Thanks to Simoleon Sense for pointing out that the book A Demon of Our Own Design is available on the web. The following quote is from page 5:
These [financial market] breakdowns come about not in spite of our efforts at improving market design, but because of them. The structural risk in the financial markets is a direct result of our attempts to improve the state of the financial markets; its origins are in what we would generally chalk up as progress. The steps that we have taken to make the markets more attuned to our investment desires—the ability to trade quickly, the integration of the financial markets into a global whole, ubiquitous and timely market in-formation, the array of options and other derivative instruments—have exaggerated the pace of activity and the complexity of financial instruments that makes crises inevitable. Complexity cloaks catastrophe.
I think one can look at our history of efforts to prevent market breakdowns and easily see a Greek tragedy. No matter how much we want to change the future or avoid our destiny, our efforts are the direct cause of that which we do not want to happen.
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