As the economic crisis deepens, redundancy is likely to be happening at a company near you. Many employers and governments will seek to soften the blow but the loss of skills and knowledge threatens to impoverish us all.

Key to the solution is entrepreneurship. While this requires no state programmes to initiate, governments that do assist aspiring entrepreneurs get good value for money – the average cost of a business start-up is less than the average annual cost of keeping a student at university, a prisoner in jail or a family on welfare.

The credit crunch stems from a deeper moral and spiritual crunch. At stake is a virtue on which capitalism depends – thrift. Resolving the crisis will involve a recovery of this virtue.

Most westerners have long had access to grassroots saving institutions, such as building societies and credit unions. But recently, while commercial banks have focused their investment opportunities on ‘high net worth individuals’, financial institutions targeting the ‘sub-prime’ market have proliferated. The growth of this anti-thrift sector is partly responsible for the high levels of consumer debt that have become an accepted feature of advanced economies, but now threaten to undermine them.

In the wake of natural disasters, the scale of human suffering defies comprehension. If we had trouble imagining the multiple lives and livelihoods that were wrecked by the Asian Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, we will be even more hard-pressed now, when the full extent of the sufferings caused by Cyclone Nargis in Burma is shrouded by the military’s tight grip on the media.

When our visual imaginations fail us, our moral imagination needs to kick in. We see this in the rapid and vigorous response of governments, relief agencies, NGOs and faith groups to Burma’s unfolding tragedy. But there is another sphere of life that is allowing the moral imagination to play a role in its response to human need, though this is generally ignored or denied by the rest of civil society.

When Anita Roddick founded the Body Shop in 1976, there was nothing remarkable about hippyish lefties dreaming of a new order. No one guessed that, in pursuing her dream, this particular eco-worrier would build a multi-million-dollar global brand with a dominant high-street presence.

Society is undergoing a silent revolution. It is not led by governments, though it has political ramifications; nor is it led by religious or academic institutions, though it has spiritual and intellectual dimensions. Leadership is coming from a far less likely sphere - business.

Being in love with a colleague is not a crime, even if you’re their boss. Paul Wolfowitz, the head of the World Bank, is not the first to find himself in this situation, and he won’t be the last.

The year is 1780. A sailing ship is ploughing through heavy seas across the Atlantic, loaded almost to the gunwales with a cargo of human beings. They are chained together on narrow shelves, soaked in sweat, blood, vomit and excrement.