The Machine Stops

A large component of the current financial meltdown results from people trusting that they were being cared for by complex financial instruments that neither they nor the people who designed them really understood. It recently struck me that this sort of situation was described long ago by E.M Forster in his prescient 1909 science fiction short story "The Machine Stops." I found the text here and very much enjoyed re-reading the story. A synopsis is given by the wikipedia entry, and it can be downloaded in the various electronic formats.