinkers" than poker players; they are more inclined to trust others in the belief that trust pays.
We know that culture affects economic outcomes. So isn't it plausible that a less trustworthy culture might have contributed to the crisis?
But is the rising popularity of poker merely a symptom of a growing untrusting culture, or is it a cause?
This is where Ms Coren comes in. She is, econometrically speaking, an instrument. Her success and her best-selling book, have helped popularize the game, independently of other cultural developments doing so. And it's plausible that playing poker doesn't just attract untrusting individualistic types but helps to create them. As Screwtape said, "All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."
In this sense, therefore, Ms Coren deserves some blame for the crisis. She is arguably an even greater blight upon the economy than Konnie Huq.
* Cynical readers might think this post is motivated by the jealousy of a spurned admirer. Would I be so desperate? I obeyed the injunctions. What more could I do?