Good - but extremely depressing - sentence

I used to think the most depressing couple of sentences were the reply of Admiral Jellicoe when asked what he had done to combat German submarines attacking the British fleet - "we have done nothing. There is nothing we can do." The mere notion of having to give that answer to any important question leaves me momentarily reeling. I think Tyler Cowen may have pipped the Admiral to the post today with a new entry though - "I observe that humans aren't very good at solving large-scale collective action problems". Assuming I'm right in thinking that our survival increasingly depends on such solutions, that's really not a very cheery thought.