Why can't they see the obvious?

Governments are supposedly run by very intelligent people. Politicians spend years as underlings, learning their trade, top civil servants have been around for decades and there are highly trained experts to advise on matters of policy. Yet every few years we have a financial crisis that no one had foreseen. High oil prices have been blamed for recessions since 1970. But is oil to blame? When countries are in recession central banks cut interest rates and governments increase spending to stimulate growth. Economic growth leads to higher employment, higher wages and higher spending, leading to higher energy use which causes oil prices to rise. That leads to inflation, forcing central banks to increase interest rates which cuts spending on credit and leads to slower growth. Oil prices drop and the cycle starts again. Years of socialist policies led to the crisis of 1991 when we had to pledge 67 tonnes of our gold to the Bank of England to survive. Yet we repeated the same socialist policies of handouts from 2004, resulting in another crisis in 2013, prompting the then RBI Governor to quote from a book,"....in matters of economics and finance, history repeats itself, not because it is an inherent trait of history, but because we don't learn from history and let the repeat happen." Why don't they learn, not just from our history but from the world? In 2012 the Chief Economist was predicting 9% growth and that multi-brand retail will be a game changer. If you see pictures of Walmart stores in the US it is instantly obvious that the stores are huge, occupying tens of thousands of square feet, not one store is multi storied and they have huge free car parks. Where is the land in India to build such stores? Do these people have their eyes closed when they visit the US, with ' companion ', on taxpayer money? Just as our fellows keep repeating the same failed policies so do governments in other countries. Years of spending, based on debt, has resulted in a crisis in China. One man saw it coming in 2009 but others did not.  Why not? For years we have been told that the Chinese government wants to move away from investment led growth to one of consumption. For people to spend they need reassurance for the future so instead of wasting money on building roads to nowhere the government could have spent the same money on a pension plan for everyone and a universal health insurance scheme, like Obamacare. Chinese leaders have spent time in the west but have learnt nothing so they are repeating the same policies which created the problems in the first place. They might devalue the yuan again which will lead to tit-for-tat devaluation and global recession. Britain's construction led growth will come under stress and even the US is getting jitters. If China self-destructs it might start wars for the party to stay in power. We hope that our agencies are concentrating on the north.