b'thatthe financial razzmatazz of Wall Street and hoopla of Silicon Valley notwithstandinggo all the way back to the era of King Cotton, slavery and Americas initial emergence as a global economic power. The so-called Prudent Man Rule, one of the underpinnings of modern finance, has its origins in an 1830 ruling by Justice Samuel Putnam in Harvard College vs. Amory, directing trustees to invest as men of prudence, in ways that preserve assets and generate reliable income. The ensuing two centuries proceeded in pretty much a straight line, financially speaking, to Assets Under Management counted in hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars, with decision-making settling firmly in the invisible hands of fiduciaries and executives whose allegiance is to markets, rather than to places. But no, driverless cars and farmerless farms and meatless hamburgers are not the only way to go.When Asa Griggs Candler bought the formula for Coca-Cola from John Pemberton in 1887, he didnt have a business plan that said: Lets aim to sell 2 billion bottles a day someday and not worry about a third of the population developing diabetes. Henry Ford didnt set out to put carbon into the atmosphere. When David X. Li published his Gaussian copula formula in 2000, he could not have foreseen that it would fuel the explosion of credit default swaps from $920 billion in 2001 to $62 trillion in 2007, much less a quadrillion-dollars-worth of derivatives, today. Each of these innovators seized historic entrepreneurial opportunities. They did not set out to damage public health, ecological balance or financial stability. 20'