1) No. I also don't consider said bailouts the root cause of anything except one more instance of wasteful spending.
2) "Too busy fighting over local minima/maxima to ever escape them and make core changes, but as a result at least mostly harmless except as a drag force on productivity." We could argue all day about core changes that might fix the system, but we'll never agree on precisely which core changes to make, so they'll never happen. And that still probably works better than the case where the wrong core changes occur.
(And a meta-level comment about search heuristics comes about as close to a political comment as I'd like to get.)
2) "Too busy fighting over local minima/maxima to ever escape them and make core changes, but as a result at least mostly harmless except as a drag force on productivity." We could argue all day about core changes that might fix the system, but we'll never agree on precisely which core changes to make, so they'll never happen. And that still probably works better than the case where the wrong core changes occur.
(And a meta-level comment about search heuristics comes about as close to a political comment as I'd like to get.)