The mind boggles at such sums. And yet, that's small potatoes compared to the pyramid scheme that was built around . I used to wonder at the megacompensation of those "managers" on Wall Street. How could so many make so much, I wondered, doing things that seemed to contribute so little to society?

I chalked it up to my ignorance, to my having gone to business school long before things like credit-default swaps existed. If someone got a $10 million bonus for doing something, that something must be pretty important and useful, I figured.

A mortgage is a thing of value -- to the home buyer, to the lending institution and to society. But mortgages were packaged and sold, and then repackaged and resold again and again until they were buried in deals so complex that neither their buyers nor their sellers completely understood them.

But so what? Risk and "leverage" (debt) were in fashion, and every party at each step made big bucks. Never mind that no real value was created at most of those steps.

So, what does this have to do with IT? Last year, researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London pinpointed a part of the brain, called the ventral striatum, that is the locus of people's craving for the new and unfamiliar. It predisposes people to take risks even when there is little logical basis for doing so. I think it was at work on Wall Street, and I think IT managers are often driven by it as well.