It just used to be rational enough to plug holes in the Gulf of Mexico, to build Levees that worked, and to avoid rapid successions of speculative bubbles.

1) My understanding is that historically there weren't any holes in the Gulf of Mexico that were as hard to plug as the one that is currently a problem.

2) Bubbles are most likely becoming more frequent as a result of more liquidity in financial markets. Fortunately the best evidence on bubble behaviour suggests that this trend is self-defeating, once a significant proportion of traders have been exposed to bubbles, we should see a decline in bubble activity, at least for a while cite

3) The New Orleans levy failure looks like a run of the mill bureaucracy SNAFU to me, I think it says more about our government institutions than our wider culture. Basically we like our government to be more risk averse than it was in the past, and that means it takes longer to do anything.

The ultimate test, IMHO, is GDP growth rate, but then again, I don't believe the official numbers for that, so...

Out of curiosity, what are your concerns with official GDP statistics?