The reason that the American financial system collapsed is far more fundamental than a lack of regulation, the pervasiveness of greed and irrational exuberance, or even the rewards implicit in the structure of our financial interactions. The contemporary model of business education (and more broadly, social values) should be blamed.

That’s right — as much as I’d like not to admit it — the MBA education is (extrapolating from our observation of the current financial crisis) far from sufficient in a globally interdependent 21st century economy that has never before been quite so complex. If it were, our nation’s business leaders would have seen this coming — and they would have stopped it.

Not to kiss my own ass or anything, but I called this over a year ago, in October 2007; just ask anyone who would listen to my rants. “We are on the brink of economic collapse,” I would ramble, talking about the collapse of American manufacturing, the economic leakage affect of high-cost energy imports, the unsustainable indulgence of American style suburbs and the like, and free trade’s long term deflationary affect on American wages (when not done in conjunction with the introduction of new transnational normative frameworks that ensure labor, human and environmental rights in addition to governance reforms that include large scale social and infrastructural investments). I remember advising friends not to go into real estate in 2005, because the market was beginning to bubble and construction was clearly outpacing demand (although, in fairness, I didn’t realize how long it would take that bubble to burst because of the lack of transparency in the mortgage backed securities market, the intensely speculative mood of home buyers or the delay attributed to the perpetual refinancing of three-year interest only mortgages and other non-conforming financial products).

Now, if I could call the crisis almost a year out (and, mind you, I’m just a college kid that smoked waayyy too much weed), how is it that our jackass of a President, Mr. Bush, was shocked when it happened? How is it that Mr. Greenspan, as he described before the Congress, in “shock and disbelief”? Well, thank you Mr. MBAs.

Case in point: Walk through a top-tier business school on any given weekday. You’d be hard pressed to find a bubble of hyper-hetronormative Western-conformist born-in-a-box CNBC-ditto-heads (whose egos are just a tad bit inflated, no?) more extracted from the economic and social realities that this nation faces. We aren’t producing leaders, we’re producing technocrats — just new cogs in the capitalist machinations of our financial system.

We’re not teaching people how the real economy works; we’re teaching people very narrow slices of financial analytics that mean nothing in themselves. We’re not teaching the broad complexities of the economy; rather we fragment perspectives and require that decisions be made with very short term considerations. And look where it has gotten us — once the mightiest economy the world’s ever known, and now conservative economists on Fox business channel are predicting that we’ll be an undeveloped nation by 2012. Shame on us.

And to exacerbate that situation, the nation’s business leaders (with some exception) are of an elite class of society almost entirely extracted from Main Street realities. No wonder we sold out our manufacturing industry over the last several decades because Wall Street lobbyists told us it would be good for us in the long term. And Washington policy makers’ inferiority complexes (subconsciously wishing that they too had pursued a more lucrative lifestyle in the world of high-finance) just rolled over to the interests of a single industry because they talked a language that they thought implied that they knew what they were talking about.

Well, guess what? We can’t all be bankers (as if I have to tell any of you that, given our current job market). Not everyone can stare at spreadsheets all day trying to figure out how to screw over the next guy on the downside of a financial transaction, or how to reallocate risk as far down the food chain as possible. We need to actually make things — real things in the real economy. And, generally, we don’t anymore. How is our domestic economy going to generate wealth if we don’t produce anything? We’re certainly not going to have a consumer-driven economy when everyone works at the fast food place around the corner.

Now, this isn’t to say that an MBA education is bad — certainly, it’s not. But the education teaches decision making analytics that are useless without a full, deep and broad understanding of the global economy, how wealth is generated and with an aptitude for long term thinking. Without those things, you’ll become just another cog in our capitalist machinations — and that’s not leadership.