MEGAN MCARDLE: Toys R Us still sells lots of toys. Here’s why it’s going under.

But wait. If Toys R Us is going to have such a meaningful effect on overall toy sales, doesn’t that suggest that it’s still, you know, selling a lot of toys? Toys aren’t exactly buggy whips — there’s still a market for them (about $20.7 billion worth of sales in 2017). And Toys R Us seems to command a healthy slice of that market. So why can’t it be saved?

Good question. It turns out that, as with many failures, the answer is a combination of “bad planning” and “bad luck.”

Toys R Us has the problems you’d expect from a big-box retailer in the Age of Amazon. It also has some problems of its own making, notably the large amount of debt it took on during a 2005 leveraged buyout. When the company goes down, you can expect to hear a lot of accounts blaming bad management and greedy bankers. And sure, go ahead and blame them. But don’t be too hard on them. But for a little bad timing, they might well have gotten away with it.

We like to tell ourselves morality plays about failure. Someone is either a victim or a villain, and which is which varies by, among other things, ideology. During the financial crisis, for example, you got two starkly different accounts of the people who got caught short by the housing bubble; conservatives saw them as gamblers who deserved what they got, while liberals thought they must have been rooked by Wall Street.

In fact, if you interviewed those folks, you generally found that they were well aware that they couldn’t really afford their house if the payment reset. They just expected to be able to refinance it when prices climbed, or they got a raise, or at worst, to sell if they couldn’t afford the payments. Then prices collapsed, and they ended up in a whole world of trouble.

What they did was undoubtedly risky. But plenty of people took that exact same risk in 2001 — buying more house than they could afford. But those people had no trouble refinancing to more affordable mortgages, because the market was soaring and they had loads of equity. The same risk produced two very different outcomes depending on when people happened to take it.

You’ll see this pattern repeated over and over if you look at failures, from major disasters to corporate collapses: They start with people taking risks that others (or they themselves) had taken before. Only this time, something goes wrong, and that little risk turns into a big problem.

Yes, Nassim Taleb has some things to say about this.