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sam0345 comments on How likely is Peter Thiel's investment into seasteading to pay off? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Iceland and ireland, like a great many other countries, allowed their banks to behave irresponsibly. When the banks imploded, Ireland bailed them out, and made incompetent and criminal bankers entirely whole. Iceland took the other extreme, declared the bankers broke, and told the creditors to take a hike.
If one is doing something badly wrong, the other is probably doing something right. They are unlikely to both be badly run.
This, right here, is the evidence that their governments weren't quite as effective as we thought beforehand.
This doesn't follow. It might be that both, one, or neither have responded sensibly to the crisis. Different circumstances call for different measures, and all that. And "bail out" or "let fail" isn't the complete universe of policy measures.
As compared to all those countries where wise regulators ensured wise bankers.
There are countries that did much better -- Canada, for instance, avoided a banking crisis. There are also countries that seem to have handled it better, such as the Baltic states.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying necessarily that I know what the optimal thing to do was, in 2007-2009. What I'm arguing is that it's often unclear for a long time how well a given country's policies have worked, since negative consequences don't always become visible quickly.