Strong societies can bounce back from a punch in the face. Consider Iceland. If the run up to the financial crisis of 2008 was a party, Iceland was party central. Four Icelandic banks went on a frenzied international expansion and grew their balance sheets (they bought stuff in the hope that it would go up in value) to ten times the size of the economy. When those banks went bust, they took the whole of Iceland's economy down with them. An epic punch in the face if ever there was one.

They may have been reckless, but Icelandic bankers and their co-workers had brains. When everything crashed, a lot of those brains went home and played video games – it's dark much of the time in Iceland. And then they hit on something. Online gaming is a global industry that requires a lot of computing power. Computing power makes heat. Heat needs to be cooled. So why not stick the servers for online gaming, Bitcoin mining, and a host of other things, in the ground in Iceland (the clue is in the name), and run the show from there? Which is what they did. Iceland had supportive institutions that didn't throw unemployed people under a bus, which allowed them to rethink their options and redeploy their capital.

The financial crisis hurt, to be sure, but given those institutions it also encouraged the growth of a whole new set of ideas and innovations that brought the country “most screwed” by the 2008 crisis back to its feet faster than almost all the others. By 2016, Iceland had fully recovered. Wages were higher than before the crisis, unemployment was low, and consumer confidence was high. Tourism was booming, in part because the crisis a decade earlier had crashed their currency, so it was a cheaper place to visit. Ten years later and the crisis seemed like a bad dream. Icelanders had never had it so good.

It was a different kind of punch in the face when in 2017 waves of angry protests broke out, and in greater numbers and with greater voice than any that had happened in 2008. That anger was triggered by revelations in the so-called “Panama Papers”, which revealed tax dodging on an epic scale by Iceland's political and economic elites.