Like the entertainment industry in general, shock jocks, agents for the 1%, disseminate their bilious opinions with incredible self-importance. Ignorance is bliss, and hubris must be your stamp if you aspire to the biggest audiences. Sometimes you may even be both correct and right.

On the other hand, I’m always amazed when perpetually perplexed commentators of the left are able to conduct their discussions with such confidence and aplomb. I guess the search for answers remains their anchor and inspiration.

I’m not sure whether the ABC’s Geraldine Doogue, the thinking person’s commentator, can be classified as being on the left of the political spectrum, but I’d put her into the second category anyway.

On Saturday Extra this morning, Doogue managed to skirt around and overlook economic rent in her discussion on social cohesion in modern day Britain with Gary Sturgess, director of the Serco Institute.

In looking for “the glue that holds society together” she might also have blended rent into her following topic –  Resolving the future of a viable banking sector – with Harrison Young, a non-executive director of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia .

You see, if you don’t understand public capture of economic rent holds society together, you won’t perceive that it’s the privatisation and breaking down of this common glue that almost single-handedly generated the global financial collapse.

And banks were the culprit, the catalyst, in taking this publicly-generated surplus away from the people to whom it was owed, and in delivering it to the 1%.

For this reason, I’m not as confident as Gary Sturgess that things will repair themselves in Britain, nor that Australian banks are as solid as Harrison Young believed in this morning’s program.

Meanwhile, Geraldine, please try to discover economic rent. You’ll become wide-eyed!