Following up on yesterday’s post about John Cassidy’s New Yorker article, “The Real Reason that Capitalism is so Crash-Prone,” we want to highlight an alternative theory put forth by Calvin Trillin. Trillin’s recent NY Times op-ed starts with this intriguing line: “If you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”

We post this link in part because we enjoy Calvin Trillin so much. What’s not to like about a guy who says he speaks no language other than English but who, because of his writing on food and his travel to exotic locales, learned how to say in every language known to man, “I’ll have what he’s having”?

There’s actually some truth to his piece. While we can’t vouch for his claim that people running Wall Street’s institutions came from the bottom third of the Ivy League classes in his generation, it’s certainly true that the firms hired rocket scientists to concoct hypersophisticated financial strategies, and then made the mistake of trusting them implicitly. Because almost all the firms didn’t push back at their young geniuses, no one challenged even the obvious problems–such as that models on housing prices didn’t allow for the possibility of a decline.

As our colleague Vince Barabba says, in which has become known in some circles as Barabba’s Law, you should never say, “The model says. . . . “