They are a linchpin of reform, allowing politicians to argue that bail-outs will not happen again and regulators to resist calls for bigger safety buffers or a radical break-up of banks.
As we democratize language and literacy we have to resist the temptation to see in its evolution a sort of breakdown or moral failure simply because not everyone speaks or writes as well as the Bard or as Ralph Fiennes.
There was no statistically significant difference among these groups to volunteer time with retarded children or to resist temptation to cheat on a test (There was only one group in which a majority did not cheat: the atheists).