I have been shuttling between Texas and New York in a curious dance between two rather different groups of people who share a basic spiritual – the old spiritual – dilemma. Roughly speaking, it goes like this. They want to get capitalism back on its feet. They feel quite guilty that it is enduring the present credit crunch and recession. They want to know what is required (not least of them) to make things work better next time.

That sounds like a problem for an economist rather than spiritual guru (they call me that, and that’s what they expect me to be). But they come to me – they say – because they are wondering what if anything is wrong with their values and whether “fixing” their values can help them fix the economy or feel better about America.

What I don’t do is the kind of meditationalism featured in Damages, where the murdering entrepreneur Arthur Frobisher decides to find himself in flowing white linen. I do recognise the new surge in business described by Jane Haynes, the psychotherapist whose “memoir of the couch” Who is it who can tell me who I am? has won prizes and is now being published commercially. But I don’t do psychotherapy either.

Rich people always expect society to beat them up about the luxury of their lifestyle and the aggression of their business techniques. My clients know from the rumour mill that I have a different point of view. I don’t expect them to change how they operate but I do expect them to examine what they hope to get out of what they do. I don’t let them waffle about family or society. I keep on at them about being sure they have examined what they really want for themselves.

Curiously, the group in Texas has resolved itself into a sort of reading group. A lot of its members are very, very rich though not as rich as they were a few months ago. But the leaders of the group are retired and have decided they want an open-ended discussion of great texts. The Great Writer approach is what they learned at school, in the American way. They like me around because they like strong chairmanship. They are often church people, and some are very right wing. Some are strikingly libertarian. Some say they have been too busy all their lives to think, let alone read.

The leader of this group is a canny man with great style. I fly business class when I’m working for him, and live in a lovely stand-alone house in his grounds. It was the granny house, but granny died. I can see where the geriatric equipment has been dismantled. It has a kitchen and I have a lovely black couple attending on me. Across the little artificial lake in the garden, I see the Big House. It’s all almost vulgar, but it is so frankly and cheerfully new and unpretentious, though vast, that only a great snob wouldn’t like it.

I’ll talk about the New York stuff next time.

 It’s not a good business model to have one’s services in great demand, but from people who expect help without having the means to pay for it. Of course, in my case it doesn’t make much difference to my personal circumstances since I give most of my income to my old monastery and to other charities. Still, I’d rather have kept the accustomed flow in decent health.

That’s how it is. High-end spiritual and business consultancy is much more profitable in good times, when firms are free to blow some marginal cash on feel-good stuff such as my own offer. Now, I am getting an increasing number of cries for help from individuals who’ve squirreled away my email address during encounters in happier times. I am not yet in the position of Ringo Starr, who has said he’ll no longer respond to requests to be in touch by strangers.

But I am close to it. I was very happy to spend lots of time with consultees when we all got something useful from the experience. I got income for the needy and the pleasure of being with interesting people. The consultees got – well they got whatever they got. It was their choice. But consulting by email for no fee, well, that’s a very small pleasure to me. In fact it’s a chore. I’m not going to persist with it for much longer.

Roughly speaking, the problem is this. Capitalism is prone to bubbles, but they really do differ in degree and kind.

Here’s a morphology.

(1) Stock Bubbles
At their most pure (The South Sea Bubble, the 1717 Mississippi Company), these are stock schemes in which there is no actual economic activity. But these readily get confused with, say, the 1990s Internet Bubble – in which there probably was a real business. Greed and irrationality underlies bubbles, but at least in the Internet case, people were aware that something big and real was happening. Tulipmania sits somewhere between the two, as does the art market. Will Damien Hirst’s productions get melted down for their gold?

(2) New instruments
John Law, who was behind the Mississippi Company, also came a cropper when he tried to engineer a new currency for France. But he wasn’t operating as a crook when he did the latter: he was inventing new approaches to currency and was – hardly surprisingly – out of his depth. 

This is a little like the muddle modern banking has got into as it recently sliced and diced sub-prime debt.

Indeed, many of these dramas turn out to be schemes which are crucial to capitalism’s future – it’s just that the pioneers don’t post large enough warnings as to the riskiness of innovation.

(3) Straight frauds
Some bubbles and some new instruments are introduced as straight frauds, or as screens behind which straight frauds can be perpetrated. Thus, Enron’s crime was very like the fraud perpetrated by Jabez Balfour in the late 19th Century. Enron was playing with energy futures and other devices which few people understood, just as Jabez was playing with new schemes for insurance and housing.

Enron and Jabez were developing schemes which in non-criminal hands would turn out to be valuable.

In conclusion…..
Many capitalist pioneers turn out to be crooks. Or, many crooks turn out to be pioneers. It’s spotting the difference which makes for entertainment.

Anyway, there are no signs of crookedness in the present crisis. Regulators encouraged bankers to get careless as they invented new wheezes. The bankers overdid it. The bubble burst.

The books excerpted in the R4 series
The Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D Wattles
The Moneymaker by Janet Gleeson
Little Dorritt by Charles Dickens
Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
Metamorphoses XI by Ovid 
Tulipmania by Anne Goldgar
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
The Reformation of Manners by Daniel Defoe
The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
The South Sea Bubble by John Carswell
Tulipmania by Anne Goldgar
The South Sea Bubble by John Carswell
Extraordinary Popular Delusions by Charles Mackay
The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan
A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith

I would add:

Millionaire: The philandere, gambler and duelist who invented modern finance, by janet Gleeson
Jabez by David McKie

Let’s leave aside for a moment whether these men are on to anything that will work. Everything about their coming together is a great American story. We meet an immigrant theoretical physicist (Klaus Lackner) who believes carbon can be scrubbed from air. He meets a climatologist (Wallace Broecker) who is inclined to agree. Lackner (as Columbia academic) worked on a late incarnation of the Biosphere project, the failed dream child of a Texan billionaire (Ed Bass). It was an attempt to replicate the earth’s atmosphere in a manmade bubble. There’s a practical mechanic (Allen Wright) who is fired when the Biosphere finally fails. His brother (Burt Wright ) is a Tucson fireman who works with ventilation systems. Broecker hooks all these men up with a further billionaire (Gary Comer), who agrees to fund an attempt to build and (patent) carbon scrubbers.

The team have made some kit which works. To cut to the chase, the US would need tens of millions of units about the size of lorry containers. (Quite how many depends on how many big power stations mop up their carbon emissions at source.) Luckily, these container-sized units could be anywhere, and they could be near disposal sites for the carbon-dioxide waste they’re designed to produce. But disposal seems to be a whole other dimension of problem.

I imagine that whether we “solve” climate change, or merely survive it, the story of the solutions we find will often look like this. Academics, mechanics and entrepreneurs will be crucial, and chance, inspiration and adventure will be at the core of it all. Quixotic people will turn out to have been invaluable.