As the debate on healthcare drones on in the US, I have been struck by a heretical thought: the differences between the British National Health Service and the US healthcare system are not nearly as important as their shared weaknesses.

The difference between the two systems has been exaggerated of late. The uninsured in America are not barred from emergency rooms by security guards. The NHS has not assembled a death panel to do away with Stephen Hawking.

I’ve had experience of both systems. My wife’s life has been saved once by American doctors and once by British ones. One of my daughters was born in Washington, DC, the other in London. And I’ll admit that the systems feel very different. The outcomes are different, the bureaucracy works in a different way, the waiting times are different and the rules of access are different.

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It will soon be a year since Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. And two years since the queues began to form outside branches of Northern Rock. The Financial Times felt obliged to pen a defence of markets, before soliciting views on the future of capitalism.

Now that we are no longer staring over the precipice, wasn’t this all just a little excitable? Perhaps not. New research suggests that the crisis may shape the psyche of a generation, even if the crisis now passes quickly.

The evidence comes from economists, Paola Giuliano of UCLA Anderson School of Management and Antonio Spilimbergo of the International Monetary Fund. Giuliano and Spilimbergo rely on answers to the General Social Survey, which has been conducted in the US almost every year since 1972. Because each survey participant has an identified home region, Giuliano and Spilimbergo can compare survey answers with the economic performance of the region in question. (The regions are large: the US is divided into nine.) Regional economic performance can be choppy, so the researchers looked for outliers: when regional growth fell into the bottom 5 per cent of all regions and all years in the sample, the researchers counted this as a severe regional recession. This turned out to be a year in which the regional economy shrank by 3.8 per cent or more.

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Imagine that your daily earnings were less than the price of this newspaper. Would you consider buying private education and private healthcare?

Before you make up your mind, here are a few considerations: government healthcare and primary education are free; the private-sector doctors are ignorant quacks and the teachers are poorly qualified; the private schools are cramped and often illegal. It doesn’t sound like a tough decision. Yet millions of very poor people around the world are taking the private-sector option. And, when you look a little closer at the choice, it’s not so hard to see why.

Take the doctors of Delhi, who were studied carefully by two World Bank researchers, Jishnu Das and Jeffrey Hammer. These doctors are busy people – the average household visits a doctor every two weeks, and the poor are particularly likely to visit. And, surprisingly, three-quarters of those visits are to private practitioners – despite the fact that public-sector doctors are better qualified. Why?

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One of the defining characteristics of the modern economy is that it’s awfully complicated. Even a fairly humble product such as a shirt might incorporate cotton from west Africa, oil from Indonesia to make the polyester in the button (manufactured in China), and designs sketched out by an Italian using American computer software. Then there is the sheer number of products: Eric Beinhocker, author of The Origin of Wealth, reckons there are probably 10 billion distinct products and services available in a modern economic environment such as London, Tokyo or New York. It’s a guess, but a fairly educated one. Beinhocker also estimates that for a traditional hunter-gatherer society, the number is closer to 300.

This would probably not have surprised Adam Smith, who emphasised the importance of specialisation as a source of the wealth of nations. Specialisation and complexity are closely linked: an economy with more specialists is one that requires more teamwork and more distinct interactions between individual activities.

Leaving aside a few complexity theorists such as Beinhocker, this is not the way that most economists think about what makes countries rich. It is not that they disagree, simply that they tend to focus on more easily measurable aggregates, such as the total stock of capital and labour.

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Aldo Rustichini is a genial Italian economist with a head of hair that seems to have been modelled on Albert Einstein’s. A professor at Cambridge and the University of Minnesota, he quickly transformed my interview with him into a full-blown undergraduate-style tutorial, occasionally asking me questions to check my understanding. Yet this likeable economist has been carrying out work with potentially explosive implications – including the possibility that economic success is genetically transmitted.

Rustichini’s latest research– with Stephen Burks, Jeffrey Carpenter and Lorenz Goette – studies the behaviour of about 1,000 trainee truck drivers in the US. The researchers gave the truckers IQ tests and asked them to participate in a number of small experiments.

In one experiment, the truckers were asked to choose between gambles and certain payoffs. In another, the choice was between a sum of money now and more money later. A more complex experiment required the truckers to play an anonymous “trust” game. The first player was given $5 and offered the choice of sending it to the second player; the second player had his own $5 and was asked how much he would send to the first player were he to receive $5 from him, and how much if he didn’t. The researchers promised to double the money sent in either direction – meaning that if the players managed to co-operate then each could get $10.

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Team titles might be what matter to them most, but football fans are also generally pleased if a player in their team wins an award. Publishers rarely object when their authors win Booker or Nobel prizes for literature. So how should shareholders in a company feel when the company’s chief executive wins an accolade such as “Best Manager” from Business Week or “Best Performing CEO” from Forbes? New research from two California-based economists suggests that the correct response would be to feel sick.

Economists have long been intrigued by the prospect that chief executives might use their position to pursue wealth, status and perks to the detriment of shareholders. Shareholders, widely dispersed and sometimes protected by flimsy governance, often have little sway over what managers get up to.

This view has unsavoury implications, such as the idea that corporate social responsibility and philanthropy might in fact mean shareholders paying for their chief executive’s golden halo. It has also been prescient: it was in studying economics that I first discovered that managers might be willing to overpay for merger targets because mergers brought them wealth and status, or that they would arrange to receive some of their pay in the form of a large pension because deferred compensation often only causes outrage once it is too late to do anything about it. If only Sir Fred Goodwin’s board at Royal Bank of Scotland had encountered the same lessons.

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I’m at the Royal Economic Society annual meetings today, hunting for ideas. I wrote a report of the 2008 Meeting of the Royal Economic Society [pdf] last year and have just discovered it online.

Flick through any copy of the Financial Times and you’ll see a lot of chaps in suits. There’s a reason for this: there are many more men than women in the boardrooms of the world’s great companies. Explanations range from the politically correct (women are held back by the oppressive patriarchy) to the sexist (women aren’t up to the job).

Untangling this is difficult, but economists have tackled it with relish, in the process finding evidence to support almost any prejudice. One famous study conducted by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse looked at what happened when the leading, male-dominated, US orchestras introduced blind auditions for new members. Goldin and Rouse found that blind auditions went a long way towards correcting the gender imbalance. Maybe those pretty little things weren’t such awful musicians after all.

Other studies suggest a different explanation for male-dominated boardrooms: women may avoid intense competition, and cope badly if forced to compete. These studies are intriguing, but usually based on rather artificial experiments, or special cases – such as tennis tournaments. Last April, my colleague Lucy Kellaway wrote: “Men want power enough to hang on to it and women don’t want it enough to make them let go.” I am not sure of that, but I can certainly point to studies that support Lucy.

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