Risk taking, embodied by heroes like James Bond (Sean Connery), is out of favor after its role in the economic crash.

Whether the situation is merely dangerous or utterly deadly, action heroes in Hollywood’s scripts usually opt for the utterly impossible: a gamble so risky that it can’t possibly pay off. But pay off it does, invariably saving the planet and a supermodel-actress or two from certain doom.

In the movies, risk always seems to be rewarded. And the same was true for many years on Wall Street, where a male-dominated culture honored the boldest gamblers with giant bonus checks.

At least, that is, until a torrent of investments in high-risk securities tied to real estate mortgages brought the entire global financial system to the brink of disaster. But what of the pervasive culture of risk? Is it another casualty of the economic collapse? And if so, is that good or bad?

Jay O.Light, the dean of the Harvard Business School, admitted to The Times’s Kelley Holland that advanced degrees in business may have contributed.“We lived through an enormous extended period of financial good times,”he explained, and the people who graduated with M.B.A. degrees“became less focused on risk and risk management and more focused on making money. We need to move that focus back to the center.

One way to do that may be to simply employ more women in the higher echelons of business. Nicholas D.Kristof, in his Times opinion column, cited a study in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior which“found that men are particularly likely to make high-risk bets when under financial pressure and surrounded by men of similar status.”Similarly, he wrote, a British study of financial traders found that“higher testosterone meant more risk-taking.

But another Times columnist, Thomas L.Friedman, cautioned against too much caution.“Some of our best companies, such as Intel, were started in recessions, when necessity makes innovators even more inventive and risk-takers even more daring,”Mr.Friedman said. He calls General Motors“a giant wealthdestruction machine, suggesting that instead of bailing out G.M., American taxpayer dollars could go to“starting a new generation of biotech, info-tech, nanotech and clean-tech companies, with real innovators, real 21st-century jobs and potentially real profits for taxpayers.

Taxpayer dollars would be especially welcome in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of such innovation. As Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone reported in The Times, the so-called angel investors who have traditionally given innovators their first infusion of cash are suddenly skittish.

“Crashes make liquidity vanish, and venture investing - especially angel investing - runs on liquidity,”Steven McGeady, an angel investor and former executive at Intel, told Ms.Miller and Mr.Stone.

But clinging to a more cautious way of life after a crash is not unusual. Kate Zernike of The Times cited a 1951 Time Magazine article that scoffed at those born into the trauma of the Great Depression as a drab, overly careful“Silent Generation.”The magazine predicted that few of them would“climb Mount Everest, find a cure for cancer, sail around the world or build an industrial empire.

It remains to be seen whether today’s younger generation, rocked by its own seismic financial upheavals, will give up Twittering long enough to boldly face their own challenges, or whether they will recede into caution.

As Ron Lieber of The Times wonders - citing Americans’fears of unemployment and the sinking worth of their homes, savings and retirement funds - “can you blame people in their 20s and 30s for giving up on risk altogether?”