After the farce comes the tragedy.

The disruption caused by an Icelandic volcano last year reminded us that, for all its complexity – indeed, in many respects because of its complexity – our high-tech globalised economy remains at the mercy of forces far beyond our control.

The same lesson was rammed home again last month but in a far more horrific form by the triple disaster that hit Japan.

The destruction has been a major blow to the world’s third largest national economy which has been reflected in all the global markets.

It has also delivered a stark warning to all who imagined that the future is a comfortable, albeit uneven, growth in human prosperity. If something like this can happen to one of the most technologically advanced and integrated economies in the world, it can happen to anyone.

Japan was not badly prepared. The Japanese lead the world in “earthquake proof” building. Nothing, however, is proof against an 8.9 earthquake directly off the coast, followed by a 30 foot tsunami, followed in turn by a possible nuclear meltdown.

Public reassurances are a necessary fiction. Make no mistake: architects of skyscrapers in Dubai and Shanghai, engineers of nuclear power stations around the world, and actuaries throughout the global insurance sector have been working late into the night, redoing their sums on the basis that that their first assumptions are flawed.

Perhaps we should all be doing the same. Shortly before the Japanese tragedy, this contributor was tempted to mock a fellow entrepreneur who was still paying for extra anti-terrorism insurance he took out on a small shop in a peaceful part of the UK in 2001. However, as the shop-owner pointed out, “The chances of an actual terrorist attack on my shop are miniscule, but the chances of disruption due to a terrorist attack, or even a bomb scare or a false alarm, are fairly high.”

It was at that point that your contributor realised he ought to check the small print of his own insurance cover.

As we get older, we have to make a positive effort not to turn into the bore who is always complaining how much better everything used to be.

Such complaints are unwise not only because they are tedious but because they are usually wrong – most things are much better than they used to be.

That said, it can’t be denied that progress in some areas has been accompanied by deterioration in others. In particular, we may be wealthier in financial terms, but is that at the expense of something more important?

In over a quarter of a century in business, this contributor has seen a definite decline in honesty in the daily transactions of commercial life. Where we could usually proceed on the assumption that most people would make an effort to keep their word, and be fair and reasonable in their dealings, it is now almost expected that big organisations in particular will try to chisel and evade their obligations.

Of course, there have always been chancers, but the worst offenders are now the pillars of the Establishment on whose reliability the whole economy depends: insurance companies, banks, pension funds, even government.

It is increasingly rare for insurance companies to pay promptly, and in full, money to which the premium payer assumed he was entitled. Insurers claim that this is, at least in part, because they are themselves increasingly victims of fraud – which is, of course, true – but we are entitled to ask if the chicken came before the egg in that sector?

The same is true of banks. They may claim to be the victims of bad loans, but they made those loans. There would have been no 2008 crash if bank managers were still reactionary but scrupulously honest old fogeys – think George Mainwaring in the British comedy Dad’s Army – instead of City wide boys looking no further than their annual bonus.

Yet government is the worst offender – because those at the top set the example for everyone else. Public service – once considered honourable because it was underpaid – is now a cash cow, and bureaucrats regularly misuse laws passed for legitimate purposes in order to raise revenues.

Public office is now an office of profit, as it was in the 18^th Century. So far from progressing, we seem to have regressed to the time of Oliver Goldsmith: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”