I can’t remember a time when the quality of our discourse so poorly matches the situation we face.

FiveThirtyEight.com: Give Geithner a Break: “I’m sorry, but somewhere between 99.9% and 99.999999% of us are severely underqualified to be making policy recommendations on this particular issue. And I’m certainly in the majority on this one. My anecdotal experience for the past several months has been that the more someone knows about the economy, the more they know (or at least are willing to admit to) what they don’t know. Anyone who is professing with certainty that this or that will work — nationalizing the banks, for instance — is an idiot.”

It’s hard to watch or listen to politicians and pundits use populist rhetoric to demagogue banking executives and administration officials about symbolic but trivial issues (like bonuses and corporate jets) that didn’t cause and won’t fix the problem, all because they don’t know enough or because we couldn’t understand it if they talked sense.