I take the author’s point as a given but as Myno accurately points out that economics is infinitely more complicated then chess to the point where the analogy is not very useful.
The modern open economy is indeed complex and is beyond the ability of anybody to manage it. Not that the “simpler” economy of the past was any more amenable to fine tuning by governments. Although we focus on the financial dimension of the recession/depression, there is a real (as in nonfinancial) dimension that has been lost in the headlines and the scapegoating. For better or worse we live in an open economy and for the last 20 or more years the United States economy has grown at 3%+ annual rate while the rest of the developed world has experienced growth in the 1-1.5% range over the same the period. That works out to 81% versus 22-35% growth rates for the US and ROW respectively over the same period. Something had to give. Either the Europeans or Japan must adopt growth polices to match outs or the United States growth rate becomes unsustainable. This imbalance was a strong contributor to the bubble as foreign investment, be it in productive assets or paper, flowed into the United States. Now, we are coming back to the rest of the world just as the Obama administration seeks to makes us more like Europe. The result will be that the US economy will begin to become the anchor dragging down the world economy that Japan and Europe have been over the last two decades.
