It’s Hard to Change the Plumbing

The reason that American financial culture was so difficult to change--the reason the political process would prove so slow to force change upon it, even after the subprime mortgage catastrophe--was that it had taken so long to create, and its assumptions had become so deeply embedded. --The Big Short by Michael Lewis

It takes a long time to build a system.

It takes even longer to build a big, important system.

It’s much easier to tear a system down.

But the hardest thing to do, that takes the longest, is to restructure a system--to make it more robust and improve its potential to deliver its intended outcome.